Friday, April 30, 2010

Tracking Book Sales

I never know how my books are selling at my publishers' websites until I get a royalty statement from them. However, I can check my books' sales ranks at Barnes and Nobles as well as Fictionwise and I frequently do--though on Fictionwise it isn't easy because I must scroll through the lists. It is far easier to keep track of my sales on Amazon since there are several sites that will track my sales for me.

By far, my favorite tracking site is http://www.novelrank.com because that site will also track Kindle sales. It lists how many books were sold and when.

I also like Metric Junkie--mostly for their colorful graphs, though Kindle sales are not included. And for me, Kindle sales have been rather nice. :^)

For a simple listing of sales ranks, which is only for paper editions, I go to http://www.salesrankexpress.com/. This site will also list Amazon sales in other countries, too.

These tracking sites are helpful tools! Using them helps me to know if my promotional efforts have been effective.

4 comments:

EchelonPress said...

Unfortunately, Novel Rank is totally ineffective. I am a publisher and just went in and checked ten of our titles and they all had totally innaccurate reports. I can see the actual sales for our titles through my account, and none of the ten were even close. Our best seller for Amazon sales no sales at all.

I encourage authors to not get caught up in the trap of tracking your sales and focus on finding ways to increase them--no matter what they are.

Karen Syed
http://klsyed.com

Penelope Marzec said...

Karen,

Thanks for your input.

For me, the ranks on Amazon and Novel Rank appear to be in line most of the time.

I agree that authors need to find ways to increase their sales. However, when I see a bump in sales which coincides with a particular promotion, I can assume my efforts in that particular area worked. That is valuable information.

Penelope
http://www.penelopemarzec.com

Mario Lurig said...

Penelope,
Thanks for getting the benefit of using NovelRank: real-time data you can link to a specific promotion and thus be more effective with your promotional efforts.

Cheers,
Mario
Creator, NovelRank

PS
My guess is Karen expected magical sales rank tracking... NovelRank only knows about books from the point you add them going FORWARD.

Mark LaFlamme said...

"I encourage authors to not get caught up in the trap of tracking your sales and focus on finding ways to increase them..."

Wow, really? Ignorance is bliss? Gotta disagree there. As Penelope points out, tracking sales is the only way to chart what works and what doesn't as far as marketing.