Brian Clegg
Basic
Apologies if everyone knows this already, but whether you are self-published or with a publisher, it's hard not to be mildly obsessed with how your book is selling - but particularly if you are with a publisher, information can be hard to come by.
There's a nice little free website called Novelrank that tries to estimate your Amazon sales by watching the sales rank and totting up the upward twitches. It's not perfect (it falls apart if your book is selling more than one an hour, as I think the ranking is only updated hourly) - but it's still a useful guide, and if you have several books out there it gives you an overview of how their rankings are doing.
Here's an example of part of its report:
Some points to note - it can show latest sale on all Amazon sites, but the sales/sales rank info on the right is only for a selected site, e.g. Amazon.co.uk. It can be sorted by a number of things: latest sale, number of sales this month, rank etc.
Another useful one for US sales is Amazon.com's Author Central. Sign up for this (also free) and it gives you access to your books sales through Bookscan US, which includes about 75% of paper books sales in the US (but not ebooks). You get nice charts like this:
... which can be taken down to a weekly level and broken down by the most popular books and also a pretty 'sales by geography' map, showing how sales break down across the US. (My two best places are New York and L.A.)
Any other sites/resources (preferably free!) to recommend?
There's a nice little free website called Novelrank that tries to estimate your Amazon sales by watching the sales rank and totting up the upward twitches. It's not perfect (it falls apart if your book is selling more than one an hour, as I think the ranking is only updated hourly) - but it's still a useful guide, and if you have several books out there it gives you an overview of how their rankings are doing.
Here's an example of part of its report:
Some points to note - it can show latest sale on all Amazon sites, but the sales/sales rank info on the right is only for a selected site, e.g. Amazon.co.uk. It can be sorted by a number of things: latest sale, number of sales this month, rank etc.
Another useful one for US sales is Amazon.com's Author Central. Sign up for this (also free) and it gives you access to your books sales through Bookscan US, which includes about 75% of paper books sales in the US (but not ebooks). You get nice charts like this:
... which can be taken down to a weekly level and broken down by the most popular books and also a pretty 'sales by geography' map, showing how sales break down across the US. (My two best places are New York and L.A.)
Any other sites/resources (preferably free!) to recommend?
