“You’re not supposed to find Amazon sales rankings informative or helpful. You’re only supposed to find them interesting.”

Although many have tried to navigate their way through the Amazon sales ranking maze, as yet few have actually managed to successfully come up with a definitive answer as to how accurate it is.

In my experience after my own book To Be or Not To Be, Innit was selling in its thousands, quickly breaking into Amazon’s top 10 of best sellers, I wanted to know how many book sales constituted a top 5 placing in its chart.

I asked my publisher – this was a self-publishing company – but even he was unable to offer any guidance. The most simple answer that I was able to come up with was this; Amazon is not an exact science and shouldn’t be used as a rule of thumb to gauge how well a book is selling.

The fact that a single book sale can see a leap of tens of thousands of places only confirms to me that there really isn’t any true correlation between book sales and chart positioning.

Although checking an Amazon ranking is fun, the only way by which any author can confidently and accurately judge how well his book is selling is by getting the figures directly from their publisher. That – and, of course, the royalty payment.

Next time I’ll be looking at the internet.