MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
August 9 – August 16, 2007 Edition

Amazon Rank Checker
Feeds Author, Publisher
Obsession Over Sales

NEW YORK,NY/8/6/07–Authors, publishers, and others craving their daily fix of Amazon sales ranks may well overdose on Sales Rank Express, a next-generation rank checker that delivers sales ranks, customer ratings, availability info, stock figures, promotional pairings, and much more, all in a compact and convenient display with up to 10 books per page and 400 pages per search. The completely free service, recently featured in The New York Times, is found at http://www.salesrankexpress.com

Sales Rank Express can look up books by author, publisher, title words, ISBN, or any combination of the four. With the click of another button, it can look up all formats of a single title, or information on ten of that title’s top competitors. Missing and incorrect data is easy to spot, and Sales Rank Express provides a button for each book to take a visitor right to Amazon’s correction form.

Those who want to check sales ranks outside the U.S. can do that too. Sales Rank Express can check books just as easily in Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Japan as in the US, whether or not one knows the language.

Sales Rank Express even includes information not available on Amazon itself. The number of copies in stock is drawn from Amazon’s own data, but a visitor will find it reported nowhere else on the Web.

Full documentation on site helps visitors understand the meaning and relevance of the information presented, and provides valuable tips for power users. For instance, a viewer can learn how to “chain” requests for promotional pairings so he or she can quickly survey a book’s appearance on Also Bought lists and exit offers.

The ease of checking large amounts of data can even help in analyzing Amazon itself. In late 2006 and early 2007, a prototype of Sales Rank Express was used to document Amazon’s apparent manipulation of Also Bought lists, as well as the end of that manipulation.

Sales Rank Express is the brainchild of sales rank addict Aaron Shepard, author and publisher of numerous books, including “Aiming at Amazon: The NEW Business of Self Publishing.” “The checker grew out of my own obsession with Amazon,” says Shepard. “It helps me follow the details of my books’ progress in a way simply not practicable before.”