Amazon Book Sales Statistics

Amazon books sales statistics

Approximately 10% of Amazon’s worldwide revenue comes from book sales
Although this sounds small, it still equates to $28 billion
Amazon is responsible for roughly half of all the sales of the big 5 publishers
Memoirs and biographies were the top-selling genres on Amazon in 2022
Amazon controls up to 80% of all book distribution in the US
In 2016, Amazon sold $4.3 billion more worth of print books than e-books
The average book sells 200 copies in its first year and 1,000 over its lifetime on Amazon

Amazon publiushes approximately 1,000 new titles a year under their own publishing operations – Amazon Publishing
This makes Amazon Publishing almost as big as one of the big 5 traditional publishers.
Amazon Publishing undercuts the market to some extent, with their own books typically selling for around $6, whereas e-books from traditional publishers tend to sell for $10+

E-books make up 21% of Amazon’s total book sales by revenue
However, because they are significantly cheaper than print books, e-books actually make up 36% of sales in terms of total number of books sold
This is partly due to a huge number of e-books being available for $1 in the Kindle store
Amazon’s market share when it comes to e-books is 68% before even looking at the books that Amazon have published themselves or the books within Kindle Unlimited
With these figures factored in, it is thought that Amazon may be responsible for up to 85% of all e-book sales

Audible is the most popular platform for audiobooks – it has well over 100,000 titles in its library
Almost 20% of people in the U.S. have listened to an audiobook in the past year

Amazon’s subscription services such as Prime and Kindle Unlimited earn the company more than $6 billion each year
Kindle Unlimited is estimated to have 3 million subscribers
Self-published authors are paid on a per page basis of what Kindle Unlimited subscribers have actually read on their devices
The pool of subscription money is distributed based upon the total subscriber revenue attributed to author royalties divided by the total number of pages of a authors’ books that have been read – the more pages the subscribers read, the more money an author gets
This also gives Amazon unique data with an insight into what people actually read that is not available to traditional publishers giving them a competitive advantage in creating new content
Amazon has two rankings – best-selling and most read
Best-selling is simply the books that have sold the most copies
Most read are the books that have been interacted with the most on Amazon devices rather than simply being the books that have sold the most copies
Up to 60% of the books available on Kindle Unlimited are thought to be self-published

Rank	Genre
1	Religion and spirituality
2	Memoirs and biographies
3	Business and money
4	Self-help
5	Cookbooks, food, wine and spirits