Category Archives: News

Amazon Paperback Sales Rank in December

Noticed by myself as well as Aaron Shepard from SalesRankExpress, starting around December 7th Amazon (at least on Amazon.com) has only rarely adjusted sales rank to reflect actual sales for paperback books. This also includes assigning sales rank to books who have their first sale. From personal experience, there was a 48 hour delay (usually 3 hours) to get a new sales rank assigned to a paperback book after it’s first sale.

I put out a complaint post on the facebook wall and a few others seemed to share the sentiment, so I think this is universal. My only guess is that since December is so busy for not only Amazon’s primary business of selling products, but also for all of the cloud services they run, they decided that they would relegate sales rank adjustments to the back of the line as far as computing resources.

What does this mean for you?
It means that during December, the accuracy of NovelRank for paperbacks is going to be severely limited. Let’s hope that my assumptions are right, and that in January, everything will return to normal. It does not seem to be affecting sales rank for Kindle Edition titles, but who knows what will happen as we get closer to Christmas Day.

Enjoy the season!

PS
Maybe this or this short story will make you feel better (girls and guys, respectively).

Kindle Store Now Available in Amazon Spain and Italy

Amazon has just announced that Kindle Edition ebooks will now be available on Amazon.es (Spain) and Amazon.it (Italy), and thus your Kindle Edition books setup through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) will automatically become available on these sites. NovelRank has also been adjusted to now allow tracking for kindle e-books on these new domains as well. It’s not automatic, and still requires you head to the Tracking page to check for new domains (if a sales has occurred), but it is now allowed. Enjoy!

Video Thank You to NovelRank Supporters

When I started running donation drives for NovelRank, PayPal provided me with the mailing address of supporters. I personally mailed a thank you card to every person who donated to support the website. Earlier this year, PayPal stopped providing that info, so I decided to do something new. Here’s a video thank you to everyone who supported NovelRank in the fall 2011 donation drive.

I especially want to thank those who have continuously supported NovelRank over the past 2 years, not just in the last donation drive. Thank you for keeping NovelRank running.

Sales Rank Stats Return and Algorithm Updates

Sales Rank Stats

After many months of being restricted to the last 30-60 days, Sales Rank Stats have returned! Head over to a book’s details page (e.g. Example) and you can click the line titled Sales Rank Stats to show the book’s best, worst, average, and standard deviation in each domain that is being tracked. This information is updated the first time you access the page, and then will automatically update itself every 30 days. Unfortunately, real-time updating was making the page load very slowly, thus the 30 day cache was built. This should return page loading to It make take up to a minute to load the page for the first time!

I’ve turned up the power on the server to hopefully speed things up (it’s at max, which is ~$7/day) while everyone (including search engines) forces the statistics to be calculated. You may see some erratic slowness across the site while this occurs.

Sales Estimate Algorithm

After feedback and testing, I’ve improved the new algorithm to use tighter statistical analysis of sales rank changes. It is also now attempting to estimate for sales occurring when a book holds its rank (e.g. 700 last hour, 705 next hour) without improving. This is only for sales rank < 1000, but is also based upon the statistical median. Translation: It’s smart enough to deal with the differences between each Amazon domain as well as the Kindle or print distinction. Not only is it better than the last system I used, but it learns each day how to get better!

Final Note

These changes conclude the upgrades to NovelRank’s core that officially started on November 1st (but have been planned for months). As usual, I’ll keep an eye on things and make adjustments as necessary, but I think you can consider this NovelRank 2.0!

If you run into any problems like weird errors or broken pages, please let me know by sending an email to admin [at] novelrank {dot} com.