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How are books ranked in Leanpub's bestseller lists?
How are books ranked in Leanpub's bestseller lists?

Keywords: top books, bestseller, list, rank, ranks, ranking

Leanpub Support avatar
Written by Leanpub Support
Updated over a week ago

Conventional bestseller lists often have complicated and opaque algorithms for ranking books.

This is partially because conventional bestseller lists rely on information from numerous sources, such as individual publishers, bookstore chains, retail outlets, and other institutions. Even so, their information on book sales is always incomplete, because they may not get information from all bookselling outlets, including, for example, some independent bookstores.

Leanpub's bestseller lists are different, in that we are the only source of information, so our information is always both complete and current.

Our main bestseller list is what you will see if you click on "Books" at the top of a Leanpub page:

Clicking on "Books" will take you to this page in our bookstore:

There, you will see that by default, the bestseller list is Bestsellers Last Week:

Bestsellers Last Week is the same bestseller list that we call Top Books on our homepage:

Bestsellers Last Week simply ranks books by revenue in the last seven days.

In the bookstore, if you click on the dropdown at the top on the left, you will see we also have other lists, in addition to Bestsellers Last Week:

Below is an explanation of each of those lists.

Most Copies Sold Last Week

This list is hopefully self-explanatory! We'd like to mention here that unlike some other ebook sellers, Leanpub lets people buy multiple copies of an ebook at the same time, so they can give individual copies to employees, colleagues, clients, and friends.

Recently Updated

Leanpub books can be updated by their authors at any time. This list shows recently updated books in reverse chronological order.

Lifetime Best Sellers

This list ranks books by "lifetime" revenue, i.e. each book's total revenue, since it was first published on Leanpub.

Most Lifetime Copies Sold

This list is hopefully also self-explanatory!

First Published

This list shows books by their first date of publication, in reverse chronological order.

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