"Life of Pi" vs. "Currency wars": Amazon sales analytics comparison for first week 2012

Check out this 3d bar graph created with Ranktracer's custom graphing tool (part of our analytics service).

We've compared the sales performance of Life of Pi by Yann Martel with Currency wars by James Rickards. Both books are absolute best sellers on Amazon.

I should point out that the comparison here is definitely apples vs. oranges. Life of Pi is a story about a shipwrecked Indian boy and was published in 2003, whereas Currency wars was published in the last few months.

With that said, it's interesting to see their relative performance over the first week of 2012 lined up against each other in graph form. In particular, note that Currency wars maintained an overall sales rank of 453 for the week in question, whilst Life of Pi maintained an average of 1223.

The lower the sales rank of a product on Amazon the better it is selling. In other words, a product that has a sales rank of 1, is the best seller. It's interesting then to see the sales estimates coming from Ranktracer's sales analytics algorithms:

- Currency wars sold approximately 376 units

- Life of Pi sold approximately 153 units

Of course, we didn't want to show off two directly competing titles since we like to be nice and friendly when we blog here. However, if you're a marketer, writer or publisher then you might well want to check out how your nearest competitors are selling.

Not only that, you can keep track of how your sales performance changes in response to marketing, interviews, radio shows and so on. From this you can learn how best to out compete your rivals, and you can do this all with real time Amazon sales analytics and market research using RankTracer.

Incidentally, we've been tracking Life of Pi since 2009, so you can check out its historical sales performance for the last few years by logging on to our demo account.

It's important to note that the sales estimates may not be 100% accurate. They are a calculation based on RankTracer's own proprietary algorithms that analyze the changes in sales over time. However, we have tuned these pretty well over the last few years, so for the few cents a day it costs to track products with us, you get a pretty good idea of how things are selling.