Category Archives: News

New PRO Features: Reviews and Charts

I’m happy to announce the features for NovelRank Pro are growing! Most importantly, Pro users will now see the number of reviews for their books (total) for each domain, right on the book’s detail page. This is checked nightly to see if new ones have appeared. The process uses Amazon’s API, but is resource intensive, thus it is restricted to PRO accounts only (it could not be supported site-wide due to changes by Amazon 18 months ago).

The second feature is minor, but while non-Pro books will default to Sales and Last 30 days as options in the chart, Pro users will have their last used options saved (via browser cookie) so they can easily use them across any of their books (e.g. SalesRank and Today). It saves a few clicks and thus your time, which is one of the core tenets of NovelRank Pro.

So if you’ve been holding back, now is a great time to get NovelRank Pro!

UPDATE 2013-04-05 03:01:00
The review count now shows in BOLD RED if it has changed since the last time you viewed that book’s detail page. Once viewed it ‘resets’ to normal after an hour. This should help you identify if it has changed so you don’t need to remember all your review counts.

State of the Server 2013: New hardware, better performance

Things have been a little rough over the last 2 weeks…

After a lot of planning, plotting, and back-and-forth with my web host, Dreamhost, I decided that NovelRank’s traffic and requests required an upgrade beyond the ~$100 Virtual Private Server (VPS) setup. My goal with this service is always to try and deliver webpages in about 2 seconds. Sure, charts, CSV files, and other heavy data requests may take a little longer, but the hope is that 99% of all the traffic on the site is served very quickly. Thus, the decision to move to a dedicated server (think a computer just for you).
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NovelRank Web App Now in Free Preview

The NovelRank Web App is now available in a free preview for all users. While it is fully functional in a PC’s browser, it is designed for mobile smartphones and tablets. All you need is the username from your user account to get going.

As mentioned previously, this is a free preview of the app. Soon it will only be available to users who are part of NovelRank Pro, an upcoming value-add service that provides improvements to NovelRank that give your books priority as well as save you time and effort to get the data you want, all in a single annual fee for your entire user account. Until that is released, the web-app will stay free for everyone to use.

Let me know what you think of the app in the comments below!

NovelRank Extensions for Firefox and Chrome Browsers

Thanks to a user request by Ryan W. I am happy to announce a very simple extension for the Firefox and the Chrome web browsers. It’s not a robust extension, but it will allow you to quickly access NovelRank from Amazon (and if the book is not yet tracked, add it for tracking quickly). Here is what the extension does on Amazon’s website:

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