I’ve been dismayed that over the past week or so the no-cost service that allow self published authors to track their Amazon.com sales rank is no longer online (www.titlez.com – I wrote an article on tracking your amazon sales rank last August in which I discussed the site). I placed a call to the company that owns TitleZ, and was assured that they were working on getting the service back online – and still at no cost.
However, like anything on which we begin to rely for book marketing feedback, it’s good to have some alternatives – and author and general publishing guru Steve Weber wrote an article on his blog giving some options – here’s my comments on each and a few other suggestions, ranked by what I think works best…
#1 RankForest.com, pretty much TitleZ in a prettier shell and with cool (though not all that critical for an author) tools thrown in… PLUS – it tracks B&N.com sales. You can chart and track your book’s rank over time – but you can only track one book for free and you can’ t see any others in the tracking library. Still – a great tool, and the costs aren’t too prohibitive.
#2 – RankTracer.com, again – much like TitleZ, but with widgets you can add to your site or page. Has a cost if you want to track books inside an account.
#3 - Sales Rank Express, created by author Aaron Shepard: it’s a bit ‘clunky’ but very effective for listing several books at once. It doesn’t have the ‘over time’ charting feature that TitleZ so cleverly provides – so it’s really only good for an immediate snapshot – it does add functionality that allows you to check ranks on Amazon international sites.
#4 - TicTap.com, could be interesting – it’s free and shows a bar graph of sales over time… but, and most problematic, is that all of the books I surveyed weren’t showing current sales data (most recent was from November of ’08…) I’m not sure the site is still receiving sales data from Amazon – and it certainly makes it useless for measuring the impact of your book marketing efforts. Not that it really means anything, but the copyright on the site hasn’t even been updated since 2007…
And that, folks, appears to be about it… there isn’t much out there – other than some deveoloper materials or sites. If you find any, please by all means post ‘em here!
Filed under: Amazon, book marketing, self publishing Tagged: | amazon sales rank, book marketing, steve weber, titlez
Excellent review Ray!
Also check out the recently released MetricJunkie.com and track up to 10 books simultaneously for free!
Features include: Stunning graphs and hourly updates.
I think this is the fix you are looking for.
Thanks for reviewing the tracking options out there. I’m sure many will find this information helpful. Thanks for your support!
Hey Ray,
Wanted to introduce you to another option: NovelRank. Completely free, without the ‘beta’ moniker, and also without the ads. Tracking .com, .ca, and .co.uk (though I can add .de, .fr, and .co.jp in about 2 seconds).
Looking into doing B&N in the future, but for now, it just doesn’t update the rank information frequently enough to be useful (I’m estimating sales information as well).
Cheers.
Mario –
Thanks for the info! I’d love to chat further about your service and promoting it both on the site and to our authors…
Can we chat via phone? Send along your info and I’ll give you a ring
Ray