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Amazon Book Sales RSS Feed Improvements

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Thanks to feedback from a NovelRank user, RSS feeds for individual books has been improved, especially for Firefox users! Now, when you go to a book’s details page such as the book Body Rolling, you will now notice that in the toolbar at the top is the famous RSS subscribe icon letting you know that there are RSS feeds available on this page! These are the same RSS Feeds that are available under the RSS feeds tab, including Amazon book sales.

Firefox RSS Subscribe Icon

Furthermore, if you go directly to one of these feeds, Firefox will automatically understand that this is an RSS feed and offer to add it as a Live Bookmark for you!

Firefox RSS Live Bookmarks

So now it is even easier to get your Amazon book sales or sales rank feeds in RSS form. Thanks to Stephanie Golden for bringing this to my attention!

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Problems with Adding Books to User Pages?

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

I’ve had some reports through the User Pages feedback survey that some people have been unable to add certain books to their user pages. I have not had the issue myself, so my guess it is either something obscure or based upon books that have unique attributes. So, I’d love to solve the problem, but I need more information. If you are experiencing the issue, please follow these steps and send me a report of the issues you are experiencing:

  • What is the search term you are using to find the book?
  • What is the exact title and format of the book that was found (and you want to add)?
  • What error message do you receive or what event occurs?
  • What is your username?

Send me an email with the above info:admin@novelrank.com. Thanks for helping NovelRank become a better service.

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Amazon Sales Rank of 7600 books!

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Girl Reading Antique Book In less than 9 months, NovelRank has grown to track the Amazon sales rank of over 7600 books! This is only counting Amazon.com, as the Amazon.de and Amazon.co.uk sales rank numbers have steadily grown for region specific publications, German and British, respectively. I’ve compared these numbers with the statistics of a few other tracking sites and this is 4x’s the number of books than other free sites and more books being tracked than free and paid sites with 5 years of history!

I’m flattered and thrilled that NovelRank is tracking the Amazon sales rank of so many books across the world, and hope new features and continued improvements will add even more books to the list! Thanks for your continued patronage of NovelRank and sharing it with your readers and fellow authors. Without your help, others would not find and enjoy the benefits of tracking their sales rank!

Update: July 4, 2010
While developing new features, I got a count of all the unique books actively tracked on NovelRank across all Amazon domains (.de, .co.uk, etc.) and it is 8997 books!

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Create an ePub Format Version of Your eBook

Monday, June 7th, 2010

epub format ebook
The ePub format has quickly become the standard for distributing an ebook to the masses using a digital reader. With the iPad continuing to sell well and ePub the standard for the iBook app for browsing for books on the iPad, it is important to get your book in the ePub format so you can share your ebook easily!

Some companies are offering conversion of the PDF or DOC version of your book to ePub format for a fee, but a new service has popped which does all this automatically for you! The service is called ePubBud and it was designed to look like the interface of the ubiquitous YouTube. To see an example, here is Mario Lurig’s ePub book (hey, that’s me!).

The steps are pretty straightforward:

  • Choose to upload a new book or create a new ebook on the ePubBud site
  • You will be prompted to make an account after the first step above
  • You will now be able to update all of the book info, provide a link to the paper version, charge for the book, etc. You can also choose to share it publicly (link at the very top)

Once the ePub book is created, you can download it directly from the site and save it for your own uses! Yes, it is pretty simple, but time for some caveats…

  • The site is changing regularly as features are being added, so if something is broken, you may have to come back. It should be marked ‘Beta’.
  • The interface for updating book information can be confusing, and not all options are in one place, sometimes split in different parts of the page
  • The target audience is not mainstream authors, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from this website!
  • I’ve never tested the ‘charge for book’ option
  • Some of the above instructions may be different in the future… I’m sorry? Joys of a new website

NovelRank nor I are affiliated with this website in any way.

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