Amazon Review Count / # of Books Sold Correlation?

[Kyle Loechner]

Hey all,

How reliable do you think it is to use the quantity of reviews for an author as a gauge of their popularity? Specifically, their book with the highest # of reviews

I did a quick check of some top fantasy authors on the U.S. Amazon site, and here was how it (very roughly) broke down:

~7000 reviews: JK Rowling

~4500 reviews: JRR Tolkien

~3500 reviews: George RR Martin

~2000 reviews: Robert Jordan

~1500 reviews: Patrick Rothfuss, Sanderson/Jordan combo, Jim Butcher

~800 reviews: Neil Gaiman

~500 reviews: Sanderson alone, Steven Erikson

~250-350 reviews: Joe Abercrombie, Brent Weeks, Robin Hobb, V Peter Brett, Terry Brooks, Mark Lawrence, Scott Lynch, Guy Gavriel Kay

~50: Elizabeth Bear

If this is semi-reliable as a measure of sales or success, it means Rothfuss is in the stratosphere and smashing his contemporaries to shit (Potter comparisons working for him and gaining him a non-genre audience?). Meanwhile Bear, a multiple award-winning author, is eating Raman noodles.

Also, using this EXTREMELY LIMITED SAMPLE, it seems as though there is a genre audience ceiling in the neighborhood of 350 reviews. I'm tempted to do a more thorough analysis by capturing exact #'s in a database and running some comparisons. It also seems like if you want to be a top fantasy author, you should throw a bunch of initials in your name (tongue in cheek). :cool4:

For comparison:

~15,000 reviews: EL James (50 Shades of Gray) -- WTF

~6,000 reviews: Stephanie Meyers (Twilight)

~5,000 reviews: John Grisham

~2,000 reviews: Lee Child (Jack Reacher)

~500 reviews: Danielle Steel -- bucks the trend, because this lady is pretty much a permanent of fixture on the bestseller list. older audience?

Anyway... curious what you think about all this.

[jbpark]

Hunger Games has 15k reviews, as well.

I'm sure the number of reviews are somewhat proportional to their popularity (as in, is Rothfuss's review count a big surprise? His books are NYT bestsellers), but there's also the fact that some books just came too late to take advantage of it--imagine if Harry Potter was being released right now, rather than a decade ago.

[WrathOfTinyKittens]

It's not reliable. IIRC Terry Brooks is one the highest-selling SFF authors ever, and Paolini definitely is (though you didn't include him).

I'd say it's only reliable on a totally non-analytical level; that is, an author with lots of reviews has been read more often than one with no reviews (probably). But you couldn't use it to directly compare sales.

[MisterOJ]

Paolini definitely is (though you didn't include him).

You know, I actually had to google Paolini because I couldn't remember what on earth he had written. I actually felt a little stupid that I didn't know who you were talking about. And then the results popped up and I was like, "Oh yeah, that kid."

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Actually, I would say this is fairly reliable, for current sales—I use this method a lot. Though of course there are some outliers—you should really not count the one-star reviews for AMoL due to the ebook delay in the total; though those are also a clear indicator of popularity, it's not apples to apples.

Plus it's better to look at recent books. You'll find that Steven Erikson should be a lot lower down. And I think this ranking doesn't quite work where Neil Gaiman is concerned.

The Way of Kings also has 100 more reviews than Towers of Midnight, though the latter sold about five times better. The speed at which reviews accumulate is also important; right after TofM's paperback came out (after TWoK's paperback), it passed up TWoK in review numbers. TWoK has steadily been gaining in relative review numbers since then. The first book in a series tends to get a different type of review than subsequent books—I think readers are less likely to be excited to review sequels if they don't break much ground compared to the first book.