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

Enterprise Sales Rank Tracking SoftwareToday 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.