Amazon Sales Rank Tracker

For several weeks now I've been searching for a way to track and analyze the sales history and progress of my book on Amazon that would be less burdensome than physically clicking through to each listing every day, let alone every hour. I'm not sure exactly what I'm hoping to gain from this, other than a more efficient way to see how my book is doing, and particularly how effective my promotions are.

As it is I've been checking in on Amazon and Barnes & Noble's sales ranks each morning, and when sales are strong, more often than that. But this is tedious and time consuming, and ultimately impractical. For one thing, sales ranks on Amazon are calculated every hour, so that by the time I check each listing in the morning as much as 23 hours might have passed since my rank increased, meaning that my #4 on AmazonUK might well have been higher several hours before. But Amazon doesn't make their sales history public, so you're on your own in tracking it.

From what I've found there seem to be essentially three service-based methods available that have the history-tracking feature I was after. Two of these are fee-based and one is free, although one of the fee-based services provides a basic account for free, albeit with severe restrictions in its functionality.

Of the two pay-based services, RankTracer and RankForest, it's the latter that offers the free account, which tracks a single title on Amazon.com alone, with updates only every four hours, and it's ad-based as well. Fees for upgraded accounts begin at $3/month, but if you want the major features or better you're looking at anywhere from $9-$59/month. However, compared to RankTracer's $6 per title and site this is actually a decent deal. To track the two editions of my book (print and Kindle) on Amazon's six foremost sites would cost $72/month. And while RankForest only gives you Amazon's US & UK sites, they do track book sales at B&N.com, and for the $9/month rate you can track 5 titles.

Compared to these, the free site TitleZ is a fairly scaled-down version, tracking only Amazon.com, but seemingly with no other restrictions on its use. This was apparently intended as the precursor of a fuller version which never appeared, as the title still says BETA and the copyright date in the page footer is 2007. However, it seems to function well enough, with a single caveat which, unfortunately for me, the others have as well - they cannot find the print edition of my book on Amazon.com! They find the Kindle edition readily enough, and RankTracer even finds my print edition on the UK, Canadian, and Japanese Amazon outlets, but not on Amazon.com, rendering all three unusable for me. Why this might be I cannot fathom, since the print edition was listed nearly two months before the Kindle version came out. But such it is, and it seems there isn't anything that I can do about it, since I've used their search functions for title, author, ASIN and even publisher, to no avail.

So my search went on.

Until just yesterday I came across a small publisher's website that offers a downloadable software version that does all this for free (or some of it at least). The company is Paradoxical Press in Redmond, Washington, and the program is called - cleverly enough - the "Amazon Sales Rank Watcher." It does, unfortunately, only track Amazon.com, but since this is the major online outlet for most books, including mine, it covers the data I most need to follow. B&N only updates daily anyway, and though my sales on AmazonUK have been good at times, if sporadic, I'll either have to keep tracking those sales manually, or pay RankTracer to track that site alone. I've never sold a book on any other Amazon outlet, so no point tracking that!

So if you're looking for a way to chart the progress of your novel's life (or any other Amazon product for that matter), this nifty little program will do the job. It updates at any rate you choose, with increments from 1 minute to every four hours, and a fully customizable chart that can be set to display spans ranging from hourly to yearly for as many titles as you want to add. On top of that it has an auto notify icon for your system tray which pops up with a little balloon containing your current stats every time it checks them (at the rate you set). And of course, it charts the sales trajectory from the time you tell it to start tracking until you tell it to stop, giving you a visual history of your novel's life.

One thing it won't do is calculate your average ranking for a given period, which the others do. But this isn't really criticial, since a glance will tell you more or less what you need to know. The exact average number is pretty much irrelevant, unless you plan to use it somehow in your marketing, but peak rankings are what you want to know. Why would anyone care that my book's average rank for December was 429,383? (I'm just making up a likely number there, by the way). What you want to tell them is that it reached #4!

However, the other thing this program won't do is track the rankings of an item's subcategories - it only tracks the overall status in its major category: "books" in this case, for example. So my #4 in Historical Fantasy or #10 in Norse Sagas is still up to me to track. But then, none of the other programs do this either, so if you know of one please let me know.

Already this useful little worker has done me service in informing me this morning that at 3 a.m. last night my Kindle edition broke its record with a rank of #7447, beating its former peak of #8255. And this time, at least, I know for certain that's as high as it went!