Tag Archives: Germany

NovelRank Feature Upgrades for the End of 2010

Christmas Candles 2010

To wrap up 2010, I’ve made some new improvements to NovelRank, so I thought I should give the community an update. I hope you are having a wonderful holiday break and that your sales, especially for e-books, have been huge after Christmas Day!

Here’s the list:

The facebook ‘like’ and twitter ‘tweet’ buttons have been updated for the book details pages, and when tracking a new book
When a book is reactivated from its inactive status, it will now take 3 times longer before it may become inactive again, to reduce the amount of false positives
Kindle book sales estimates are more accurate when sales rank drops below 6000
Sales estimates updated retroactively for those books affected by the above change **
When a book has more domains added for tracking, user pages that track that book will automatically be updated with the new domain info
More capacity available for tracking Amazon.de books in the future

If you received a new Kindle or Nook this holiday, consider picking up a copy of my newest e-book, 50 Conversation Starters for the Modern Age, for $2.99 and strike up a conversation with a stranger this season! You can even blog about it. :)

Happy New Year!

* Update 1:13pm PST (9:13pm GMT)

The initial round of ‘sales estimate’ updates were skewed very high. The formula has been fixed and reapplied.

* Update 3:18pm PST

Did a bit more tweaking based on feedback, trying to never overestimate. Done for real this time!

Region Specific Books on NovelRank

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.

Germany, France, and Japan Sales Rank Data

Woohoo! NovelRank now supports tracking on Amazon.de (Germany), Amazon.fr (France), and Amazon.co.jp (Japan) to get your sales rank data. It’s opt-in when you submit your book for tracking by checking the ‘Additional domains’ checkbox. Even better, you can simply click on the ‘Additional Domains’ text and it will check the box for you, because who wants to aim their cursor at a tiny box!

I’m a fan of what Aaron Shepard has provided for years at SalesRankExpress.com. It really is the most robust snap-shot of information you can get on any of Amazon’s domains. He’s also very clear that he doesn’t do tracking over time, which is perfectly fine since that’s where NovelRank can step in. Looking around though, nobody was providing sales rank data over time for .de, .fr, and .co.jp. Heck, till NovelRank started doing it, nobody was tracking .ca (Canada) either! Well, it was a small step to enable this within NovelRank, and I’m very happy to announce it’s availability. Whether it is called Sales Rank, Classement parmi les ventes, Verkaufsrang, or ランキング (yup, completely borrowed that idea from Aaron), it’s all available on NovelRank.

Charting has been updated to represent the new domains, but any books that have already been added and want to track their sales data on Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, and Amazon.co.jp, will need to resubmit their book for tracking. Be advised, the default view (nothing expanded) for your book may seem a little cluttered if your book is available at all 6 domains (and has sold at least one book so that a sales rank is present). Here are two visual aids:

Coders at Work - All Domains

Crush It! - English Domains

Of course, with a large screen resolution (many visitors fit in this category), this won’t be an issue, but worth a mention none-the-less. NovelRank aims to be the best resource for authors tracking their sales rank data, and that can only happen with your help. Use the social networking links below to share this with friends, retweet, and post on author forums you engage with. Word of mouth not only helps sell books, but also helps NovelRank keep up with the costs for hosting this website when someone clicks through to Amazon from your book’s page on NovelRank and buys a copy. Thanks in advance and enjoy the new domains!