Check the Amazon Sales Rank of your book and competing books

Here's a nifty tool you should bookmark:

Aaron Shepard has upgraded his Amazon sales rank checker, Sales Rank Express (formerly called Sales Rank Multichecker). The strength of this tool -- compared to others like TitleZ, Charteous, RankForest, RankTracer, Books & Writers or the now-defunct JungleScan -- is its ability to poll Amazon's Canadian, U.K., French, German, and Japanese sites. Also, it looks up books "paired" with yours, the same list Amazon shows under the heading "Customers who bought this item also bought ..."

Here's Aaron's description of the new Sales Rank Express:

"It's now several times as powerful, with a lot more information presented, and a lot more convenience in looking for it. Here's a list of some of the info available for each book (with up to 10 books displayed per page).

• Sales rank
• Customer rating
• Number of reviews
• Date of last review
• Basic metadata, as it appears on Amazon
• List and sale prices
• Amazon discount
• Copies in stock
• Availability
• Summary of offers
• Top pairing
• Other formats

You can search by author, publisher, title words, ISBN (10-digit or 13-digit), or any combination of the four. Within the results, you can then automatically look up the same info for all formats of a title (paperback, hardcover, etc.), or for the book's top ten pairings (the competing and complementary titles used for Also Bought lists, exit offers, etc.). Searches for pairings can be chained, so you can check each book on your Also Bought list to see if you're on that book's list too!

Sales Rank Express has separate forms for each of Amazon's countries -- U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, and Japan -- so it's easy to check your books on sites even where you don't know the language. There's even a "Fix Data" button for each book in each country, to bring you right to Amazon's correction form.

The site includes full documentation that not only describes how to use Sales Rank Express but also describes much of the significance of the data and how it relates to the inner workings of Amazon. For instance, you'll learn that the figure Amazon reports for copies in stock can often be used to view sales almost in real time. You'll also learn that this figure does not always equal the number of copies in Amazon's own warehouses! (This figure, by the way, is not currently available on Amazon itself or anywhere else but Sales Rank Express.)

And it's all still free.

Try it and let me know what you think!"