Circa 2016: Sales Rank Express is not longer active because of changes to Amazon’s core programming.
Sales ranks can now be found only for individual novels or by publisher, but they are still a fairly good barometer for estimating sales and rates of sales.
Before querying or submitting work to an unknown publisher, consider checking out how well they’re selling on Amazon. Amazon isn’t the only online vendor, but they are one of the biggest. If a book isn’t selling there, it better be selling like crazy on the publisher’s or author’s website. *
Here’s an easy way to get ballpark figures of current Amazon sales ranks: go here to www.salesrankexpress.com and enter the publisher’s name into the ‘Publisher’ field. Hit search. You’ll see sales ranks for that publisher’s books listed on Amazon. They’re not exact, and are known to be inaccurate for strongly selling books. But those figures seem to be scarily accurate for low-selling books, especially those with estimated single-digit or double-digit Amazon sales per year.
Hint: sales ranks on Amazon are shown in ascending order, ranking all books currently in Amazon’s catalog. The best seller will be #1, the worst way down in the tens of millions.
Why should you check? A publisher with a lot of books ranked over 500,000 simply isn’t selling that well on Amazon, so they might not be good at selling your work there, too.
* There are ways to see how popular a publisher’s site is on the internet, too, if they claim to be selling more from their own site. I’ll cover that in a later aside, or you can go here to learn more. ∞