Tracking sales of Amazon sales ranking and obtaining accurate estimates
I've been an author who has published over seven years and if one thing can not stand about the industry's expected! Waiting for the book to get through production, hoping to hit store shelves, waiting for someone to buy, waiting for the first paycheck, and, most importantly, waiting to see how my book is doing.
Anyone who has written any material posted has no doubt suffered the same anguish and frustration at the time it takes to get feedback on their precious work of art. I remember the first time I wrote a entire book myself (up 'till then had mainly contributed chapters to other peoples' works) – I spent most of the first week after publication to update the book page on Amazon to see if any new reviews or if the sales rank has improved.
Do this soon became quite tedious and when it was still anxious to know how I was doing my book, I could not lose more and more time looking at the same page over and over and over again. The worst thing is that, although it was always good to see the range of drop in sales to the thousands or hundreds of low high occasionally, I really could not know that I was doing … not really!
Looking around on the Internet was a bit disappointing because it seemed that many people are of the opinion that the Amazon sales rank does not say anything and that I had been wasting his time. This seemed strange, because it seemed that Amazon has put much effort in building Sales Rank Facility – certainly not thumb sucking in numbers?
In time for the launch of my next book, I began to use RankTracer that actually provides sales estimates and the tracking sales of rows. Setting up an account requires to perform the following 3 steps:
1. Registry RankTracer
2. Using your subscription form to enter an ASIN (A unique number assigned to each of the products sold on Amazon) Product (s) you want to track – this will add the product (s) to your shopping subscription (They actually have a little form that helps determine the ASIN of any product you want to track before purchasing a subscription).
3. Order and pay for your subscription – your one-time $ 2 per month for monitoring of a diploma, or $ 1 to receive updates automatic review.
RankTracer also gives you $ 3 to prove that written notification of the registration (for a limited amount of time), so it is really free to try for a month or so. They also sell credit you can buy in order to make the shopping quicker and easier – you do not have to reach for your credit card each time you renew a subscription. Once you buy some credit you can even send any amount to others for use in RankTracer.
I have been following all my books and some other of using this service, and instead of checking me RankTracer Amazon to email me notifications of comments or my Sales Rank falls below or above a certain point.
What is more, I have to send me a PDF of all the titles I track every week and every month, which is useful because I have finally become too lazy to even visit the Internet to check how my books are doing (now that I do not have to). They have a sample report up on your page site if you want to have a look. As you will have the full range of sales statistics, weekly or monthly sales totals as well as graphics and review product information.
What I find really interesting is the way the site is built for you to make comparisons and contrast information you record. They have what they call a workstation, a single Web page that uses AJAX to provide a friendly and intuitive interface to interact with selling information Fila – there are plenty of options that allow you to view information about your group and a variety of ways.
For example, I wanted to see how the new book by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, it was selling in comparison with my own titles (not that I expect my sales to compete in any way, only to see the difference in sales volume). Using the GUI construction RankTracer called me for this period a week by using the 3-D graphics (which have several different types of graphic representation of data):
The mirage God is the track in front (yellow), my sales ranking chart in blue. NOTE: If you can not see this image, please visit my website
Ok, so the real picture may not be very clear here, but I hope you can make the fact that my book is seriously lagging behind Mr. Dawkins. Note that the graph appears almost flat due to its ranking has averaged 19 for the last week, while the mine an average of 19 000. On the bottom of the figure also must be able to see the sales estimates given for each title. In this case, the God Delusion sold about 510 copies that week, but my book only sold 31.
I have been tracking my book much longer to give an example of a different way of looking at the data collected, I took a picture of my Sales Rank graph in the last month using a range format grouped on a daily basis (instead of hours, as shown in the chart above):
My Sales Rank range grouped by day during the month NOTE: If you can not see this image, please visit my website
From here you can see that sales increased for a few days in early January after a bit of a slowdown in December – each bar indicates the range between the best and worst classification of that day. As always, the sales estimate RankTracer engine that provides an estimate of the Month – in this case there is an even 130 copies sold in an average range of about 20 000.
Apart from monitoring the Amazon sales rankings for his own book, I feel very good track a group of my titles of competitors to see how well I'm doing in the context of my little niche. Its very useful to know just like everyone else are doing, because I think that helps me determine where I have things right and did wrong.
Especially since the sales rank information is obtained on I say an hourly basis in near real time the impact of any advertising or items that I or my editor has been released. It is incredible to see the falls in the classification as articles or comments posted on various websites – once my book has a great review on Slashdot and RankTracer noted an improvement in sales approximately 3 weeks after that.
He has reached the stage where my editor often asks me how my book is doing because it's easier for me know that for him to go get your records. Eventually, I suppose that all publishers need to wake up and start offering this service to its authors, but for now I am happy to receive my weekly updates to keep up with what was happening in the world of the Amazon – I'll leave the analysis of competition for merchants, publishers and advertisers.
There are actually a little more to do and see on the website RankTracer, but I hope there's a good idea of what is on offer in the way of the Amazon Sales Rank tracking and Amazon's sales estimates. Enjoy …
About the Author
David Mercer
\”davidm at contechst dot com\”
www.contechst.com
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