Category Archives: News

Amazon.cn (China) Close to Launching Product Advertising API

Amazon.cn — Joyo, the China version of Amazon.com has been live for a while now, and a few months ago Amazon.cn (China) and Amazon.it (Italy) were added to the associates affiliate program. One of the main driving forces for the associates program is the use of Amazon’s product advertising API. This is what enables sites like NovelRank and thousands of others to access data about products listed on a specific Amazon domain.

While nothing has been officially announced, recent functionality has lead me to believe that Amazon.cn will soon have the product advertising API available. A few months ago, it was not responding at all. A few months later, it was not processing requests properly. Now, it seems to be functioning properly on the simplest of requests: an item lookup by ASIN. Until it is announced, I don’t intend to add the domain to NovelRank for book tracking, however I expect this will be available very soon. There will need to be a few steps to integrate the new domain, however the steps are minor and it will part of the NovelRank domain options within a few hours or days of the release of the Amazon.cn API.

What about Amazon.it (Italy)?

Requests against this fledgling API asks you to provide an already established marketplace: France, United Kingdom, or Germany. My guess is that this behaviour means that Amazon is not interested in making the Amazon.it marketplace unique in the near future, and thus the API will be on the back burner.

Can anyone else use this information?

If Aaron over at SalesRankExpress is able to resolve his current issues with Amazon’s API, I expect that as soon as the API is announced, he will be enabling it as an option in his all-inclusive static requests for information about products on Amazon. I expect that few other websites will be as quick to adapt and include the new domain, but if they are multi-domain now, it won’t take much, so this post acts as a heads-up.

Stay tuned for Amazon.cn to be available for tracking sometime in 2011 (guesstimate)!

NovelRank Just Got Faster Worldwide

Running cheetah by bm.iphone (CC: Attribution) Okay, maybe not just, as these changes have been put in place and tested for a week or so prior to this post, but I thought it would be good to let everyone know. NovelRank, including the blog, has had a major speed bump due to a few changes I’ve made to ensure pages load faster, especially for those located outside of the United States. The service costs a few more dollars each month, but I believe it is a worthwhile investment.

The first improvement was to load the larger files (JavaScript, images, stylesheets, etc) via ‘the cloud’. The service in use is Amazon S3 to host the files, and Amazon Cloudfront to distribute the files across the world to servers much closer to users. Previously, these files were loaded slower by loading strictly from my web host. Now, if you are located in Germany for instance, the files are loaded from European servers. The improvement? Loading web pages takes 33%-50% of the time it did previously previously (around 2 seconds now), and 20% for the blog (2.5 seconds).

The second improvement was the storage of the data that is accessed by 95% of the visits to the site. This included the sales rank and sales estimates for books for the current and previous month. Previously, it required looking through almost 100,000,000 database records (over-simplified). Now, it involves, at max, 10,000,000 records. If that seems like it would be 1/10th of the time to access the data, but the improvement is actually much greater. The problem is not linear, so making this improvement (as well as changing the storage method), allowed more concurrent connections and less records to calculate. There was only one downside: Book details displaying average, minimum, and maximum sales rank is calculated from the last 2 months of data, rather than since the beginning of tracking. This change made a notable speed improvement, so I believe it is a valuable trade-off.

Recent chart data will be quick. However, if you pull data for the last 90 days or longer in the chart, it will still take a few seconds longer that recent charts. Finally, this improvement was also put into place for the NovelRank private API, which is the method used to access data by the upcoming iPhone app. When it is released, I’ll have a full write-up on the application. I also hope to have a few new features available for user accounts in the near future, so stay tuned.

Amazon.de Kindle Edition Sales Rank Tracking Now Available

With today’s announcement from Amazon that Kindle Edition e-books will now be available for customers in Germany and worldwide who use Amazon.de, NovelRank has been updated to support this new store! You can now track your Kindle book sales on Amazon.de by going to the book tracking page on NovelRank and adding your URL, just like you did for the print editions. NovelRank’s second largest user base are books in German, published by German authors, and distributed exclusively on Amazon.de. Therefore, this update to NovelRank was made shortly after the announcement.

If NovelRank is already tracking your Kindle Edition book in other domains, just grab the Amazon URL again or the book’s ASIN (highlighted in the example below) and enter it again into the box on the sales rank tracking page, making sure to check the ‘Additional Domains’ box. The system will search whether a sales rank on Amazon.de is present, and add the book if it is available.

http://www.novelrank.com/asin/1234567890

Note: In most cases, your kindle book has not yet sold a copy, so no sales rank is present and NovelRank will not be able to begin tracking. As soon as you have a sales rank (a single sale will do it) on Amazon.de, it can be added to NovelRank using the method above. My personal trick? Buy a copy as a gift for a friend. About 3 hours later, you will have a sales rank and can add it for tracking on NovelRank.

Sales Rank Check Frequency Changes – Growing Pains

Starting today, a new structure has been put in place to ensure the longevity and speed of NovelRank continuing through year two and beyond. This is based on the frequency that NovelRank will check the sales rank for a particular book on a particular domain (.com, .de, .co.uk, etc.). I thought long and hard about this, especially as an author who sells from 1 to 10 books a month in some cases, and I think this will be valuable and fair to everyone.

Here is the breakdown:

  • If a book has been sold in the last 7 days on a specific domain, it will continue to have its salesrank checked hourly.
  • If a book has been sold in the last 14 days (but not the last 7), the checks will occur every 4 hours.
  • If a book has been sold in the last month (but not the last 14 days) on a specific domain, the checks will occur every 8 hours.
  • If a book has not been sold in the last month on a specific domain, the check will occur once per day.

It’s important to note that as soon as a sale is made, the clock is reset and the book goes back to hourly salesrank checks! It is also domain specific, so in the case of some books (see my PHP book for example), it will check .com hourly, but .fr and .ca would be daily, thus it will vary between domains even within the same book, as many books are popular only in specific regions.

But WHY?

Two big reasons:

  • Less frequent checks allow the system overall to be faster at loading pages and data (more improvements coming soon on this)
  • More capacity for NovelRank to support tracking a larger number of books and benefiting more authors going forward. Amazon has limits on the amount of data you can request per second, so there is a raw limit to what NovelRank can provide due to these restrictions by Amazon.

I want NovelRank to always be useful, fast, and benefit as many authors as possible, and this is just the first step in continuing to uphold these goals. This slow down for books that are not actively selling but actively being tracked will be gradual and be in full effect by April 6, 2011.

What about new books?

When a book is first added to NovelRank for salesrank tracking, its last sale date is set to the day the book was added, so it will immediately be treated to hourly sales rank checks for at least the next 7 days (more if it continues to sell books!).

Final Word

When I use the term books here, I am referring to any paperback, comic, hardcover, kindle, etc. format that is tracked on NovelRank. For simplicity I just refer to everything allowed on NovelRank for tracking as books. The FAQ has also been updated to reflect this change. Photo courtesy of digitalmums.