Amazon Sales Rank
What Does It Mean


The Amazon sales rank, in and of itself, tells you approximately when the last item of that type sold. For books, you can look around on the Amazon forum or other places and get values which I have condensed in the following table

	150,000 or less	Within the last 12 hours
	150,000 to 750,000	Within the last 3 or 4 days
	750,000 to 1,500,000	Within the last two weeks
	1,500,000 to 2,000,000	Within the last month
	2,000,000 to 4,500,000	Within the last year

Now those numbers by themselves don't really mean a lot. As they say in the stock market "past performance is no guarantee of future performance". A book that sold 10 minutes ago may not sell for another three years and another book that hasn't sold for three years may sell in 10 minutes.

If that's the case, what good are the numbers? Well, if you add tracking to the mix, you can get some useful information. Suppose, for example, you look at a book with an Amazon rank of 10,000. A short time later you look at it again and it is 30,000. Continuing, you see the rank 'go down' to 50,000, then 75,000, then - well you get the idea. But about 16 hours or so since you started watching, you see it at 10,000 again and, watching this for a week or so you see this same pattern [a low rank going up to about 150K or so, then dropping to a low rank again] repeat itself every 16 hours or so. That data would indicate the book sells about 10 copies a week. If you are the type to be interested in actual data, you might want to look at A time series analysis of Amazon sales rank which presents some data for a particular book which shows just that kind of behavior [with different rankings].

Getting back to that 10 copies a week in our own example; is that a good number? Well, Morris Rosentha seems to think so and presents some results on his Amazon Sales Rank For Books page where he talks about the number of copies sold per week (or per day for the lower ranks) compared to the Amazon rank.



>> 'til next time - DW <<

Searching For Information on a Book


O.K., you want to find out about a book. Well sometimes the search is easy, you just put the title in Google or Yahoo or one of the other search engines and you can get all of the information you want, in fact too much. However, that isn't what I'm going to talk about today. What I'm going to talk about is finding information out about a hard to find book. Here the information is sometimes a little harder to come by. The easiest way for me to talk about searching for the information is to take you through a search for something - at least partially. That something will eventually have a page on our site, so finding out about the book could be a little easier after that happens. But for right now, let's try to find out about

Title: Slovenly Peter's Story Book Publisher: Mcloughlin Brothers, New York Date: Undated Illustrator: Edward P Cogger Binding: Hardcover; An illustrated terra cotta (reddish) cover, embossed in red and gold with a black background Pages: Unpaginated: [1] leaf, [48] p. : col. ill. ; 18 cm. Condition: Fair/no Dust Jacket; Ex-Library Size: 12 mo (about 5 by 7 inches or 12.5 by 18 cm)

Not suspecting this is a hard to find book, I go to viaLibri and put in Slovenly Peter's Story Book. I get three entries for the Print On Demand title Slovenly Peter's Little Story Book which is not what I want and two entries by the same seller for what looks like my book. The price? A very nice $1750 on the ILAB web site and an even higher price on the multi-dealer listing site ABE. [As an aside, this is typical of a lot of dealers. They charge more on those sites which charge them to list their books and then also take a commission on the sale - in this case about 13.5%]. Well, since the dealer is a member of the ABAA [Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America] I figure this is a pretty legitimate price so I had better do some research on the book if I want to get a fair price for it.

First, I go over to the dealers web site. Sometimes a dealer will have something extra on their own web site about items which are not carried over to the multi-listing or search sites. In this case they don't have any more about the book, but they do have a couple of images which goes a long way to convince me we have the same book. They also give the author as Heinrich Hoffmann and the date of 1877. So maybe I've found out some additional information about my book.

A nice resource for all kinds of information is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Looking up Heinrich Hoffmann [the author], I find that he was German and wrote Der Struwwelpeter, an illustrated book portraying children misbehaving. That sound like my book but it certainly isn't in German. I try a Google search for Hoffmann Struwwelpeter Slovenly. We find out from Wikipedia that "The first English translation appeared in 1848. Mark Twain's English translation of the book is called 'Slovenly Peter.'" Wikipedia even gives a link to the english translation of the entire book The Project Gutenberg EBook of Struwwelpeter. BTW: Project Gutenberg is a great place for free ebooks. So we have a little bit of history about our book.

We've seen that there appears to only be one copy for sale of our book, but what about other copies. Another good site for finding out about books is WorldCat, the OCLC World Catalog Program. Searching for slovenly peter's story book we get two results [and two results for slovenly peter's little story book]. This gives us some more information about the book and indicates that there were at least three printings of the book. Which one is ours? There isn't enough information to say yet but we're still looking. Although one of the entries says there are quite a few copies available around the world, looking at the actual entries of quite a few of them shows that the libraries have a copy of a different book. It appears there are not many available in libraries around the world. So we now know it is a rather hard to find book in general.

The last place I'm going to mention is the American Antiquarian Society and their online catalogs. If we go to the, particularly the AAS Basic search and search for Slovenly Peter's Story Book we see some of the same notes we saw on OCLC and some additional information.

Well, I've lead you thorough a few of the places to look for information about a book you might be curious about. There are certainly more places to look including the Library of Congress page for gateway access to LC's catalog and those at many other institutions, the Science Fiction Internet database, Fantastic Fiction, Bibliomania, and many many others. Hopefully this will get you started on developing resources of your own. If you find some good ones, you might even add a comment with the information.



>> 'til next time - DW <<

An update. I've put together a page for the book on our sight. There's a little more information. If you are interested and would like to see some images, see Slovenly Peters Story Book on White Unicorn Books

What is a proof? A proof copy is what it sounds like or at least used to be. That is, proof that the book has not been unduly trimmed, see A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology for a fuller definition. In the recent past, basically, after the printer was satisfied with the layout (from the printers proof), a 'few' copies would be run off as Authors proofs. One (or more) was sent to the Author(s), the editor might get one to look at, etc. Although not what some would call rare, there were generally very few of them.

It used to be that proofs were not to be confused with an Advanced Reading Copy (ARC) which were printed before general publication for reviewers, bookstores, magazines, etc. for publicity purposes but the line between the two is much finer today and, in fact, some ARCs are used as proofs [or proofs are used as ARCs]. The result is that some proofs today exist in (very) large numbers.

BTW: If you are interested you might check out our copies of ARC's/galleys/proofs at White Unicorn Books.

>> 'til next time - DW <<

Hi All

I wrote about the time of delivery below [March 15] and got a few e-mails talking about some of our deliveries to Canada. Well I checked into it and it turns out all of the e-mails were from the same area. On further investigation I think I've found the problem. The Canada Post delivery employee was new to the neighborhood and had to ask directions so they kept falling behind. I've written Canada Post and asked if the employee could get some extra training so that the deliveries would be made in a more timely manner. I haven't heard back yet, but I'm pretty sure the situation will be corrected fairly quickly. Either the employee will get the training or learn the delivery area better.

I actually got a video of the employee asking for directions and thought I would share it with you so you can maybe see where the area is [this will download a wmv file for Windows Media or some other video player].

BTW: White Unicorn Books ships almost anywhere in the world and has a large selection of books for you to choose from.


>> 'til next time - DW <<