Since its beginning, Amazon.com has displayed a "sales rank" number with every book it stocks on its website. This number is like the numbers used on a booksellers top 10 list--the best-selling book is ranked #1, the next best-selling title is #2, and the tenth best-selling tome is #10. But at Amazon, they rank every single book in their inventory--all the way up to around 2.5 million! And they update their sales ranks constantly--the top selling books are typically re-ranked every hour.
So, what's a good sales rank?
There is, of course, no hard and fast rule about what constitutes a best-seller, whether you are looking at sales ranks or actual sales volume. However, I'll throw caution to the wind for a moment and offer a few generalizations.
First, it's important to look at a book's average sales rank over time--a book that spikes to, say, number 25 on Amazon for an hour or two may be selling well for that brief period (perhaps because the author just appeared on a morning talk show or got a favorable review in a regional newspaper), but you'll want to see how that book performs over days or weeks to fairly judge its success. Plenty of books break into Amazon's top 1000 or even top 100 for a few hours but are not able to sustain the high ranking over time.
Bearing the above very much in mind, here's a temperature gauge you can use to get an idea about a particular title's success. The following numbers apply to average sales ranks over time:
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Less than 100: Best-seller. Author, publisher, agent are all getting rich
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101-1000: Extremely good performer. Any publisher/author would be thrilled.
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1001-10,000: Very successful book. A few of these can sustain a small publishing company.
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10,001-50,000: A successful book by most industry standards.
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50,001-100,000: Not bad.
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100,000 - 500,000: Not good.
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500,000 or more: Poor.
Keep in mind that books with average ranks above 100,000 may have performed much better before we started tracking them on TitleZ. However, books that launch with ranks above 100,000 are probably not considered successful from a publishing industry point of view. Of course, the book could be selling well through non-bookstore channels such as trade shows, speaking events, etc. In general, though, we've found that Amazon sales ranks provides a good indicator for how a title is doing throughout the book market as a whole.