Researching the book market with TitleZ

One of the handiest free tools for book publishers is TitleZ.com, which provides charts of the Amazon Sales Rank for any book.

Once you've set up your free account, TitleZ allows you to instantly retrieve historic and current sales rankings from Amazon and create printable reports with 7-day, 30-day, 90-day, and lifetime averages. This allows you to see how book topic areas or individual titles perform over time relative to others.

TitleZ's charts resemble a stock chart -- except that unlike stock prices, lower is better for Amazon Sales Rank. If you get all the way down to No. 1, you're at the top of the heap.

TitleZ is a handy tool for evaluating book topic ideas since it allow you to gauge the potential audience for a given topic or title. You can easily assemble a list of books along with a specific topic with their historical sales rankings and descriptions. This will provide a quick indication of whether other books on the topic have succeeded or failed, or if the market is saturated.

There are other ways of comparing competitive titles, but TitleZ provides a detailed list faster than the research would take using Amazon or other book sales tracking programs alone. TitleZ also provides pricing information on competitive titles, helping you determine the right price for you book.

You can also track your book's performance over time to assess the effect of promotional efforts and marketing programs.