BSR
Your Amazon Best Sellers Rank for every book, on every storefront you sell in — read from your own browser.
What a Best Sellers Rank is
Your BSR is your book's position on one Amazon storefront, compared with every
other book there. #1 is the best.
Two things follow from that, and both matter:
- It is not a sales figure. Amazon's own words: "your Sales Rank can change even if your book's sales and borrows stay the same". Your rank moves when other books sell, too.
- Each format and each storefront is its own rank. Your paperback on amazon.com and your paperback on amazon.de are two different positions in two different lists. They are never added up or averaged here.
Amazon also confirms that Kindle Unlimited borrows count: a book has no rank until it has been "sold or borrowed at least once".
What the page shows
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Best rank | The best position this book currently holds across the storefronts we track |
| Flag | Which storefront that best rank is on |
| No rank yet | Amazon shows no rank for it — it needs a sale or a borrow first |
| Reading… | We have not read this listing yet (see below) |
Click any book to open it. You then see its rank on each storefront separately, plus its category ranks — the "#2 in German Literary Criticism" lines Amazon shows under Product details. Amazon lists at most three.
Each country keeps the same colour everywhere, and the dot beside it in the list is that country's line on the chart. Category names are shown in the store's own language, exactly as Amazon prints them.
Click a country to show it on its own. Click a second one to compare the two, click a selected one again to drop it, and Show all brings every line back. The vertical axis rescales to whatever is left, so isolating a country you sell less in still shows its movement instead of a flat line at the bottom.
Where the numbers come from
Amazon publishes no API for this, so the rank is read from your own browser, by the TrueRoyalties extension, from pages you are allowed to see anyway. Three ways, and the first two cost nothing:
- Amazon Author Central, if you have an account with your titles claimed. This is by far the best source: it returns your whole catalogue at once and carries years of daily history, so your chart is full from the start rather than being built up day by day. It covers six storefronts — amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .co.jp and .com.br — and does not include category ranks. Nothing to set up: if the account exists, we use it.
- When you open one of your own book pages on Amazon, the extension reads the rank off the page you were looking at. No extra request, and it updates instantly. At most once an hour per book and storefront — a rank cannot change faster than that, so reading it more often would tell you nothing.
- Otherwise a slow background pass reads the pages nothing else refreshed. This is what covers the other eleven storefronts and the category ranks.
The extension only ever looks at your own ASINs. A page for somebody else's book is ignored before anything is sent, and only the numbers travel — never the page itself.
The extension has to be running
All three sources go through it, so with the extension removed, disabled, or too old, no rank can arrive — this is the one page in TrueRoyalties that cannot fall back to anything else. The page says so at the top rather than showing progress that will never move:
- Extension not detected — it is not installed, or it is switched off. Install or re-enable it, then reload the page.
- Extension update needed — it is installed but predates this feature. Update it and reload; your ranks start arriving on the next pass.
Your existing ranks stay on the page either way. They simply stop being refreshed until the extension can run again.
How to tell whether Author Central is connected
The page says so, at the top, as soon as we have been able to look. Only the
extension can check it — author.amazon.com requires you to be signed in, so
nothing on our side can see it for you.
- Connected — your six main storefronts arrive complete, with their history.
- No account detected — your ranks still work, read from your book pages. But Author Central is the only way to get your past ranks. It is free: claim your titles there and we pick it up automatically, with nothing to configure.
- Nothing shown — we have not managed to check yet (the extension has not run since you connected). We would rather say nothing than claim you have no account when we simply have not looked.
Every book is listed, ranked or not
The list is your whole catalogue, exactly like the Reviews page — a book without a rank is shown with its state rather than hidden:
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Never made a sale | Your KDP reports show no sale and no borrow for this book, ever — so Amazon gives it no rank. We know that without asking Amazon, so we never read its page. |
| Not tracked yet | We track a book on the storefronts it has actually sold on. It appears after its first sale, or after the next KDP sync. |
| Reading… | Queued, and being read now. |
| Not read yet | Queued, but nothing is reading it — see the extension. |
| No rank yet | We read it, and Amazon shows no rank — a book has none until it has been sold or borrowed at least once. |
A book that has never sold gets its rank here the day it makes its first sale. Nothing to do: the sale arrives in your KDP report, and the book joins the list.
Ranks wait for your KDP history
Nothing is read until your first KDP import has finished. Two reasons, and both are for you: while it runs, the extension and your connection are busy importing your royalties — and until they have landed, we cannot yet tell which books have actually sold, which is what decides which pages are worth reading at all. The page says so while it waits.
Why the first read takes a few hours
We read one page at a time, spaced out, best-selling titles first — so your most important books are ranked within minutes and the long tail follows.
A progress bar shows how far along it is, in books. You do not need to keep anything open — it continues in the background, and opening one of your Amazon pages fills that book in immediately. A catalogue of a few hundred books is usually covered within a few hours of normal browsing.
Books that sell in several countries are read once per country, because a rank only exists per storefront — and books that have never sold are not read at all, because Amazon has no rank to give them.
With Author Central, most of this does not apply: your six main storefronts arrive complete, with their history, on the first pass.
The history chart
Open any book to see its rank over time, one line per storefront.
The vertical axis is upside down on purpose — #1 is the best, so it sits at the top and every improvement reads as a climb. It is also logarithmic, because a rank moves multiplicatively: without it, a book drifting from #900,000 to #1,800,000 would flatten everything else on the chart into a single line.
A break in a line is a day with no reading — including a KDP Select free run, which Amazon leaves out of the report entirely. We draw the gap rather than a straight line across it.
How often it refreshes
Amazon recalculates ranks hourly, but only publishes a daily history, and a book ranked past #100,000 genuinely moves about once a day. So we re-read:
- daily for a book ranked inside the first million,
- every three days past that, where the rank barely moves,
- weekly for a book with no rank at all.
Opening the book's Amazon page always refreshes it on the spot.
Reading it honestly
A rank below #10,000 is a book selling steadily; around #100,000 it sells roughly daily; past #1,000,000 it has not sold in a while. Those are bands, not conversions — the same rank means different sales in different categories, and the only figures that are truly yours are the royalties on your dashboard.