Dancing with Numbers: Estimating Amazon's Sales

Intrigued by the whole Amazon concept of selling and how small and self-published books might fall within the realm overall? Then don't miss this post!

A methodology for estimating Amazon's Long Tail sales
By Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine

By summarizing a collective wealth of information (including some analysis by a team from MIT and Morris Rosenthal), this article gets into the nitty-gritty of sales using reverse-engineering combined with experiments and tracking of the sales rank numbers to summarize the relation between sales and rankings.

Some high points:

"… the Long Tail still appears to be somewhere between a quarter and a third of
Amazon's book business..."

"… two sales of any title, independent of whether it's ever sold before, will propel it into the top 50,000 books for a few hours."

"Amazon sells somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 unique titles on any give day. The top 30,000 titles average over 1 copy a day."

"The ranks between 1,000 and 10,000 are selling a couple copies a day…"

But don't just go with this minute excerpt of data posted here: make sure you read the whole article for it just may explain (in much detail) how your own books falls in comparison to those "bestsellers."

LINK: http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/
2005/08/a_methodology_f.html