Amazon Book Sales Statistics

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 book publishing statistics

  • 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+

Amazon e-book sales statistics

  • 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

Amazon audiobook sales statistics

  • 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

Kindle Unlimited and subscriptions

  • 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

What are the most popular book genres on Amazon?

Print books

RankGenre
1Memoirs and biographies
2Self-help
3Religion and spirituality
4Health, fitness, and dieting
5Politics and social science

E-books

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