Amazon have for a long time listed best selling products in categories across the site and books are no exception. Everything is ranked for all to see and it’s a valuable tool to decide if a particular product might be profitable or not.
Now Amazon.com have added a weekly best seller list for books with the launch of Amazon Charts. The top 20 bestsellers on Amazon for both fiction and nonfiction as well as the 20 most read books in both categories (think Kindle).
Key Features
- What’s really being read
Amazon Charts Top 20 Most Read is the first list to rank books by the average number of daily Kindle readers and daily Audible listeners each week – giving customers the opportunity to see what’s actively being read or listened to every week. - What’s really being bought or borrowed
Amazon Charts Top 20 Most Sold ranks books according to the number of copies sold and pre-ordered through Amazon.com, Audible.com and Amazon Books stores and books borrowed from Amazon’s subscription programs such as Kindle Unlimited, Audible.com, and Prime Reading. - The stories behind the books
When exploring Amazon Charts, readers can browse fun insights into how other readers are reacting to each book. From which books were Most Anticipated according to the rate of customer pre-orders, to which Kindle books were simply Unputdownable, according to how quickly customers read a book from cover to cover.
In the past the New York Times best seller lists have been the defacto authority on the subject but recently they upset the publishing industry by combining print and ebook lists. Amazon may have spotted a gap in the market and doubltess if authors and publishers start referring to the Amazon best sellers lists it’s natural to expect some buyers to assume Amazon is also the default place to purchase from.
How can it help sellers
It’s probably too much work to monitor the charts manually on a weekly basis, but if you have time on your hands it may be worth doing. If a book is top of the charts it’s likely to attract more sales so plugging the data into your repricing tool to make sure your are competitive might make sense.
Of course it would be nice to have this fully automated – if a book is in Aamzon.com’s top 20 best sellers your repricing engine automatically lowers your margins to attract sales – this is of course if you want to chase turnover rather than profits. Perhaps one of the repricing offerings will take note and add this as a new feature?
