I’d like to welcome guest blogger Amy Dawson Robertson to Mystery Writing is Murder today. Amy is a native Virginian and graduated from St. John’s College in Annapolis. She lives in the Washington DC area and her writing interests include genre fiction, short stories and graphic novels. She creates strong female characters in action-packed stories drawn on current events. Miles to Go is Amy’s first novel.
In the old days, before the internet was a twinkle in eye of Leonard Kleinrock, writers were condemned to worry and wonder. Say you published a book. And it’s 1888. Or 1942. Or even 1994. Congratulations! You have a contract with your publisher for, maybe, a 15% royalty rate on hardcover sales. Your book is slated for release just before Christmas. Perfect. The book comes out, you get a few reviews – some good, some so-so. Sometimes you go visit your book at the bookstore around the corner and you wonder how it’s selling. You know you won’t have an inkling (unless you’re one of the very lucky few to hit the NYT bestseller list) until you get your first royalty statement.
In. The. Mail.
The mail that will be known in the as yet unknowable future as snail mail.
Writers, tending to be a thoughtful bunch, can’t help but fixate on the notion that this thing that they are driven to do might have value. And not just some esoteric notion of value but quantifiable value. Dollars and cents value. And ultimately, that accumulation of dollars and cents is indicative of individual minds that each made the decision to buy your book.
That’s right. Buy. Your. Book.
Which means there’s a good possibility that same said mind might read your book.
Read. Your. Book.
And that’s really what the writer cares about. We want people to read our books. Everyone single one of us remembers “coming out” as a writer to our friends and their raised eyebrows. It’s hubristic after all. It means you think you have something so worth saying that it not only deserves to be printed on a page and bound between two covers, but also to be cataloged and entered into libraries. Which means of course that it might live for eternity. And it means you believe that it is a reasonable proposition for people, real people, to spend the hard-earned fruits of their labor on your book. If anything’s hubristic that is, right? It’s still hard to know who is buying your book but it is getting easier to know if anyone actually is.
The internet, thankfully, is all about minutia, quantification and immediate satisfaction and nowadays our friendly author is now a member of a coterie of
“twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.”
Maybe this sounds familiar, right? Unless you have endless time to stalk your book in all of the places it sells, you really don’t have a notion if anyone is buying it. So whether you’re in it for the money or that special satisfaction of envisioning your words coursing through another human being’s brain, now there are a few tracking tools that can help you take the edge off until your royalty statement turns up.
Each of these tools captures Amazon sales rank information (admittedly only one piece of the pie). There are other paid tracking sources such as Publisher Alley that pulls their data from Baker & Taylor and the mythic BookScan that grabs data from bookstores everywhere. But if you’re looking for free, here’s a peek at the four that I have found since my book was published.
First there was Titlez . Titlez was my first Amazon sales tracker. I was still naive then.
Titlez, which is still in beta, allows you to track as many books as you’d like. Then it arranges the books you’re tracking into an actively ranked list. If you expand a title, you can see how it has performed over time. Each dot represents the sales rank for a single instance in a day. Sales rank is captured once a day. Note that when the line goes flat that means you are having a sale or more likely multiples sales every day or mostly every day. By hovering over each dot you can see what the sales ranks was for that day and what time it was captured. It’s important to note that Amazon rankings fluctuate wildly (I won’t even get into the mathematical speculation that surrounds it) so it’s best to look at your rank over time. Titlez is especially useful to see how your book is doing in comparison to similar books in its genre.
![clip_image002[4]](http://lh6.ggpht.com/_v68WnMKHlKQ/S7PTUJhmzLI/AAAAAAAABMI/MKcO6sWnZOs/s1600-h/clip_image002%5B4%5D%5B6%5D.jpg "clip_image002[4]")
Next, Metric Junkie swept in on a big noisy motorcycle and stole my attention. Catching my fickle eye with sexy pie charts, bar graphs, and best of all, a thing of their own invention: Cha-chingers™. Yes, Cha. Chingers. (™) And we know what that means.
While the biggest limitation to Titlez is that it only captures data once a day, Metric Junkie solves that problem by capturing data hourly. The image below shows an eight hour time span when five books were purchased.
Metric Junkie only allows you to track ten titles (per account) but you can see the sales of those titles across any time period you choose. The pie chart also shows how the ten titles rate against each other by percentage. The bar chart allows you to see how you’re doing week to week, month to month, etc., graphically.
After my experiences with Titlez and Metric Junkie, I’d been through a lot and I was more mature. So when a subtle, handsome application called NovelRank came along I was ready to jump on board. Most appealingly, it could capture multiple sales in a hour. Did you hear me? Multiple sales in an hour. Yeah, seriously, I was blown away.
Though NovelRank doesn’t have as many graphical ways to display your data, it has an RSS feed feature that will show you those multiple sales in an hour. For instance, from the time period of 11AM-7PM where Metric Junkie shows five sales, NovelRank shows seven including three in one hour. This is what showed up in my RSS reader:
NovelRank is cosmopolitan too. It captures international Amazon sales data — this is how it displays:
NovelRank can also download your hourly sales rank into an Excel file making it easier to pinpoint fluctuations in your sales. (You may find you need pocket protection if you go this far.)
Another application that only recently caught my eye is Rankforest. Rankforest allows you one title to track for free — I don’t see much value to this service except that it is the only sales tracking application I’ve found that also tracks Barnes and Noble. It is mostly useful as an application on the side.
