Track Your Book Sales
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We all need to know how our book sales are doing. There’s not much that tops finding out we’re a bestseller in our category(s), or even better, in the overall Amazon bestseller list.
CHECK YOUR AMAZON PAGE
For those with books listed at Amazon and Kindle you can check right in the book’s sales page. Scroll down to Product Details. (Numbers 1 and 2 in the screenshot.)
Screenshot 1
- Listed first is your overall status; how your sales rank against every single book sold at Amazon in the Kindle Store and Amazon (print) Store, respectively.
- Following that your Product Details tally your category bestseller status. If you’re not a bestseller in any category this section is absent.
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BUT THERE’S MORE
In order to wage wise publicity campaigns there is much more we need to know about our sales, such as patterns. Did your cookbook sales rise at Christmastime? Did your Y/A book sales drop during summer vacation? We need tracking stats, for one thing, to access when and how to invest our publicity dollars.
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NOVELRANK
NovelRank tracks only Amazon books. They track overall print books sales not only at amazon.com, but also .uk, .ca, .fr, .de and amazon.co.jp. This also includes your Kindle book sales.
Among the many functions available at NovelRank:
- Grab the code to display your sales rank widgets
- Study charts for book sales and sales history for the week, month and year
- Compare book stats
- Subscribe to your own RSS feed alerting you every time a book sells or get hourly sales rank
- Amazon review count
- Download stats to spreadsheet
- Search twitter for mentions of your book title
- Search blogs for mentions of your title
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TITLEZ
One benefit of using TitleZ, in addition to NovelRank, is that it can find books through all publishers, including Amazon. They even listed the books published under my company, Ceilos Rojos Publishing, which publishes only me. If it has an ISBN # you can find it at TitleZ, but there may be no data attached.
Unfortunately, as of September 2009 Amazon stopped providing Kindle sales rank data via the data feed service, so TitleZ can only track your Amazon print books now.
Among the many functions available at TitleZ:
- Instantly retrieve and print historic and current sales rankings from Amazon for 7, 30, 90 days and lifetime averages.
- See how topics or titles perform over time
- Measure the competition
- Understand what’s hot
- Decide the best time of year for a new book release
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GOLDEN DATA
I really like the research/comparison function at both sites. Enter a keyword (topic) into the search bar and they’ll return a list from Amazon of the current top selling books on your topic.
You can use these searches to mine golden information. For instance, before signing a new book a publisher could use TitleZ to quickly gauge the historical success of similar, competitive books. A travel writer can identify trends in travel book sales,a marketer to determine what time of year might be best for releasing a new book on the topic at hand.
You can while away hours at this, but can’t come away without valuable information about your field. At TitleZ I entered the keyword “authorship” and was delighted when my friend Larry Brooks’, Story Enigineering, came up 13th at the rank of 2,034. And upon entering “how to edit your writing” my friend Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s book, The Frugal Editor, came up #11 and ranked 208,123. Way to go guys.
Notes:
- Many sites don’t track Barnes & Noble sales as they only update monthly and this provides little benefit.
- I’ve written to ask, but so far none of the sales tracking sites I know of can track your Amazon category sales, but all track your overall sales rank.
- Want to get quick emails listing your rankings? Set it up with Booklert.
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