Tag Archives: reviews

New PRO Features: Reviews and Charts

I’m happy to announce the features for NovelRank Pro are growing! Most importantly, Pro users will now see the number of reviews for their books (total) for each domain, right on the book’s detail page. This is checked nightly to see if new ones have appeared. The process uses Amazon’s API, but is resource intensive, thus it is restricted to PRO accounts only (it could not be supported site-wide due to changes by Amazon 18 months ago).

The second feature is minor, but while non-Pro books will default to Sales and Last 30 days as options in the chart, Pro users will have their last used options saved (via browser cookie) so they can easily use them across any of their books (e.g. SalesRank and Today). It saves a few clicks and thus your time, which is one of the core tenets of NovelRank Pro.

So if you’ve been holding back, now is a great time to get NovelRank Pro!

UPDATE 2013-04-05 03:01:00
The review count now shows in BOLD RED if it has changed since the last time you viewed that book’s detail page. Once viewed it ‘resets’ to normal after an hour. This should help you identify if it has changed so you don’t need to remember all your review counts.

Amazon Reviews Changing on November 8th

A recent email from Amazon stated that they will no longer provide all the details about reviews, such as the total number of reviews which NovelRank uses to give you a quick indication about the books that you are tracking. Instead, they will only provide a URL that displays all the review content in a box within a webpage. This begins on November 8th, 2010.

Therefore, on November 8th, I will remove the ‘review’ count from being displayed on NovelRank and change the ‘reviews’ link on a book’s details page to load this special URL within NovelRank. Sorry folks, not much that can be done here. More information can be found (for the technically minded) in Amazon’s API documentation.

Amazon Book Review Count Now Available

A new feature has been added to NovelRank: Review Count. Now, NovelRank has always actually stored this information, but unlike Sales Rank which is updated hourly, NovelRank never had a system in place to update the total number of reviews for each book. That… is history.

The system will now check, approximately once per month, for 2 things:

A change in Review Count
A missing or new book image

NovelRank will then update automatically with the new information about the book image or review count and update the book’s info, available on the book details page as well as the User Pages. Please be patient; At current levels, it will take approximately 23 days before every book has been checked at least once! Thanks to user feedback, this was a top requested feature, so I hope this is a step in the right direction (feedback welcome in the comments below).

The next step is to use this new, efficient code to rewrite the Sales Rank checking script to improve its performance, with the goal being to complete it by the end of July as well as launch the sister DVD and Music sites. Stay tuned to the blog for an important post soon.

Update July 7, 2010
I’ve pushed through the script to complete checking every book at least once so it was done in 3 days instead of 23 days. I’ve also increased the speed so that currently it is around 19 days between checks. Thus, all review counts should now be up-to-date. If not, be patient… it will be in less than a month.