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A better question. What does it take to hit best seller status on a top level category?

About 5000 books sold in a day or. Thats... a lot harder (or just more expensive) to fake.

It really depends on the period they use to calculate it. My book was very briefly the #1 programming book on Amazon[1], which is, I think, a decent-sized category. I don't know the exact numbers, but I probably sold a few hundred copies that day. But, more importantly, I think I had a narrow spike of a lot of sales in a couple of hours right when the book first launched.

[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/20/how-my-book-lau...

It depends. They're calculated hourly. Right place right time...could be just a couple dozen. Books sell less copies than people think.

That's interesting, do you have a sense for what the incremental sales were from having the #1 designation?

Gary Vaynerchuk did an 8 hour preorder drive yesterday. From what I recall, it peaked at 211ish on Amazon in that time (giving him #1 in most of his subcategories) and they said they had about 8000 preorders in the bucket, most of which were via Amazon. TBH I was gobsmacked he wasn't at #1 given the book market.

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