Use Novel Rank to track your Amazon sales

Latte Other Software & Development
1

If you’ve got printed books or Kindle books for sale on Amazon, you might want to look into using NovelRank to track their sales at all the Amazon stores around the world. There are details at:

novelrank.com/

I’ve dabbled in using it for about a year, only including a few of my books on its display page. But they just released an iPhone app, and that got me to take the time to set up all my books and to look at it more closely.

It seems quite useful and costs you nothing. The data comes directly from Amazon. You can display all sorts of statistics about sales including a graph of sales over time. If you’re really compulsive, you can set up an RSS feed that has a posting every time one of your books sells. If you were really clever, I guess you could use that to ring a bell at your desk for every sale. Bing, bing, bing…

One thing to keep in mind. Novel Ranks isn’t monitoring data for all the books on Amazon. They only begin to monitor a book’s sales when you ask them to do so. That means they’ll probably not have historical data when you first ask them to begin monitoring. That takes time to accumulate.

Similar sites include:

titlez.com/

And Amazon’s own data for authors, which, if you are registered as an author with them, you can probably reach through:

authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/metrics

The interesting thing is that what Amazon offers is NOT Amazon sales data. It’s BookScan data for brick-and-mortar bookstores displayed geographically. Like me, you can wonder why the sales of one of your books has suddenly taken off in the Memphis area. Enjoy it. I’m told that publishers pay thousands of dollars for what Amazon is offering for free.

If you know of other book sales data sites, feel free to post them here.

–Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

2

I just checked. You can you OS X’s RSS Visualizer to monitor your Amazon sales through Novel Rank. And the plus is that it’s one of the prettier Screen Savers.

To set it up.

  1. Control-click your “Recent Sales” RSS Feed from your Novel Rank User Page and choose Copy Link.

  2. Select System Preferences from the Apple menu on the far left of the menu bar.

  3. Click on the Desktop & Screen Saver icon.

  4. Click on the Screen Saver tab.

  5. Click on the Options button.

  6. Paste your RSS feed into the Feed URL box.

  7. Click done to leave the Options window.

  8. Click on the Test button to see the result.

The Screen Saver preferences also let you set the delay before the Screen Saver starts up.

Enjoy!

–Michael W. Perry, Seattle