Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

As part of the research on a post exploring whether Self-Published authors can make money (Yes! more on that in a later post) ran into a treasure trove of data that unveils what those Kindle Store sales numbers really mean.

How do I interpret Kindle Store Sales Numbers?

Here’s the quick guide (thanks to Boyd Morrison for his note confirming my guess) -

1. Kindle Store Sales Rank of 20 = 500 or so sales a day. 
2. Rank of 200 = 50 or so sales a day. 
3. Rank of 1000 = 15 or so sales a day. 

And how exactly do we know this?

The most useful post is from J. A. Konrath’s blog where he details his earnings and sales, and lots of other self-published Kindle Store stars chime in.

Also useful is John August’s post detailing his experience selling The Variant. Now all we need is J. A. Konrath to reveal sales figures for Serial and we’ll be set.

Well here are the data-points -

1. John August – the day I hit #18, I sold about 500 copies. 
2. J. A. Konrath -
   

   He sold 500 copies of his book Origin in May (17 a day) and its sales rank is currently 537. Also, he sold 780 copies of The List (25 a day) and its sales rank is 302.

3. Boyd Morrison -
   

   He feels a rank of 200 is 50-60 copies a day, and a rank of 1000 is 10-15 sales a day. In terms of numbers, he had 3,450 sales in May (111 a day). Given his book’s current sales ranks of #256, #530, and #663 (which are lower than just a few days back) it goes well with our estimates.

4. Stacey Cochran -
   

   He’s seeing a rate of 2,500 copies a month (83 a day) for his books Claws and the Colorado Sequence. Given the sales ranks of 351 and 231, that means its probably a ’28 a day, 55 a day’ break-up.

5. John Rector –  Sales rank of #222 and he said he was seeing 70 sales a day. He also writes -
   

   In better news, I just agreed to a deal with Tor to publish my new novel The Cold Kiss. It’s coming out summer 2010 in hardcover with trade paper to follow.
   I don’t know how much of this can be attributed to the kindle book (probably not much) but I like to think it helped Tor make a decision.

If you analyze the numbers its hard to come up with numbers other than what we have listed above. Its important to keep in mind -

1. Kindle Store does a sort of rolling ranking.
2. There’s probably some extra weight given to very recent sales. See John August’s blog for his thoughts.

 These figures are a moving target

As more Kindle 2s and Kindle DXes sell, the number of sales needed to hit a particular spot will increase.

A good figure to keep in mind is that last year the New York Times had 10,000 Kindle Edition subscribers. 6 months or so later we have 5-6 self-published authors that are selling 100 or more books a day i.e. 3000+ a month.

Its got to be encouraging for aspiring writers to know that they can sell 3000 books a month via the Kindle Store, even without getting a contract. And it’s not just one or two isolated cases – It’s 6 separate authors.

Why are the Self Published Stars all on J. A. Konrath’s blog?

For some strange reason they have all found their way to J. A. Konrath’s blog. What could the reason be?

1. Perhaps he and his example gave them all hope/belief? And then they got success.
2. Perhaps he’s figured out a strategy that works really well for the Kindle Store and they’ve all found it at his blog.
3. Perhaps the most successful authors are also the ones working the hardest and keeping pace with all recent developments.

J. A. Konrath has said that within a year a self-published author finding success in the Kindle Store will have a contract. I’d put my money on it being more than one, and more than one of those will be with Amazon Encore.

Filed under: evolution, publishing Tagged: | kindle sales rank, kindle store sales