Why sales numbers for Olivia Nuzzi’s ‘American Canto’ aren’t looking good

“American Canto,” which billed itself as “a mesmerizing firsthand account of the distortion of American reality over the past decade,” stood at a middling No. 5,546 on Amazon’s bestsellers list on Friday, three days after its release, and No. 3,059 on the Kindle Store.

Amazon’s somewhat mysterious rankings don’t reflect real-time book sales Amazon notes that it considers both historical and recent activity, and that changes in rank can take days to update, while publishing observers often warn that they do not always meet public demand.

But Dan Sinykin, an assistant professor of English at Emory University, called the sales score “strikingly low” and said the book is likely to perform below expectations.

“American Canto” did not appear on Amazon’s “Movers & Shakers” list on Thursday, which marks the biggest jumps in sales over the past 24 hours and is often a measure of success on the bestseller lists in the days after a book’s release.

For a book to break onto the New York Times bestseller list of the fifteen best-selling books—a hugely important ranking that often determines how a book will be distributed and displayed in bookstores and airports across the country—it needs a concentrated burst of sales during its first week of reporting, Hannah Yelin, a lecturer in culture at Oxford Brookes University, told Forbes, which the Amazon list definitely doesn’t reflect.