Amazon, the biggest bookseller in America, is also famously one of the most tight-lipped. Sales rankings are available on the Web site and are updated hourly, but the company doesn’t provide information on how many unit sales it takes to make a title an Amazon bestseller. Like everyone else, PW couldn’t get sales numbers from Amazon, but by studying the print bestseller list for a two-week period, we were able to determine that a title in Amazon’s top five averages 1,050 print copies sold across all channels, including other retailers, on a typical day. And because the general industry thinking is that Amazon accounts for about 30% of print sales, that means it likely takes around 300 copies per day to reach Amazon’s top five, depending on the day of the week and the time of year. How was PW able to get this number? We looked at Dark Horse’s The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia, a 300-page collection of historical information, concept art, and chronology of the famous Nintendo video game series.
