How does one determine the breakdown of booksales? The new Michael Moore bashing book has opened at number 9 on the Times bestseller list. I had never even hear of it and I read voraciously. There are already more than 300 reviews on Amazon, all accumulated within the last 10 days. According to David Brock, right wing foundations will often pump up sales of books they favor by buying them in bulk from select outlets. Brock says that bulk buying will be indicated by a (!), but I can't see this on the Times web page. How can I tell if this is real book sales to individuals, or just Republicans gaming the system. It would be nice to know if Amazon can prove reviews are from unique users, or again just interested parties pumping up the hype on a book. A reference on the Amazon ranking system would be helpful.
(answer from mcapri sumbitted by emk)
Looks like I found a few resources. What I didn’t find was one comprehensive ranked list of everything. Barnes and Noble shows their top 100 on their website http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bestsellers/top100.asp
The NYT bestseller list shows only the top 5 without registering which is simple and free of charge, once registered you can see the top 35 in a given category http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/bestseller/
The American Booksellers Association also has charts of bestselling books: http://www.bookweb.org/booksense/bestsellers/
And finally for Amazon.com there is a website devoted entirely to ranking items sold there called junglescan. What you have to do is cut and paste the URL of a book or amazon item in question into the box marked for that purpose. It is important to click on the particular item and not to cut and paste the URL of search results into the box Here’s the URL: http://www.junglescan.com/
Also if you need to trace these statistics backwards and cant find such a on the website itself try plugging the URLs into the wayback machine at:
mcapri
(this answer is from Myka submitted by emk)
Additionally, if it helps to answer the part of the question about whether Amazon can prove its reviews are from unique users, there's been quite a flap about anonymous reviews and ratings on the site. Anyhoo, an article about Amazon's latest baby step to put a stop to the bogus practice just appeared in The Guardian yesterday: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1271178,00.html
FWIW, Bookscan is another source we use in the industry to track book sales, but as with other tracking systems, it doesn't necessarily tell the whole story (in our case, it really tells us our and our competitors' sell-through in the major chains, not so much with independent stores). And, as an industry tool, it ain't free or open to the public. Publishers guard real sales figures jealously, so you're *always* going to have a hard time getting a straight, reliable answer about exactly how many units have been moved for any given title. Myka