Category Archives: News

Amazon Book Sales RSS Feed Improvements

Thanks to feedback from a NovelRank user, RSS feeds for individual books has been improved, especially for Firefox users! Now, when you go to a book’s details page such as the book Body Rolling, you will now notice that in the toolbar at the top is the famous RSS subscribe icon letting you know that there are RSS feeds available on this page! These are the same RSS Feeds that are available under the RSS feeds tab, including Amazon book sales.

Furthermore, if you go directly to one of these feeds, Firefox will automatically understand that this is an RSS feed and offer to add it as a Live Bookmark for you!

So now it is even easier to get your Amazon book sales or sales rank feeds in RSS form. Thanks to Stephanie Golden for bringing this to my attention!

Amazon Sales Rank of 7600 books!

Girl Reading Antique Book In less than 9 months, NovelRank has grown to track the Amazon sales rank of over 7600 books! This is only counting Amazon.com, as the Amazon.de and Amazon.co.uk sales rank numbers have steadily grown for region specific publications, German and British, respectively. I’ve compared these numbers with the statistics of a few other tracking sites and this is 4x’s the number of books than other free sites and more books being tracked than free and paid sites with 5 years of history!

I’m flattered and thrilled that NovelRank is tracking the Amazon sales rank of so many books across the world, and hope new features and continued improvements will add even more books to the list! Thanks for your continued patronage of NovelRank and sharing it with your readers and fellow authors. Without your help, others would not find and enjoy the benefits of tracking their sales rank!

Update: July 4, 2010
While developing new features, I got a count of all the unique books actively tracked on NovelRank across all Amazon domains (.de, .co.uk, etc.) and it is 8997 books!

Book Sales Numbers (Kindle) and Other Improvements

A quick update for those not following NovelRank on Twitter or Facebook (where I toss out real-time information about updates to the site):

The new book sales number estimates for Kindle Edition books were applied retroactively, adjusting the sales for all Kindle books tracked since the beginning. In most cases, this saw an increase in sales, but in a few cases, there was a decrease. This was based on the new more accurate formula.
Some tweaks to properly displaying non-US characters were put in place. There are still some imperfections, but this affected the User Pages as well as book Details pages.
Book Sales Numbers displayed in charts on the book Details pages are now using a 3d column bar chart. You can left-click on the chart and rotate it along the x an y axis now as well. This should give the graphs a little more ‘punch’. Previously, they were flat columns.

Once last announcement… well, preemptively. I intend to do a few more tweaks in June to NovelRank before I work on new features. However, the goal is to replicate NovelRank two more times to serve the DVD and music communities. Much like NovelRank focuses on tracking books, there will be two new sites, one tracking Sales Rank for DVDs and one for music. Stay tuned for announcements when they go online, as a few people have asked if NovelRank could track DVDs (the answer is still no, but there will be a place to do that soon, with all the same power).

Cheers,
Mario, Creator of NovelRank, a community supported website

Biking 150 Miles to Support Multiple Sclerosis Research

MS generally strikes in the prime of life—ages 20-50, and 73% of those diagnosed are women. 9,500+ in Colorado are living with MS.

Last year I rode in Colorado’s BikeMS ride and raised a measly $400 for the event. I even wrote a full story of my BikeMS personal experience to share with others. This year, I want to ride faster, better, and raise a ton more money. See, I’ve spoken about supporting authors, supporting NovelRank, and recent troubles with Amazon. With all that, I still try and give back in my community and my world.

This year, I am extending my reach. If you know someone who has or had Multiple Sclerosis, and you believe in supporting research that could stop the daily needle pricks given by caregivers and provide air conditioning units that help sufferers keep their symptoms in check, then consider supporting my ride. I’m biking 150 miles over two days, and if I can, I’ll make it 175 total miles (100 miles on the second day). I try not to ask too much from NovelRank visitors that isn’t directly related to supporting NovelRank or providing a new free service, but in this case, I thought it was worth your attention. Thanks for reading and supporting Multiple Sclerosis research.