Category Archives: News

NovelRank Launches Sales Rank Tracking

NovelRank and its creator are proud to announce the official launch of NovelRank, a free website for Amazon sales rank tracking. NovelRank offers authors the opportunity to get real-time feedback about their promotion efforts towards book sales on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca (Canada), and Amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom). While direct sales through author’s websites and self-publishing websites such as Lulu, CreateSpace, BookSurge, Lightning Source, AuthorHouse, and others offer immediate sales data, book sales data through distribution sources such as Amazon is typically delayed many months.

Many readers purchase through Amazon.com, the leading online bookseller, after seeing coverage in the media, on the web, and on social networking websites, leading to increased book sales for the author. Without real-time sales rank tracking through NovelRank, authors are left guessing if there was a positive effect from the book’s coverage, not knowing where to spend their time and resources in the continued promotion of their paperback, hardcover, or audio book. NovelRank takes it a step farther by offering estimated sales data based on changes in Amazon sales rank.

As a completely free to use and ad-free website, NovelRank provides a risk-free option for authors publishing their first, second, or seventh book. Authors with large publishing agencies promoting their books also find the tool useful, since royalty information and sales information is typically delayed or unavailable from their publisher. There are no required logins or accounts, and a full suite of useful methods for sales rank tracking through the use of RSS feeds, spreadsheet downloads, sales rank widget, and direct website access.

Created by an author, for authors, NovelRank‘s goals are to provide the best resource on the web for authors wanting to turn their passion into profits through sales rank tracking and estimated book sales data. A full list of current and future features are available on the NovelRank website.

Get started today by tracking your book!

Launch… Sort of

NovelRank has been over 140 hours of my time over the last 3 months, and as of last weekend, it has been soft launched to the public with the addition of the TRACK page: The ability to add a book to NovelRank for tracking of your book’s Amazon Sales Rank. You do have to know your Amazon link (or ASIN), but it does the rest from there, automatically adding the book (if it is available and reporting a Sales Rank) for Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.ca. It even has custom error generation and of course logging so I can track down any obscure problems (like the valid book format of ‘Imitation Leather’).

Now, this isn’t a search on Amazon, so it can’t find your book for you, then allow you to add it. I don’t expect that will be difficult to create (I know it won’t), but it hasn’t been written yet. That addition will happen before the end of the year, but the more critical ability (adding the book itself) took precedent. Secondarily, Amazon.ca tracking has been disabled until a rewrite of the code that connects to Amazon’s Product Advertising API and gets the Sales Rank data. I hope to accomplish that this weekend and start tracking Amazon.ca again.

Finally, while the Sales estimator has been doing some great work for books with a Sales Rank above 1000, it severely underestimates books that dip below this threshold. With some feedback from Peter Seibel, author of the very popular “Coders At Work“, I look to be improving this accuracy in the near future (maybe this weekend, we’ll see). Secondarily, much of the logic was built around Amazon.com results. Turns out that the less popular .co.uk and .ca can sometimes overestimate sales by 1 book. Luckily, that’s a quick fix and will be rectified along with the other improvements. So if your book is selling like hotcakes: 1) Be happy, you’re doing a lot better than most of us, 2) The numbers will be better soon.

Once the above two items (Sales and Amazon.ca Sales Rank) are resolved, this first edition of NovelRank will be officially launched. It’s okay, you can tell your friends on Facebook or Twitter, I don’t mind. :)

Amazon Product Advertising API and Kindle Edition Books

Update: January 23, 2010 8:00am MDT
NovelRank now offers Kindle book tracking again! http://www.novelrank.com/blog/tracking-kindle-sales-rank-book-tracker-available/

– – – – –

As of 11pm EDT on August 13th, 2009, some problems have been creeping up in the interactions with the Amazon API. NovelRank uses the API to gather Sales Rank data about paperbacks, hardcovers, and kindle edition books. First the problem was 1 book (the first one ever added), then an hour later 2… 24 hours later, all Kindle Edition books tracked by NovelRank are not returning any SalesRank numbers.

There is an erroneous error being returned by Amazon:
AWS.ECommerceService.ItemNotAccessible

Originally I suspected a bug, but as the day has moved on, it looks like a deliberate move by Amazon to no longer make Kindle book information (SalesRank specifically) available. I’ve posted in their forums and will continue to try and get some word from Amazon on the status. It would be unfortunate if this was blocked, since many authors don’t have direct access to the sales numbers provided by Amazon for Kindle books unless they are self-published and added it themselves rather than their publisher.

Hopefully more info will come soon. Till then, current Sales Rank for Kindle Edition books will be shown as 0. I’ll keep trying; let’s hope it works out for the better.

Update: August 19, 2009 2:16pm MDT
It seems Kindle Edition books are also not being returned via the API ‘ItemLookup’ either. Kindle Edition books are being completely blocked. Tested with an ASIN based ItemLookup. No response or word from Amazon on the forums at all.

Update: September 30, 2009 7:29pm MDT
Aaron Shepard over at SalesRankExpress has called it quits on Amazon Kindle books through the API, and has proposed a theory as to why on on his blogin the Sept. 20th post. He’s also updated it with the same update I’m about to give: Amazon, without explanation, has confirmed this to be permanent. For now, Kindle Edition books will no longer be added to NovelRank and hopefully in the next few months, I’ll write all new code to add Kindle Edition books as well as scrape Amazon.com for SalesRank. This will take a notable amount of work, so it will be pushed off till the future. Sorry folks, this is frustrating for me as well as an author of a paperback and Kindle book.

Sales Rank Tracking Widget Created!

It’s the little things… There is now a widget for pulling in your current Amazon.com Sales Rank from NovelRank. This allows the viewers of your book blog (that you of course have to promote your book) to quickly track your sales rank and see how your book is performing! On each of the detail pages for books you’ll find the snippet, but here is a basic example of one:

 src="http://www.novelrank.com/embed.php?asin=143571590X"
type="text/javascript" >>
>
 href='http://www.novelrank.com/asin/0470325070'>Amazon Sales Rank>
by NovelRank>

You’ll notice inside the src tag in the beginning it ends with the ASIN number for the book (which is also used for the details page):
http://www.novelrank.com/asin/143571590X

Just change that code for your books ASIN and it will now pull down the results for that book! There is also a currently secret flag you can add to disable all the default styling (for those who want to apply their own CSS to the embedded code). After the ASIN code and before the double quotation mark, add the following:

&styles=false

Thus the new link under the src tag would be:

http://www.novelrank.com/embed.php?asin=143571590X&styles=false

Here is the HTML that was dynamically created by the widget and is written to your page when you use the above code:

 id="novelrank">
 class="nr_title">Amazon Sales Rank:>
 class="nr_salesrank">833,704>
 style="display: block !important; visibility: visible !important;" class="nr_tag"> href="http://www.novelrank.com/">Sales Rank> by NovelRank.com>
>

Update: September 22, 2009

You can now specify the domain you wish to use! Just like the &styles=false example above, you can append the following:

&domain=uk

&domain=ca

The default (if nothing is specified) is Amazon.com, but using the above values you can now have a widget for each domain NovelRank tracks!

Update: October 31, 2009

Three more domains now available:

&domain=fr

&domain=de

&domain=jp

Update October 5, 2010

Sample code of an embed using the UK domain addition:

 src="http://www.novelrank.com/embed.php?asin=143571590X&domain=uk"
type="text/javascript" >>
>
 href='http://www.novelrank.com/asin/0470325070'>Amazon Sales Rank>
by NovelRank>