Free tools for tracking Amazon Sales Rank

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.