Category Archives: News

Featured Book Donation Drive – Spring 2011


The picture to the right is me at a Meals on Wheels fundraising event, raising money to deliver meals to the homes of those in need. Besides NovelRank, this is one of the organizations I give back to and support, with my time and money. To that end, I’m writing today to ask for your support to keep NovelRank prospering in 2011. Donations have slowed enough that my hourly wage (hours working on NovelRank divided by donations dollars) has started going backwards and is now below $5 per hour.





 

 

In the last 6 months, NovelRank has made a large number of improvements, including: Research on sales rank myths, improved kindle sales estimate accuracy, improved social networking tie-ins, book analysis, CSV download and RSS feeds for user pages, sorting of books on user pages, added Amazon.co.uk Kindle book tracking, worldwide snapshot on user pages, and tons of little bug fixes and tweaks to speed up the website. I hope to continue in 2011 with an iPhone app, SMS/Email notifications of book sales, and greater support for Kindle books on Amazon.co.uk. done!

Of course, I’m happy to give something more in return, so here is what you can receive by donating: A coveted Featured Book spot on NovelRank, one of only 9 spots! Combined over the last 6 months, the books featured on the Track, FAQ, Publisher, Top 10, and Login have received a combined 341,000+ page views! The Track page accounts for 274,000 of those views in the last 6 months. To put that in perspective, this is 3 times the traffic expected during the last donation drive.

 

Donate $400 or more – You may choose 3 books to be rotated through all pages
Donate $150 – You may choose 1 book to be rotated on the Track page for each $150 donation
Donate $50 – You may have 1 book rotated through the FAQ, Publisher, Top 10, and Login pages





 

Optional: If you cannot use PayPal, use the NovelRank Supporters Amazon Wishlist.

 

Any donation amount will be accepted. The above amounts are simply reward levels. After donating, you can either email me or you will receive an email shortly after the donation asking you which book(s) will be included.

Thanks for contributing to this community supported website. All Featured Books will stay up till July 1, 2011 at a minimum. Note: The amount of page views received is not a fixed amount, but is dependent on the number of qualified donations and thus the number of books in rotation.

Cheers,
Mario Lurig
Creator, NovelRank.com

Amazon UK Kindle Book Tracking Improved

Amazon.co.uk The last week with Amazon Kindle Edition books has been… interesting.
First and foremost, many books were placed on Amazon’s Kindle Store by publishers through MobiPocket instead of the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP, formerly Digital Text Platform or DTP). Amazon has migrated these books to KDP, and in the process, those books were issued a new ASIN number, the unique number assigned to all products on Amazon.

What does this mean for you, the author? Your book may need to be added to tracking again using the new ASIN just as you did in the past. It is a mess created by Amazon not using the same ASIN, but alas, we move on.

Now for the good news!

For a while, some Kindle books that were not added to the Kindle Store through Amazon’s KDP suffered a penalty when it came to tracking: They were not accessible through the Amazon API, which is what allows NovelRank, SalesRankExpress, and other websites from accessing information about the book, including sales rank. For every other website, this is the end of the story. However, a few months ago I added code to NovelRank that worked around this limitation with Amazon.com and tracked the book’s sales rank anyway.

Well, that new code was added before Kindle books were added to Amazon.co.uk, and thus it only supported Amazon.com. Today, that is no longer the case. You can now track these Amazon.co.uk books on NovelRank. Be advised, this is about 5% as efficient a process as using Amazon’s API, but I feel it is a good idea that NovelRank continues to offer solutions for authors where other websites and publishers cannot provide the information. That’s why it exists after all.

Book Sales RSS Feed and CSV Download on User Pages


NovelRank User Pages now have two new features: RSS Feeds for book sales and CSV/Excel download of monthly sales estimates!
These are both long requested features, so they are now available on the left side. If you don’t have a user page yet, create your own user page by logging in through your favorite 3rd party website. You will be prompted to setup your user page if this is your first time logging in through that service.

Both new features will include every book present on your user page in a single download/RSS. In both cases, the download is for the currently viewed Amazon domain (.com, .co.uk, .de, etc). Switching the domain will switch the links for the download/RSS to the new domain automatically. The RSS feed has one additional new benefit: Timezone aware! That’s right: Sale times are now adjusted for your account’s timezone, and the timezone is specified within the RSS feed. My little thank you to all the folks in Germany and the UK who use NovelRank!

Remember, if you are using a modern browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, you can also access the RSS feed from the URL/Address bar. Of course, you can also subscribe to the blog this way… The below image is from Firefox.

Enjoy the new features, and I hope your 2011 is starting off with lots of sales!

Book Sales Analysis Added to Book Details Page

I’ve slowly added a new feature to the book details page: analysis (circled in red).

As seen in the example above, the book analysis includes three items:

  • Best day of the week for sales to occur
  • Best hour of the day (or best 2 hours in case of a tie) for sales to occur
  • Breakdown of sales frequency

The first two items (marked with two red arrows) take into account two additional timezone aware facts: Sales occur 3 hours prior to the change in sales rank and the sale time should be adjusted for worldwide domain timezones, including GMT (United Kingdom), CET (Germany and France), and JST (Japan). Thus, you get a true indication, worldwide, of when your book is most popular in regards to days of the week and hours of the day.

The last item is a basic graphical example of sales frequency: How soon after the last sale does the next sale occur. This is represented with different symbols, described in the Key in the bottom-right (highlighted in yellow).

The analysis tab is the result of 4 hours I spent trying to aggregate this information across books that sell at different levels of frequency and develop some deeper sales analysis that takes the full breadth of books on NovelRank and provides some insight. Unfortunately, the results were not significant. Thus, the new tab was born to provide you information about individual books. In other words, I turned lemons into lemonade.

Note: Amazon.com sales are based on PST, so there is a small 2 hour margin of error in the ‘best X’ estimates.