
                        Amazon Sales Rank Toolkit

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So you're an author, agent, publisher.  You have a book out there that
is selling through bookstores, both online and otherwise.  But HOW WELL
is it selling?

That's not easy to say!  Bookstores order copies, but they may return
them.  They only pay for them 30-90 days after they've ordered them.
Unsold copies can come back basically forever.  At any instant in time,
at the very least there is a lag of months between any set of numbers
you might have and unadjusted reality.

The one exception to this rule is Amazon.  Amazon does warehouse books,
but it does so in very modest quantities, ordering just enough to be
able to cover the book's estimated (and continuously remeasured and
re-estimated) sales rate relative to the lead time on an order.  Amazon
has a large enough volume that they can ride almost any reasonable
surplus down with their just-in-time ordering scheme without the need to
return.  They basically sell all that they order, keeping only a tiny
handful of copies around of the very slow sellers and a lot more of the
hot sellers.

Amazon ALSO provides the author/agent/publisher a single, extremely
valuable number from which at least some information about sales rates
(of books that sell relatively slowly) can be abstracted:  The Amazon
Sales Rank (ASR).

As any author of a book learns empirically, one can "watch" the ASR of
one's book(s) on a daily, or even hourly basis.  When the book isn't
selling the ASR gradually rises as books that were above it sell a copy
and drop below it, pushing it up.  When a copy of the book sells, the
ASR drops, often dramatically for a slow seller -- from (say) 401,231 to
63,827 or even lower.  The ASR then rises rapidly at first, then more
slowly as it approaches the "equilibrium" level for the long-term
average sales rate for the book.

Empirically again, Amazon has perhaps 1.5 million titles that actually
sell at least rare copies in its "bookstore".  Only around a third of
these titles sell as many as 5-10 copies a month, so books that are
"actively" (if slowly) selling will tend to equilibrate with an ASR of
around 400,000 to 600,000 and only very slowly rise beyond as the book
slows down altogether.  Books selling as many as 10-20 copies a month
well spend a lot of time in the 300,000 to 500,000 range, and books
selling a copy a day or better might spend most of their time in the
100,000 to 300,000 range.  Books that stay under 100,000 consistently
are all selling quite well, multiple copies a day, and books that stay
under 10,000 are selling multiple copies an hour.

One reason that these ranges are reasonably predictable (and hence
predictive!) is that Amazon's algorithm for evaluating sales rank
"favors" books that sell regularly.  A book that has sold only one copy
today (but that has been selling ten copies a day for most of the last
three months might be surpassed momentarily by a book that sells four
copies all at once, but if those are the ONLY four copies that have sold
in the last three months, the sales rank of the slow seller will rise
more rapidly than the sales rank of the fast seller, all things being
equal.  Soon the long-run better seller will again be on the -- uh,
"bottom" (where lower ASR is better, of course:-).

Note well that all of these ranges are crude estimates and subject to
the dynamics of the marketplace, don't take them too seriously.  But the
idea is correct even if the numbers themselves aren't exactly correct
THIS month or THAT -- which can happen, as the recent economic downturn
has clearly indicated.

It is pain in the butt to track the ASR by hand.  I know, I've done it
for MY book for over a year now!  One leaves a browser window open on
the book's page all the time, and refreshes it far, far too often (as
seeing the dip that indicates a sale is quite addictive!).  This
causes one to get less REAL work done in the not unlikely event that one
has a day job.  Also, one misses events when one sleeps or is away from
a browser.  One sees the ASR at 90,000 around 8 a.m., and it is only
102,300 when next you check it at 5 p.m.  Wow!  Did it really only go up
12,000 or so all day, or did the book sell multiple copies during that
interval?  Without regular sampling, there is no way to be sure.

For months now, I've wanted an ASR tracker that I could just point at my
book and then come back at any time and get both a graphical display of
the ASR as a function of time AND an abstracted graph of sales.  Well, a
quick trip to google and one sees that sure, one can do this -- for
money.  Well, if one's book sells ten copies a month (netting you
perhaps $15), and you pay $6/month to track the sales... uh-uh.  I'm a
coder (ubercoder, even), on the other hand, and it isn't that terribly
difficult to write an application that visits the web page FOR you and
extracts just the sales rank.  Nor is it terribly difficult to write an
application that stores the rank in a timestamped table, looks for the
sudden dips in sales rank that indicate "sales", and tally up sales
events as well.  It isn't even that difficult to make something plot
this running table.

Why buy what one can build?

The tool you've downloaded (and whose README you are reading) is the
result of such a process.  It took me roughly four or five person hours
of coding plus some time testing and tweaking to get it to where it is
right now -- functional but still sparse.  In another ten hours of work
I'll have it very spiffy indeed.  By then I expect it to automatically
install and track a prespecified list of ISBNs (or ASINs: the other way
Amazon tracks e.g. Kindle books and books without ISBNs) to generate
suitably named web-viewable reports, not unlike the way webalize works
now.  However, the tool is USEFUL right now AS IS to at least some
potential users, and if I put it out there as a GPL open source project,
I'm likely to get some help both debugging and adding features that well
benefit everybody.  Very, very quickly there will be no point in using a
commercial service for something you can just get by just typing:

  yum install asr_tracker

and doing a minutes or so of configuration per book (on an RPM-derived
linux installation, YMMV on other OS's).

What do I hope to get out of this?

Well, there is use my own tool with my own book, so that I can measure
the effect of my own sales efforts.  That alone is enough, to be honest.
I expect to have quite a few books up for sale in a few years, and
asr_tracker will almost certainly be extremely useful to me along the
way.

However, it is ALSO a SALES VENUE for those books, because I built my
own book into the tool as the default/demo (which one feature cannot be
altered by hackers wishing to customize or advance the tool for their
own ends, by license requirement).  SO if you downloaded this lovely
free tool and (as I strongly suggest) try running it with the defaults
at least one time just to see how it works, you'll be exposed to the
Amazon web page for The Book of Lilith, and with luck some of you will
be tempted to at least read the reviews, and once you do THAT some of
you will buy it!

This will amply repay me for the effort I've expended making the tool
and for the effort I expect to put in in the future fancying it up.  ASR
is "everything" for a book -- a low ASR drives more sales to a still
lower ASR as Amazon's automated marketing mechanisms give the book more
exposure.

It will benefit you, as well!  If you use this tool instead of the
commercial/online tools, it will SAVE you $6/month, and the second,
third, fourth books are all "free" as well!  In no more than three
months you'll have paid for a copy of The Book of Lilith in money saved
and valuable reports generated!  And, of course, you'll have the book
itself.

The Book of Lilith is, I promise you, worth it.  Even without the
benefit of a free ASR tracking tool as a "rebate" on your purchase.  It
is a damn good read, and you will not regret buying it.  It will make
you laugh, it will outrage you, it will make you think about some deep
and thorny issues.  It might, just might, make your eyes moisten up just
a tiny bit once or twice.  And what more can any book do?

So please, by all means, use this lovely ASR tracking toolset all you
wish, customizing it however you like.  And consider, as you do, buying
a copy of MY book to read while this tool saves you all of those
Ctrl-R's you were entering into your browser window when you should have
been sleeping or eating or working.

The Book of Lilith has its own website here:

  http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Lilith/Lilith.php

and from it you can preview the book, read reviews, learn about Lilith
as a historical mythopoeic character and follow links to any of several
places it can be purchased.

  Thanks,

     rgb
