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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Improved Site Speed and Web Crawler Management
Quick Summary: The website is running 20% faster across all pages (<2 seconds load time), especially book details pages. This was accomplished by prioritizing page load speed and fresh information for real visitors, rather than everyone (which included a LOT of web crawlers and bots).
Hey everyone, it’s been a while since we have talked on this blog so I wanted to give you an update of the work that has occurred over the past few weeks. While nobody has complained (since the site was still loading pages in less than 3 seconds), I still realized there was room for efficiency in the code that runs NovelRank. Why? Because at any given second there are 40-50 real people accessing the site, while many multiples of that number of pages are being accessed by robots: web crawlers, bots, rss readers, widgets, etc. That’s a lot of information to process, and while NovelRank’s servers (~$100/month in costs) have been up to the task, their load was starting to getting high.
So I went to work identifying the sources of the database server overload and came up with this list (highest to lowest):
- Charting requests, especially for long-term data (more than 30 days)
- Detail stats for salesrank: minimum, maximum, average, etc (refreshed automatically every 30 days)
- CSV exports by bad bots who do not obey NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW
- Activity tracking for individual books (how I can tell someone is still looking at it)
KDP Select Borrowed Books Effect Sales Rank
I get a lot of questions regarding what effects sales rank (now also known as best sellers ranking). I’ve done some testing on the matter to clear up some common sales rank myths, but I didn’t yet have an answer regarding the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program.
What is the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library?
The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a collection of books that Amazon Prime members who own a kindle can borrow once a month, with no due dates.
Today I can confirm that books borrowed through this program do effect sales rank just like a normal purchase. Oh, you want proof? Here you go:
I don’t understand, why?
Simply put, a borrowed book gets a portion of the monetary pool, and since it generates revenue for the individual or organization who published the item through KDP, it is considered a sale for the purposes for adjusting sales rank positively. Remember, sales rank is a measure of sales activity of all sorts, so consider this information when you are exploring royalty info (KDP Select payments may be dramatically higher or lower than your sales price).
System Tweaks: Abuse Prevention
Recently there has been a large amount of requests on the system that are either by an automated system or one or two overzealous individuals. Specifically involving requests for charts and exports (CSV) of information. After a few days of research and data collection, an automated system has been created to help ensure that this does not become a detriment for all NovelRank users.
Here’s the info you need to know.
If the database is currently overloaded by too many requests or is working very hard on a current requests (in regards to time), you may receive an error page when attempting to export CSV data. Simply retry your request a few seconds later (in most cases). In the case of charts, a message will be displayed in the chart area notifying of the server overload.
All of these abuses are NOT from user accounts, but individual book pages (details page). Thus, I’ve only implemented these methods to address the problem areas. I reserve the right to, in the future, implement the same measures for user comparison charts and user CSV exports.
I hope this results in a continued fast NovelRank experience for everyone.
Image courtesy of RowdyKittens on Flickr