Anybody who has written any materials that’s revealed has little doubt suffered from the identical angst and frustration at how lengthy it takes to get suggestions in your treasured murals. I recall the primary time I wrote a complete e book myself (up ’til that stage I had primarily contributed chapters to different peoples’ works) – I spent a lot of the first week after publication refreshing the e book web page on Amazon to see if there have been any new evaluations or if the gross sales rank had improved.
Doing this quickly turned fairly tedious and whereas I used to be nonetheless wanting to learn the way my e book was doing, I simply could not waste increasingly more time trying on the similar web page again and again and over. What made it worse is that whereas it was at all times good to see the gross sales rank drop to the low 1000’s or excessive a whole bunch from time to time, I could not actually inform the way it was doing… probably not!
Trying round on the Web was a bit disheartening as a result of it appeared that lots of people are of the opinion that the Amazon Sale Offers would not inform you something and that I had been losing my time. This struck me as odd as a result of it appeared that Amazon had put lots of eff ort into constructing the Gross sales Rank Facility – certainly they weren’t sucking thumb on the numbers?
In time for my subsequent e book’s launch I stumbled throughout RankTracer.com (www.ranktracer.com), and was shocked to see that they really present gross sales estimates in addition to monitoring your gross sales rank. I’ve been monitoring all my books in addition to a number of others utilizing this service ever since, and as a substitute of checking on Amazon I get RankTracer to e mail me notifications of evaluations or when my Gross sales rank drops beneath or above a sure level.
What’s extra, I get them to ship me a PDF report of all of the titles I’m monitoring each week and each month, which is helpful as a result of I’ve lastly gotten too lazy to even go to the Web to test how my books are doing (now that I not must). As you will see they’ve all of the gross sales rank stats, weekly or month-to-month gross sales totals, in addition to graphs and product overview info.
What I discover actually fascinating is the best way through which the positioning is constructed to permit you to make comparisons and distinction the data you document. They’ve what they name a WorkStation, which is a single net web page that makes use of AJAX to current a pleasant and intuitive interface for interacting together with your Gross sales Rank data – there are lots of choices that permit you to view and group your info in a wide range of other ways.
For instance, I needed to see how the brand new Richard Dawkins e book, The God Delusion, was promoting compared with my very own titles (Not that I might anticipate my gross sales to compete in any means, however simply to see the distinction in gross sales volumes). Utilizing RankTracer’s graph constructing interface, I drew this up for every week’s interval utilizing the Three-D graph choice (they’ve a number of several types of graphical illustration of your knowledge):
The God Delusion is the hint in entrance (in yellow), with my gross sales rank graph in blue.
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Okay, so the precise picture will not be too clear right here, however hopefully you can also make out the truth that my e book is significantly lagging behind Mr Dawkins’. Discover that his graph virtually seems flat as a result of his rating has averaged at 19 for the previous week, whereas mine averaged about 19 000. Trying on the backside of the graph you must also be capable to see the gross sales estimates given for every title. On this case, the God Delusion offered about 510 copies throughout that week, however my e book solely offered 31.
I’ve been monitoring my e book so much longer so to present you an instance of a unique means of trying on the collected knowledge, I took a snapshot of my gross sales rank graph over the past month utilizing a variety format grouped every day (as a substitute of hourly because the graph above exhibits):
My gross sales rank vary grouped by day over the past month
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From this you possibly can see that gross sales picked up for a number of days in early January after a little bit of a slowdown in December – every bar signifies the vary between one of the best and worst rating for that day. As at all times, the RankTracer Gross sales Estimation Engine gives an estimate for that month’s gross sales – on this case it provides an excellent 130 copies offered at a mean rank of about 20 000.
Aside from monitoring the Amazon Gross sales Rank in your personal e book I discover it fairly good to trace a bunch of my rivals’ titles to see how effectively I am doing within the context of my little area of interest. Its fairly helpful understanding precisely how everybody else is doing as a result of I discover it helps me decide the place I obtained issues proper and the place I went flawed.
Most of all, as a result of the gross sales rank info is collected on an hourly foundation I can inform in near-real time the influence of any promoting or articles that I or my writer have launched. It is unbelievable to see the dips in rankings as articles or evaluations are posted to numerous Web sites – one time my e book obtained a fantastic overview on Slashdot and RankTracer recorded an enchancment in gross sales for about Three weeks after this.
It is gotten to the stage the place my writer usually asks me how my e book is doing as a result of it is simpler for me to search out out than for him to go search their information. Ultimately, I suppose all publishers should get up and begin offering this service to their authors, however for now I’m blissful receiving my weekly updates to maintain me up to the mark with the goings on on this planet of Amazon – I am going to depart the aggressive evaluation for the entrepreneurs, publishers and advertisers.