A Decade of Bestselling Books: Exploring Amazon Sales
Amazon, as an organization, started on the premise of book sales, with the ‘low cost and universal demand’ of books as well as a business model that took advantage of the internet and its growth capabilities, the business succeeded early.
In 2020, Amazon has been cemented in their role as one of the largest online retailer and books are still a significant portion of the companies’ earnings, as a publisher and bookseller with the addition of their Kindle devices, books are still one of the products where the organisation is known for.
In this report, we will look at the bestselling books on the Amazon platform, analyzing for patterns in the consumer data.
In the dataset used, there are more non-fiction books in the bestselling rankings, with about 56% of the bestselling dataset belonging to non-fiction books, this includes everything from memoirs to art and photography books.
Book Ratings
Ranking by rating gives a relatively high number of max (4.9) ratings, however, we can see significant differences in the number of reviews, with some books having just over 3000 reviews while some have about 20,000.
A weighted rating, that takes into consideration the number of reviews, will be a better option for this ranking.
where R = average rating for the book
v = number of reviews for the book
m = minimum reviews required to be listed in the best seller list
C = the mean rating in the dataset
While a number of rows in the weighted rating column can still be rounded up to 4.9, there is enough of a difference between the various books that they can be ranked.
As an aside, Nine of the the Top 10 books, according to the weighted rankings are in the fiction genre. This could be taken as a sign of the fiction genre’s dominance in rating rankings.
Dr. Seuss’s ‘Oh, the Places You’ll Go!’ comes out on top of the Weighted Rating rankings by an edge, with 21,834 reviews and a number of them overwhelmingly positive. Originally published in 1990, the “Children’s literature” book has been well liked by most people who purchase it.
Sarah Young with her sole entry in the Top 50 Bestselling books, ‘Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence (with Scripture References)’ tops the ranking for Authors in Weighted Ratings. The 2004 Inspirational, Christian literature text was reviewed 19,576 times.
On average, bestselling books in the Fiction genre are rated higher than their counterparts in Non-fiction
Book Price
Here, we will look at patterns in book price in the Top 50 Bestselling books on Amazon
There are 6 non-fiction books out of the top 10 most expensive bestsellers on Amazon. Looking at the rankings, the fiction books in the Top 5 are collections or combinations of a book series, while the non-fiction books are instructional, educational texts. Both genres are priced expensively because of their larger size (relatively large amount of pages).
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edition), DSM-5, comes out on top as the most expensive bestselling book, as a relatively large publication that is useful in a number of medical professions, this ranking can be seen to be right. Originally published in 2013 with about a thousand pages, it beats its newer edition (DSM-VI) by 5 spots on the price ranking.
On average, non-fiction publications cost more than their fictional counterparts. Considering educational textbooks for all professions and fields, history texts and other instructional publications fall under non-fiction, there is a definite tendency for non-fiction books to cost more.
Number of Reviews
Here we look at the patterns in the number of reviews on books in the Top 50 bestselling rankings
Nine out of ten books on the bestsellers with the most reviews on average are from the fiction genre. As this ranking looks at average reviews, non-fiction books which may not frequently come in series are not disadvantaged, however only Michelle Obama’s Becoming had more than 36,000 reviews on average in the non-fiction genre.
Delia Owens’ ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ tops the ranking for average number of reviews, it was also rated highly with a weighted ranking of 4.8. Originally published in 2018, the ‘Mystery’ book with just one year on the bestselling list was critically acclaimed.
On average, fiction books accumulate more reviews than their non-fiction counterparts, with a relatively large gap between the two genres, the review culture of the fiction community is dominant.
Trends over the years
Here, we look at the trend of reviews, ratings, price of books in the Top 50 Amazon bestselling list over the decade.
The number of book reviews on Amazon bestsellers trended upwards on average with notable dips in 2013 and 2017. Fiction publications were dominant in reviews for every year except 2018.
The average price of books on the Amazon bestselling list has been trending downwards over the years with a sharp change from 2014 to 2015. Non-fiction books were price higher on average from 2010 downwards, with 2009 being the sole year where fiction books are more expensive on average.
The ratings of Amazon’s Top 50 bestselling books have had a slight increase on average from about 4.5 to around 4.7. Non-fiction books were only rated higher on average in 2012 and 2013.
Conclusion
There were more non-fiction books on the bestselling list over the years and these non-fiction books were more expensive than their counterparts on average. However, fiction books are reviewed more and rated higher on average.
