I just thought this was really interesting, so I’m sharing it. In an effort to continue to make NovelRank not only an efficient tool, but also allow it to continue to grow, I had to look at some interesting statistics.
Below is a list of Amazon domains that NovelRank tracks, followed by the number of books that are listed EXCLUSIVELY on that domain (for instance, if the book is on Amazon.com AND Amazon.co.uk it is not counted).
- 17824 unique books on Amazon.com
- 3234 unique books on Amazon.de
- 1317 unique books on Amazon.co.uk
- 186 unique books on Amazon.fr
- 74 unique books on Amazon.ca
- 18 unique books on Amazon.co.jp
Now, with Kindle books being exclusive to Amazon.com for so long, and Amazon.com being the biggest of all the domains, the biggest number is no surprise. However, Amazon.de is a fantastic surprise. I’ve known there to be many visitors recently, but this really put the point on it. If you have any feedback about how NovelRank can better serve a German audience, please let me know in the comments below.
Birgit:
FYI, the charts give you the option (drop-down menus above the chart) to look at a specific region’s rank only, rather than all of them. Since France and Japan are less popular and useful, I may provide a way to mark the book inactive for those specific domains, ceasing tracking where it is least helpful.
Another thing I’ve just noticed: Novelrank doesn’t really work well if you sell books from multiple domains. For example, a book of my strongest competitor (dealing with nonfiction here) has sold once or twice in France (in the span of 4 months), and sells daily in Germany. That makes the charts (expecially the Salesrank) unreadable, as well as screws up with the home page (Account management), where the (useless) French sales rank is shown.
Another idea, or just a tiny improvement would be to allow the average sales rank to be resetted or something. Or have any time period longer than a month and shorter than “forever”. I’ve added some books I’ve been totally excited about when they weren’t available yet (meaing sales rank in the millians), and that simply makes the numbers useles..
All the best, and thanks.
I don’t believe Italy and China yet have their API’s active, thus why they are not part of the system as of yet. In 2011 I’ll keep an eye out for new activations!
Amazon Italy (Amazon.it) launched in November so now you have to consider whether you’re going to support it in the NovelRank system. It could be interesting.
I second Birgit’s suggestion of a German time-stamp.
Hi, from Germany, and thank you for providing this service :-). I think that part of your rather strong fanbase here is the fact that we only have very few active author communities, and that spreads the word easily.
The only thing that I can think of is some kind of different time-stamp – for example for GMT or so..
For english (imported) books, the wrong sales rank is displayed. Actually, amazon.de has a own rank within english books (which is always lower than the extracted rank). This has no effect on the usefullness of your tool, but is good to know when comparing to the numbers at amazon.de