Category Archives: News

Major Update: Sales Estimates and Overall Speed

For the first week of November 2011, I went through the process of migrating 400,000,000 sales rank records into a new database system, in an effort to improve the performance of NovelRank, especially when you requested large amounts of data (e.g. charting). As of today, that migration was completed and NovelRank was updated (I didn’t eat today… it’s been a long day) to use this new system in 95% of requests. I didn’t think there would be as many problems as there were, thus why many of you reported strange changes hour-to-hour in your data. All of that should be resolved and the system mostly stable.

One big change is that as of Nov 1, sales estimates are being processed through a much more accurate (but not perfect) statistically based system for estimating the number of sales that occur per hour. The system still has a weakness for inaccuracy with a sales rank < 500 due to being based on sales rank changes, but it is a lot more accurate for Kindle Edition books, especially those not on Amazon.com. Due to some feedback today however, it seems that for some titles with sales rank < 500, it was still likely to be underestimating (and could be improved). I’ve made a tweak going forward that should increase sales estimates for those popular titles. I’ll continue to monitor the results throughout the month. This new system is constantly learning and reevaluating what constitutes a sale for a particular book/ebook, and it’s accuracy is increasing daily.

Please be aware that your sales estimates MAY HAVE CHANGED TODAY for the month of November as NovelRank was displaying the OLD sales estimates prior to today, while recording both the old and the NEW estimates (which are now being displayed).

There are still some issues with speed when calculating your BEST, WORST, and AVERAGE sales rank causing massive slowdown using the new system. For now, these calculations are still based on the old database structure, and I’ll be working this week to try and solve this problem. The end goal is to keep the speed and performance of NovelRank high and remove the downtime that occurs for a few hours every 2-3 months as well as for 30 minutes every evening at 1pm Pacific Time.

Finally, for those using the iPhone App, 40% of the data provided is from the old system (to keep the performance quick). Later this week you may see the stats change to ‘n/a’ for STD and AVG information as that data will be removed. I’ll be working with the App creator to see if an update is possible after the changes have been made.

Thanks again for using NovelRank, and I hope that it continues to be a useful tool in every authors arsenal.

Update: Nov 9, 2011

Some new fixes and adjustments have been put in place based on feedback. The system is now much tighter with the sales estimation algorithm, as well as it attempts to calculate sales for ‘holding rank’ when books have a sales rank that is better than 1000. As usual, estimates for popular titles will still be underestimated due to limitations of sales rank tracking.

For Publishers: NovelRank Enterprise Edition Sales Rank Software

Today I’m releasing a new piece of software, specifically for publishers and other companies who sell and compare products on Amazon worldwide. The sales rank tracking software is web-based, however you install it on your own servers. That means there are no restrictions to what you track, nobody else can see the information you collect, and it can support up to 20,000 different ASINs (recommended use is 5,000-10,000 products)! More importantly, it’s enterprise level software, which means the experience, information, and technology behind it is more advanced than NovelRank.com.

There is more information on the NovelRank Enterprise Edition main page, including an outline of the features. Even better, there is a live demo of the software that anyone can try out! The database automatically resets twice a week since it is a demo, but it is fully functional. It uses calculations for statistical outliers to estimate sales, focused on not only the specific Amazon domain, but on the specific product category (e.g. Book, eBooks, Toy, Health and Beauty, etc). That means much higher accuracy of sales rank based estimations, including multiple sales in a single hour (from different purchases).

BONUS

The MSRP of the software is $1600, but for the month of November, I’m offering a 10% discount ($1440)! As an added bonus, there is also an referral program. That means that if you know a company that would benefit from the software, and they note you as a the referrer, you earn a 10% referral fee! That means that the company saves $160, and you are given $160! More details about the referral program are available at the bottom of the main NovelRank Enterprise Edition page.

Final Note
This in no way changes NovelRank’s services for authors worldwide and actually is leading to improvements before the end of the year. This software was possible because of everything I learned creating and maintaining NovelRank, and in no way will replace or change it in a negative way. NovelRank.com was built by an author, for authors, and that will never change.

2011 Fall Donation Drive – Featured Books, PDF, and News

Mario Lurig - NovelRank's Creator It happens only twice a year, and the last donation drive was in February, so it’s time for me to invite you to join me. You can support NovelRank’s continued growth and improvements and get cool thank you benefits! Even if the donation is small, you are contributing to keeping this site the most valuable sales rank tracking site on the web today.
Continue reading →

RSS Feeds and Speed

For those not technically minded, here is the quick summary:

The RSS feed feature for NovelRank is used across more than 9000 feeds each day, even for books that are no longer being watched by the person who added them. However, they still require the website resources to provide them. An improvement today will ensure that this invisible resource hog will not slow down NovelRank’s server in the future.

Okay, if you are still with me, here is a more specific rundown. Before User Pages and the User RSS feeds came along, there were separate RSS feeds for every book (ASIN), and for each book there were up to 8 different feeds (sales-1 and rank-7)! People dropped these into their reader or home page, and while I’m sure many still use them, many more have been long since forgotten. However, the computers and servers that check them continue to check for updates, multiple times per hour, even if the book is INACTIVE! You can imagine the load this has on the servers.
Previously, there was a simple cache in place to not ‘refresh’ the content no more than once per hour, just like the rest of NovelRank. However, it still required connecting to the web server (Apache) and activating PHP’s engine. This is resource intensive, to say the least. It took all day today (seriously, I didn’t have breakfast till 1pm), but I’ve worked out a new methodology that should improve this experience. Now, using Apache’s mod_rewrite module, the cache will be served up. If the book is active, then every hour, when there may be new data, it will refresh the cache upon request. If the book is inactive, the cache will only refresh once per day. That removes a hell of a lot of server resource overhead. Finally, I’ve also begun serving a 410 (Gone) server error for RSS feeds on books that are inactive on all domains (sales feed) or for that particular domain (rank feed), to stop the zombie requests from coming in the first place. This also means that if your book is inactive on a particular domain, you will no longer see a rank RSS feed link for that particular domain. This is only for RSS feeds on the book details page (not the user RSS feeds).
I’ll be continuing to monitor the server for other improvements in an effort to continue to serve a fast, responsive web experience for the growing NovelRank audience.

Cheers,
Mario

PS
If you read all of this, I salute you.