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.