With the addition of the new Lending Library program which includes 5 days of free pricing for your kindle book, I thought it was time to write up a quick post to explain how sales rank on Amazon works in regards to free titles.

Amazon displays a separate sales ranking for books that are free compared to their paid sales rank categories (price of at least $0.01). While these are both visible on Amazon directly, the Amazon API that powers the sales rank tracking of every website, including NovelRank, will not report a sales rank for free books. This also means that if your book has a price one day, and then switches to free pricing for even just 1 day, it will no longer offer a sales rank that can be tracked until it becomes a paid title again. Here’s a breakdown of what will happen in terms of NovelRank.

• Books switching to free will become inactive, and will not be able to be reactivated until they become paid again
• Free books will not be available for tracking and will return a message stating that they cannot be tracked because they have no sales rank
• Once a book becomes a paid book and thus is for sale, you can reactivate or track the book on NovelRank

The new Lending Library option to make your book free for 5 days during the 90 day period of exclusivity is phenomenal for promotional purposes, but please be aware that when that free period ends, you will need to reactivate the book for tracking on NovelRank.

I hope that clears up the free and paid sales rank issuess and how they will affect your ability to track sales rank info here on NovelRank.