Believe it or not, there is no place you can effectively research bestselling books – you can see what is bestselling RIGHT THIS SECOND, but what about the last year or last quarter? And what if you don't want to include books that are only bestselling because they've got a Bookbub promotion running or another anomaly?
I'm writing a romcom for the first time in a long time and realized this horrifying fact very quickly as I tried to figure out what sells. Mind blown. I thought for sure there was somewhere I could go to get this important info!!
It hit me that I needed a way to sort Amazon category results by NUMBER OF REVIEWS. The books with the most reviews would be those that consistently sold the most over time (another search ability I needed---a way to filter by date).
It took some doing, but I found the answer!
You can sort books by # of reviews by carefully adding &s=review-count-rank to the end of an Amazon search string. Example:
1. Go to a category first: Thrillers, for example. From the dropdown menu at the top “categories” choose Mysteries, Thrillers, Suspense. Then on the side menus, drill to Thrillers. You’ll see in your browser URL window that the link to that page is:
https://www.amazon.com/s?bbn=157305011&rh=n%3A133140011%2Cn%3A154606011%2Cn%3A157305011%2Cn%3A157319011
now in that URL window, paste or type to the end of the string: &s=review-count-rank
https://www.amazon.com/s?bbn=157305011&rh=n%3A133140011%2Cn%3A154606011%2Cn%3A157305011%2Cn%3A157319011&s=review-count-rank
BAM!
Books under that category will sort by most reviews.
And once you do this once, any category you choose on the side menu will stay ordered this way. You can book mark the link you created so you don't have to type/paste it in there every time.
Want to narrow it by publication year? Add:
&p_46=During&p_47=2023
For “during 2023”
You can add month too: &p_45=10&p_46=During&p_47=2023
Is released during Oct (10) 2023.
You can do other various advanced searches from Amazon's advanced search too... and THEN add whatever additions you want to the search URL.
https://www.amazon.com/advanced-search/books
I hope you find that helpful! I found out in the last year 4 of the top ten romcoms are about HOCKEY. 😂 Yeah, that's not going to happen. But now I can see all the cover styles, topics and blurbs that were winners!
Hope you find this helpful!
