You are currently browsing the NovelRank Blog archives for February, 2010.

Authors: Donate your Novel for Monthly Promotion and Giveaway!

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Girl Reading Antique Book (licensed)Let’s face it, authors are the biggest readers (we call it research) and love reading books as much or more than writing them. More importantly, authors are always looking for ways to promote their book to an attentive audience. With this in mind, and a touch of crazy, NovelRank would like to start doing a monthly book giveaway, supported by books donated by authors like you who track their books on NovelRank.

Update: August 2011

Due to overwhelming response, and a balance of author benefit and time cost, NovelRank is no discontinuing the giveaway program in 2011. Thanks for participating!

Why would NovelRank do this?

NovelRank should be more than a one-trick pony, as some of the unique blog posts have aspired to do. To that end, I would love to also share and promote author’s books in new and unique ways whenever possible. With some interest already from Rebecca Connell, Cami Checketts, Lisette Brodey, Cheryl Kaye Tardif, and Mike Dauplaise (with TitleTown Publishing), I think that this idea is ready to move forward.

What’s in it for me?

Free promotion of your book? Isn’t that what every author wants? Your book would be promoted to twitter, facebook, and the NovelRank blog, and all the while being adored by hundreds. On January 5th, NovelRank had ~100 unique visitors a day. On February 5th, this doubled to 200+ unique visitors. January 2010 had over 11,500 visits to the site. As you continue to spread the word, this will continue to grow.

Seems too good to be true; what does NovelRank risk?

Cold. Hard. Cash. Seriously, I’ll be paying out of my own pocket to package and ship (anywhere in the world) the winner their copy of the monthly giveaway book. I also have to store all the books authors send to me until their time comes.

Anything else?

Not really. Oh, one last thing: I’m actually a slow reader because I’m busy (guess with what), so I won’t be reading and reviewing every book before it is promoted. If you are looking for a review, I suggest LLBookReview.com.

Chart Amazon Book Sales: Tracking Books

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Book Sales Chart - Dating GuideI’ve been putting this off for too long, and finally took the initiative and got it done this morning in about 3 hours. You will now see a new Chart Type option when viewing your book on NovelRank: Book Sales. Book sales tracking has existed since NovelRank launched, but there was no way to see a chart or bar graph of the information, till now. Remember, these are still sales estimates, with accuracy decreasing for books selling more than 100 copies a month.

 

I have also updated the Download to Excel/CSV option so monthly Amazon sales estimates for the entire history of NovelRank tracking will be available. Better late than never. Here is another quick example with more domains present:

Sales Chart - All Domains

Finally, since I was in charting, I fixed a bug where you would see in the Domains drop-down menu all Amazon domains, even if your book was not tracked on that domain. That has been fixed, so only relevant domains will be displayed. Please hold your applause.