It’s all too tempting to be hypnotized by the ups and downs of your book’s Amazon Sales Rank. Fortunately, indulging in this pastime no longer requires you to reload your Web browser each time you want to check your rank—several free services allow you to monitor sales ranks of your books and other titles.
Just a few days ago I mentioned TitleZ, a nifty Web site that allows you to chart the Amazon Sales Rank of any book over time. And it seems not a month goes by without some new innovation employing Amazon rankings.
Author Aaron Shepard has his Sales Rank Express tool, which allows you to quickly check all your ranks on Amazon.com and the company’s international sites.
RankForest.com is another service that allows you to chart your Amazon Sales Rank by drawing a line graph similar to a stock chart. You can add books to a “collection” for quick reference, and leave comments on books. Many of the site’s features are free.
TicTap.com also allows you to track Amazon sales ranks over time on a bar graph and compare purchase prices from different retailers.
And here’s another neat site for tracking the Amazon Sales Rank of any book: Charteo.us. This one has some unique features, like the ability to compare the ranks of two or more books within the same chart.
Amazon ranks each book based on how often it sells relative to every other book in its catalog of some 3.5 million titles. The rank of the topselling book is 1, and the rank of the slowest seller is higher than 3,500,000. Books for which Amazon hasn’t recorded a sale have a sales rank of “None.”
A book’s Amazon Sales Rank appears in the “Product Details” section of its detail page on Amazon, which you can locate by searching for the book’s ISBN. Sales ranks are recalculated hourly, and can rise or fall by many thousands of places per day.
Books ranked in the top 10,000 are generally considered commercially successful books.
Since Amazon has an estimated 70-percent market share among Internet book retailers, its sales rankings are the best free publicly available information about the relative sales performance of individual titles. The rankings include new and used books sold by third-party sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace platform.
Amazon doesn’t publicly discuss its sales figures for individual titles, so it’s impossible to exactly correlate the quantity of sales with Amazon’s rankings. However, based on anecdotal reports from various publishers, you can assume that an Amazon sales rank of 5,000 translates into about 15 to 20 sales per day, depending on seasonal factors.
Here’s more background on Amazon Sales Ranks.
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6 Comments
for other people's take on amazon sales rank,google amazon sales rank. Also, there's a fascinating book called the long tail (author's blog comes up on the above search)which has a chapter on amazon & how the rankings compare to sales. (steve, if this posting of other sites is a nono, feel free to flag)
I created a standalone tool to track sales ranks on the iPhone and iPod Touch called Ranktouch for anyone wanting an easy way to follow trends.
thanks Steve; but note that titlez is not working right now; not sure how Aaron Shepard's service is more helpful than just looking on Amazon as it has no history, RankForest looks good feature wise, but when tried was just simple daily sales rank. Ditto for others. So right now we seem to be without an effective tool for checking sales rank history.
Best,
Marshall G
Amazon is making it a lot more complicated for these sites to use their data. Not sure if this is the problem with Titlez. I understand Sales Rank Express will be able to continue.
Great list of tools Steve!
Also check out the recently released Metric Junkie and track up to 10 books simultaneously for free!
Features include: Stunning graphs and hourly updates. Did I mention it is totally free!
Site: metricjunkie.com
Hey Steve,
Wanted to introduce you to another option: NovelRank. Completely free, without the 'beta' moniker, and also without the ads. Tracking .com, .ca, and .co.uk (though I can add .de, .fr, and .co.jp in about 2 seconds).
Hopefully another (and best) site to add to your list! Love to hear your feedback.
Cheers.