Ebook Sales Rank for UK

The last couple of posts, starting with (This one) I have explored how ebook sales rank relates to number of ebooks sold. But that was for the USA. From the data that is out there I extrapolated to end up with a set of graphs showing how Amazon sales rank related to actual sales. Obviously this comes down to my interpretation but I think it stands up. Here I will try an explore the same issue with UK sales rank.

There is much less direct information available for the UK ebook market than there is for the USA market. I thought I would have a go at figuring out  some ball park figures.  So here they are along with my methodology.

To figure out UK book sales per UK sales rank we need to know a few things about the relative sizes of the markets and the relative number of ebooks sold in each. We can also look back at historic data for the USA when their ebook sales were much less and more like ebook sales in the UK today.

The first thing we do know is the numeric ebook sales for the USA and the UK. The latest figures are for 2016. We do know that ebook sales in the USA rose by 6% in 2017. It would seem unlikely for UK sales to take a dive or massively overperform the USA market so using the 2016 figures would seem fine – adjusted by 6%.

The Sales Ratio USA & UK

Here they are. In essence the number of ebooks sold in the USA is about 5 times that sold in the UK.

In my opinion the consequence of this is that you will need a much better sales rank in the UK to sell a specific number of books than you would on amazon.com.

My concept here is that if (as an example) in the USA you sell 5 books for a given sales rank, in the UK you will sell only one ebook. This means the sales against sales rank graph for amazon ebook sales looks like this.

eBook Sales Rank UK vs Sales

So from the graph I produced in the first post in this series it looks like a sales rank on amazon.com of 125,000 would give you about one sale a day, or about 30 a month. But for the UK to get similar sales you would need to be on a sale ranks of about 40,000. Again this is not entirely clear from the above graph so I thought I would explore the long tail for the UK like I did for the USA.

Here is the link to the next post: ebook Sales Rank for the UK The Long Tail.

Regards

Chalkie.