How accurate are any of these tools? It’s hard to say. I haven’t seen my first royalty statement yet and I don’t know how analyzed it will be. I have found that these tools take the edge off the wait a bit. But I also believe that such applications can offer a snapshot of how your book is doing which can influence how you strategize your own marketing. Mondays tend to be very good sales days for book buying so maybe you’ll want to post to your blog or otherwise remind people of your existence sometime Monday morning. Businesses are investing more and more in data mining and accessing valuable results. Likewise, the more data a writer has, the more she can understand her audience and the market. Unfortunately, none of these tools will write your next book for you, so quit fooling around on the internet and get to work!
Amy Dawson Robertson
Author of Miles To Go: A Rennie Vogel Intrigue
Elizabeth – Thanks for hosting Amy : ).
Amy – Thanks for letting us know about those tools for tracking sales. I have to admit, I was a little ignorant of them, although I shouldn’t be. I really appreciate your giving the demo shots, too. This is all sort of a new area for me to explore.
Elizabeth, You’re a great hostess.
Amy, Congrats on your book. I am so obsessive I KNOW I would be checking the numbers constantly. Great information.
I resemble that remark about “twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales” when it comes to checking my book’s Amazon ranking! I actually consider myself well-adjusted in that I only check it three or four times a day now, not every hour….
Seriously though, I do like NovelRank. It was still a bit of a challenge to reconcile it with my first royalty statement, but it seems like they were pretty close.
Congratulations on your book and may your sales grow each day. Technology is an amazing thing and how it can sometimes help authors is wonderful.
Thank you to Elizabeth and Amy for this informative post. I haven’t paid much attention to tracking sales, but perhaps now I can check one of these out.
karen
Thanks, Amy, what great information! And just in time, I was running out of creative ways to procrastinate!
Wow, that’s a lot of ways to track one’s books! Think I’d skip the hourly one – that could be really depressing. LOL
Oddly enough, I never look at my rankings or even try to track my sales. Maybe I’m neurotic in a different way.
Or maybe you just manage your time better than the rest of us, Diane! It can be very addictive so I don’t recommend starting it.
Glad to know that it mostly falls in line with your royalty statement, Ingrid.
Thanks, Journaling Woman! And thanks, Margot, for commenting.
I also want to thank Elizabeth for hosting me. This is a great blog and I’m so glad to contribute.
Thanks so much for guest posting today, Amy! This was such an informative post–I’ll definitely be looking into these sales tracking tools…thanks!
I’ll try a couple of those when my book is released this fall.
Fascinating. And thank you for doing all the work for us!
Not long ago, in the dark ages before the Internet, before you were born if you’re 30 or younger, authors only knew what their publishers told them. Now we can find out so much more. We probably still don’t know much more, but it’s more exciting than sitting in the dark.
Helen
Straight From Hel
Cosmopolitan NovelRank? Awesome. Thanks for the kind words, and I’m glad you enjoy the site. Feel free to contact me through email (see NovelRank FAQ) if you want to share your thoughts on graphs you would like to see and other feedback. I’m always developing new features (just added User Pages for multiple books on a single page).
Cheers,
Mario
Creator, NovelRank
This is great. I haven’t heard of any of these tracking tools. I can’t wait to try them all. Guess that means I’m not going to get much writing done this afternoon!
Thanks, Mason!
It’s so true, Helen — it can be a very dark place.
Hi Mario — I’m really glad I found NovelRank. Let me give it some thought and I’ll write you.
You’re welcome, Karen — I enjoyed putting it together.
Careful, Jane — you don’t want to get sucked in too deeply!
WOw, those are great links. I will check them out, it’s great to know that these types of sites exist.
ann
I vaguely knew about this, but now I’m so much more informed. Thanks, Amy! And thanks, Elizabeth, for another great guest post.
“Unfortunately, none of these tools will write your next book for you, so quit fooling around on the internet and get to work!”
Thanks for the reminder, Amy :)
Be still my beating heart!
There’s software that can be twitchy and nervous for me?
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Wow, thanks for hosting Amy, and Amy thank you for such an informative and useful post! Got it bookmarked for reference and plenty of use. :)
Marvin D Wilson
I think we all need to outsource our twitchiness! Thanks again, Amy, for showing us how. :)
Very useful info. I’m bookmarking this post for later reference! Thanks for letting us know about this!
Great blog, Amy. Thanks for the tips on all those nifty tracking programs. I’ve been published since 2001 and didn’t know a thing about them.
I hope you know that you might have created another obsessive author….LOL.
Again, thanks. Enjoyed the blog.
Those were good to read about for when I get published ;)
I use NovelRank and I love it!
I love novel rank. With books selling on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com and amazon.ca in print version and kindle, with my 3rd book out in May that would have been 18 pages to view – each of 3 books twice each on 3 amazon sites – which sounds excessive even for an amazon-sales-ratings junkie like me! With novel rank I can check each title twice (print and kindle) and see all the data – 6 pages instead of 18. It also gives an overview of the week, month and year – but that’s more clicks again… Yes, I do still have time to write!
Leigh:
Click LOGIN in the top-right to make a user page… then you have to load only 1 page to view all of your info (and hover your mouse 3 times).
This was a very helpful and informative post. Thank you.
My concern here is that while I have a contract for 9 volumes (I’m a non-fiction author), I can tell by Google hits and Amazon sell-out rates that sales for my first volume, which released July 2011, are far better at this point in the game than sales for my second volume, which released 2 weeks ago. Volume 1 sold over a million copies, but it doesn’t appear that I’ve sold even 100 copies of Volume 2. I’m petrified, to say the least.
Questions: if I have to wait until my royalties come in (which, in my case, is July 1), how can I avoid the seemingly inevitable worry (read “many nights without sleep”)? The bar was set so high for Volume 1, and I’m not sure if I’ll reach that same level for Volume 2. If sales are the bottom line, could my publisher rescind the contracts?