Amazon Book Sales Calculator for KDP: How Much Does a Best Seller Make?

How to Use the Amazon Sales Rank Calculator

Generally, my Kindle Calculator is pretty easy to use. All you need to do is find the Amazon Best Seller Rank or (ABSR) of a book, select what form the book is (ebook, book, etc), and which market, and click calculate. However, if you don't know how to find those things, no worries. Let me walk you through an example on your can calculate the Amazon book sales.

For this example, let's use a well known LitRPG book, “Dungeon Born”. Going to its Amazon sales page, you will find the following:

Step 1: Select the book version and market place

Make sure you have either the Kindle Version or the Hardcover/Paperback selected. For the marketplace, one thing that is super unique to my Kindle sales calculator is that you can select all the different markets like the US, Canada, France, etc.

Step 2: Find the Amazon Best Seller Rank

Scroll down until you find the Product Details section. Here with Battlefield Earth, we find that the book sales rank (as of this writing) is 181,698.

Step 3: Enter in the Kindle Calculator

Input that number into the Amazon Book Sales Calculator to get the daily sales volume and monthly sales volume. For Battlefield Earth, it looks like that Amazon Kindle bestsellers rank means that, at the time of this writing, that book is averaging less than 1 sale per day.

And there you have it. You can know find the actual sales data of any book, ebook or audiobook with the use of the Amazon Book Sales calculator.

What Is the Amazon Book Best Seller Rank?

Amazon ranks every book on their market place from the best selling in all of their store (#1 Amazon Best seller Rank) to the worst selling book (whatever is the total number of books at that time – so perhaps over 9 million).

Therefore, the ABSR is based on relative sales in a certain time period as compared to other books. This means that the number of sales to be #1 today, might be different tomorrow. Therefore, an accurate book sales calculator needs to be updated habitually to reflect the relative sales volume in order to be accurate (something I'll discuss later). This ranking is calculated hourly.

What Affects the Amazon Best Seller Rank?

The rankings assigned is comprised of recent activity, as well as historical activity, with recent activity weighted more heavily. Therefore, Amazon uses previous sales data to shape how your Amazon Best Seller rank is.

So, this brings up the question – what constitutes as “activity” which affects the ABSR. Well, surprisingly enough, there are three things that affect your Amazon Best Seller Rank:

• Sale
• KU download (if you're enrolled in that)
• Clicking on your book's sales page

A sale makes sense. However, many are surprised by #2 and #3. If your book is enrolled in KDP select, then those that are a part of the KU program can download your book for free. It's important to note that the downloading of a KU book is weighted the same as a sale. It is for this reason why many KU books seem to do better in Amazon. If you were a customer that was in KU, would you purchase a book, or download for free a KU book? It's because of this reason that KU books tend to have better Amazon bestseller ranks and thus better category rankings.

So, what about clicks? Well, there is a section in the ABSR range where there are no sales or haven't been any for a long time (we're talking about the 500k-9M range). In this case, if a book in that range is found on Amazon and a shopper clicks on the book, this will improve the ABSR. So, while clicks technically affect your ranking, it isn't very useful.

How Does the Book Sales Calculator Works

Now that we understand the Amazon Best Seller Rank, and what affects it, let's discuss not only how this Kindle calculator works, but also why it is so accurate.

Not only does this book sales calculator have the appropriate algorithm to decipher the number of books sold based on the ABSR, and can do it for all the different Amazon markets and book formats, it is also habitually updated. Thanks to Publisher Rocket's database and systems, it is improved daily ensuring that it's as accurate as possible.

Also, thanks to partnerships with publishing companies around the world, Publisher Rocket and this Book Sales Calculator are continuously updated with the right representation of what that sales number should be. We get this because we track the ABSR of certain books in our system, and then compare it with their sales – ensuring our book Amazon sales ranking calculation is as accurate as possible, and not stagnant like other systems.

Calculators like TCK Publishing's just set some numbers and don't understand the dynamics of the system – which is why their data is old and therefore inaccurate.

How to Use Amazon Sales Rank Data to Improve Your Sales

The way that the Amazon book sales rank works is based on your sales over time. If you have consistent sales, your rank will be much better than if you have spikes of sales here and there (even if the number of total sales between the two examples are the same).

Therefore, the best way to improve your Amazon sellers rank or BSR is to develop steady sales of your book over time. This will lead to the Amazon Popularity Effect, which will increase the amount of promotion that Amazon is willing to give you. Over time, this will lead to an increased royalty.

If you'd like to learn more about how to improve your sales ranks, I wrote a free book you can check out.

FAQ About Amazon Rankings

In addition to the Amazon book sales calculator and everything mentioned above, you might have more questions about how Amazon calculates its Amazon best seller ranking for each book sold. Read on for a few frequently asked questions: