Tracking Amazon Sales Rank, Obtaining Accurate Estimates

I have been a published author for over seven years now and if there is one thing I can't stand about the industry its waiting! Waiting for the book to get through production, waiting for it to hit the shelves, waiting for someone to buy it, waiting for the first paycheck, and, most importantly, waiting to find out how my book is doing. Anyone who has written any material that is published has no doubt suffered from the same angst and frustration at how long it takes to get feedback on your precious work of art. I recall the first time I wrote an entire book myself (up 'til that stage I had mainly contributed chapters to other peoples' works) - I spent most of the first week after publication refreshing the book page on Amazon to see if there were any new reviews or if the sales rank had improved. Doing this soon became quite tedious and while I was still eager to find out how my book was doing, I just couldn't waste more and more time looking at the same page over and over and over. What made it worse is that while it was always nice to see the sales rank drop to the low thousands or high hundreds every now and then, I couldn't really tell how it was doing not really! Looking around on the Internet was a bit disheartening because it seemed that a lot of people are of the opinion that the Amazon Sales Rank doesn't tell you anything and that I had been wasting my time. This struck me as odd because it seemed that Amazon had put a lot of effort into building the Sales Rank Facility - surely they weren't sucking thumb on the numbers? In time for my next book's release I stumbled across RankTracer.com ( The God Delusion is the trace in front (in yellow), with my sales rank graph in blue. Ok, so the actual image may not be too clear here, but hopefully you can make out the fact that my book is seriously lagging behind Mr Dawkins'. Notice that his graph almost appears flat because his ranking has averaged at 19 for the past week, whereas mine averaged about 19 000. Looking at the bottom of the graph you should also be able to see the sales estimates given for each title. In this case, the God Delusion sold about 510 copies during that week, but my book only sold 31. I have been tracking my book a lot longer so to give you an example of a different way of looking at the collected data, I took a snapshot of my sales rank graph over the last month using a range format grouped on a daily basis (instead of hourly as the graph above shows):