TitleZ

Kristen spotted this one for me, and since I found JungleScan to be rather erratic and error-prone, I thought I would recommend the fairly slick TitleZ: Book trends for publishers website to any published authors out there.

You can set up searches for multiple books, see historical data graphed back a full year or more, compare them, see weekly or lifetime average sales ranks, see your best and worst ever, compare to other books issued by your publisher, and more.

Best of all, it does this, and only this, and it’s slick. It just works. JungleScan frequently misreported numbers, seemed to check erratically, and often just wasn’t even available. Perhaps my favorite thing, though, is that TitleZ has been scraping Amazon data since late 2004, so unlike JungleScan, which I only discovered recently, it has historical data preceding my sign-up.

It seems to be free but planning to charge at some point. I suspect that for authors, the monthly fee (which I am guessing will be low) will be worth it. Even just knowing how your book is doing compared to other books by your publisher, or other books in your proposed category, might help with your next book proposal.

Oh, and this was the best explanation of Amazon sales ranks that I have seen yet:

< 100 = Best-seller. Author, publisher, agent are all getting rich 101-1000 = Extremely good performer. Any publisher/author would be thrilled. 1001-10,000 = Very successful book. A few of these can sustain a small publishing company. 10,001-50,000 = A successful book by most industry standards. 50,001-100,000 = Not bad. 100,000 - 500,000 = Not good. 500,000+ = Poor.

I have a “very successful book.” Yay! 🙂