D&D 5E 3 Years Later: D&D's total Domination on Amazon (and Earth in General)

[TerraDave]

Are the amazon rankings based on number sold or $$ value sold?
So which would rank higher- 1 sale of a $101 book or 4 sales of a $25 book?

You would hope the second. Of course, they don't really say.

The top seller right now is the paperback of Ready Player One (of all things). Based on that, I would guess it is number of units.

 

[SkidAce]

LOL. I saw this post this morning and was about to respond something along the lines of "Nah, who would question this? After all I can find how many books per month this translates into after about 30 seconds of googling. Just go here."

Good thing I didn't post.

Interesting article.

 

[Oofta]

So, anyone have any idea how many copies the other books on that list sell? Did anybody give out sales numbers? By that I mean the books that stay or have been in the top 100 for a while.

I remember reading something about hundreds of copies of The Great Gatsby sell a day. And it is in the top 100 and I think it's been there a while?

I don't usually quote myself, but a simple search for "how many books does amazon sell" and

LOL. I saw this post this morning and was about to respond something along the lines of "Nah, who would question this? After all I can find how many books per month this translates into after about 30 seconds of googling. Just go here."

Good thing I didn't post.

So if you want to know (at least according to the website I found and the interwebz would never lie), it's approximately 9,803 per month for the PHB.

 

[darjr]

I new about the sales rank site. And it's numbers are close to what other sites are estimating. What I wanted was solid numbers.

I'm beginning to trust the sales rank site, I'm just floored by the number it gives for the PHB. 600+ books a day!

What I wanted was some solid quote of exact numbers because folks will argue about that sales rank site being off for one reason or another.

Surely some author or publisher has said and it's available on line.

 

[fjw70]

As a fan of OSR and 4e versions of the game (While I don't hate 3.x and respect the improvements it made to the game, it isn't my cup of tea) I am very pleased to see 5e really catch on. WotC did a great job of finding a nice balance point between editions. Very easy to simplify to close to BX levels and a decent amount of mechanical widgets to play with if you want to (with XGtE coming that looks to increase).

Besides the excellent job of game design the company seems to be doing a much better job on the business side as well. As much as I wanted electronic versions of the books to use at a non-virtual table, WotC waited until the right third party company was found to go fully digital. While DDB is not launched yet things look very positive.

Good job Wizards!!!

 

[Oofta]

I new about the sales rank site. And it's numbers are close to what other sites are estimating. What I wanted was solid numbers.

I'm beginning to trust the sales rank site, I'm just floored by the number it gives for the PHB. 600+ books a day!

What I wanted was some solid quote of exact numbers because folks will argue about that sales rank site being off for one reason or another.

Surely some author or publisher has said and it's available on line.

Yep. And that's only Amazon, not books sold at stores.

I think you really have to stretch to put these numbers in a negative light. It's doing great for it's niche. Well, if you can count over 100,000 sales per year after all this time of any book as a niche.

I'm just glad the hobby is healthy.

 

[ad_hoc]

The overall ranking is impressive. I'm not sure we should pay much attention to its ranking in "Fantasy Gaming", though. If D&D wasn't the best selling fantasy game, WotC would be doing something *really* wrong. That position is theirs by default, unless they screw up.

While that should be true, it was only a few years ago that Paizo was on top.

 

[Morrus]

While that should be true, it was only a few years ago that Paizo was on top.

Yup. And it was true then, too.

 

[Jester David]

I don't usually quote myself, but a simple search for "how many books does amazon sell" and

So if you want to know (at least according to the website I found and the interwebz would never lie), it's approximately 9,803 per month for the PHB.

Selling roughly 9,000 per month means that, since launch, it's sold around 324,000 copies on Amazon alone. Lowballing, since it was *much* higher the first couple months.
If half of sales come from Amazon and the otter half from game and big box stores then we can ballpark totally sales at >648,000. Probably easily in the 700k or 800k range. Well above even the 3.0 book sales!

-edit-

The above is potentially lowballed, since it was in the Top 10 multiple times over the last few years, and IIRC it hit #1.
And there was a couple weeks of high sales pre-Amazon.

If sales just hold steady for a couple years, it might even pass the 1st Edition...

 

[BookBarbarian]

It's amazing just how much more expensive it is to buy from a local store.

My FLGS price matches amazon as long as it's after the 2 week period where the product is for sale in stores, but not online. It's very nice.