While US publishing has lived with Amazon Charts for two years now, Germany and the UK just got them, and the Brits are doing a lot to pull out what reflections they can offer of the market
In the States, we’ve had the Amazon Charts rankings since May 2017, but only on July 24 were they rolled out to the UK and German markets, considered the number-two and number-three world markets for ebooks.
As we’ve covered many times in the past, Amazon’s refusal to share sales data cripples the publishing industry’s ability to “see” a huge portion of ebook and audiobook sales, so no one really knows how large it is. While the UK and Germany (like the US) still would like to have full sales data on digital content from Amazon, the arrival of the Charts is useful in itself.
At The Bookseller, Philip Jones writes, “The release of Amazon’s new weekly charts shows, for the first time, the impact of the huge but opaque digital sector on book sales.” For example, seeing Rachel Abbott’s And So It Begins at the top of the Most Sold chart for two weeks in the UK doesn’t tell us how many copies have been sold, but it does confirm, as Jones writes, that Abbott “has long been a digital hit-maker.” Amazon revealed in 2015 that Abbott was its bestselling self-published author in the five years since Kindle launched in the UK.
“Like many of these authors, however,” he writes, “she has been largely absent from Nielsen BookScan’s bestseller universe, her top seller having shifted just 6,955 copies in print. The chart also highlights the success of new digitally led publishers such as Joffe Books and the more familiar Bookouture, which feature along with Amazon imprints Lake Union Publishing and Thomas & Mercer.”
The word from Germany (where ebooks are thought to comprise a steady but small 5 percent or so of the market) is more subdued. We spoke with Matthias Matting, journalist and author in Munich, who is currently enjoying brisk sales of his hard science fiction titles written as Brandon Q. Morris in English and German markets. In Germany, he says, “Amazon Charts have not generated significant feedback,” in part because they’re competing with lists already in place. “There was the BILD Bestseller list before,” he tells us, “which is curated by Amazon too, exclusively, and is published bi-weekly in the largest tabloid. So the new charts are not really having a larger impact than the BILD list. And the Amazon Charts are largely ignored by the book trade.”
Interestingly, books published by Amazon aren’t at the top of all these lists. Hardy perennials include Dale Carnegie’s 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People at number 13 in Germany, up four spots from last week. Still, whatever consumers may be buying, an awful lot of what they’re reading is Harry Potter und der Orden des Phönix.
Bottom line: Kiera O’Brien, who leads The Bookseller’s stats analysis, is so actively tracking titles’ relative success on the Charts that it makes us wonder if this resource isn’t being overlooked as a comparative touchstone of value in the States. On July 31, for example, O’Brien reports that while mega-hit children’s writer David Walliams’s The World’s Worst Teachers topped the Nielsen BookScan Top 50, it “fell eight places in the Most Sold fiction chart to 12th” place, “which perhaps indicates Walliams’s strength in supermarkets and the high street. The title, which has sold over 275,000 copies in hardback since the end of June through the BookScan TCM, was another Audible favorite, with more listeners than Kindle readers.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
