An Interview with Mario Lurig and Novel Rank

Recently, Mario Lurig, the creator of NovelRank, left a comment on LLBR and added all of our reviewer’s books to his site.  Mario’s site tracks your book’s sales on Amazon, and his service is free.  It’s a great tool for authors and Mario is always posting lots of useful information on the blog portion of his site.  Look for a post later today highlighting the “best and worst of Lulu.”  We caught up with Mario to learn more about NovelRank and how it works.

LLBR: First, tell us who you are and why you decided to create NovelRank.

ML: I’m Mario Lurig and I published my first (and currently only book) over a year and a half ago, “PHP Reference: Beginner to Intermediate PHP5“. I did some of my own marketing on the book, but checking Amazon.com all the time to see if my sales rank was lower (and thus a sale) was just not a good use of my free time. I looked around to see what sales rank tracking sites were out there and I just wasn’t thrilled with any single one (I tested most of them). So for my own benefit I started to track my book and had it email me on a sale, because in the end it’s not the rank but the sales info that you really want. Eventually, I decided to make NovelRank a site for other authors and committed 180+ hours of time in 2009 designing, researching, and creating the site so that other self-publishing authors could get more real-time information about how well their book is selling and how well their marketing is working.

LLBR: What is NovelRank and how does it work?

ML: It’s a pretty simple concept: You add your book to NovelRank by providing the link to your book on Amazon, and it tracks your sales rank on Amazon every hour. It also uses that information to determine if your sales rank has changed in a way that means a book (or more than one) has been sold. It then reflects that data on the site. You can track by visiting the site directly, grabbing the widget for displaying your book’s sales rank on your own website, or grabbing the RSS feed so you can put it into your favorite RSS reader. The best part, and mind you I’m biased, is that you don’t have to create a login, and you can share your book’s link with your readers or friends by just sharing the link.

ML: I couldn’t charge a fee, because I know how it is to sell a handful of books a month ( I average 15 a month), and that was the exact audience I wanted to help, so the site is completely free. Yes, that means that my hourly rate for building and improving NovelRank is currently around $0.01/hour, but if an author is selling a 1000 books or more a month just on Amazon, you probably care a lot less about the details, just the fat check. I want to help the independents, even the authors who market their books but get limited information from their publishing company so they have no idea what works and what doesn’t.

LLBR: So how does NovelRank make money and stay online?

ML: Currently, the hosting for the site is paid for by the income my book generates, barely. However, if you click through to an Amazon domain from your book’s page and end up buying something on that visit to Amazon, I get a small percentage of that item’s price as a kickback from Amazon (around 5%) through their affiliate program. Costs you nothing. I also may run some NPR style ‘support NovelRank’ pledge drives once or twice a year, but this is a while away, if ever. I never intend to put ads on the site or charge. Clean design, useful information, and a supportive community has always been my top priorities.

ML: RSS feeds, spreadsheet downloads of data, twitter searches, sales rank widget, average sales rank for common time periods, some statistical info (best rank, worst rank, etc), and how long it’s been since you made a sale. Oh, and pretty charts as a visual aid for your sales rank (soon I’ll be adding charting for actually sales as well). This is just the beginning, what I considered the basics needed. In 2010 I have a whole list of new goals, including optional user accounts that you can use to track multiple books on one page (and still share that page with others). The complete chart of features is available on NovelRank.com.

ML: The lists are updated hourly, just like the sales rank. I thought of a few criteria that were interesting and tossed them all into a Top 10 Lists page, which feeds the frontpage of NovelRank with 3 lists, the 3 lists randomly changing hourly. I’m personally addicted to the ‘Recently Added’ list for obvious reasons. In the future I may add a few more lists, but I think there are enough for now: Top sellers, recently added, top Lulu.com books, and diamonds in the rough, a category of books that sold a copy recently, but it’s been a few days and they deserve some reader attention.

ML: Hourly, as long as Amazon actually updates. Sometimes an Amazon domain doesn’t provide new sales rank data, so nothing is updated on NovelRank’s site either. At one point I saw that Amazon.com and Amazon.ca were not updating a third of the day, over 8 out of 24 hours! Usually, this won’t effect much, unless your book has a sales rank below 400 where hourly changes make a difference in calculating the number sold. Of course, if your sales rank hangs out below 400, I’m insanely jealous.

ML: Every Amazon domain. I built it with Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in mind, but I was a little too prepared so switching on Canada, Germany, France, and Japan was actually really simple. I figured there was no harm in offering more information for authors, and it may prove interesting data to analyze later.

ML: Barnes & Noble is tracked by a few other tracking sites, but frankly I don’t see the benefit. Barnes & Noble isn’t as diligent in updating their sales rank, making the final results (estimating sales) difficult to make useful. They also don’t provide a convenient way to get at the data, and I just don’t think it benefits authors enough to warrant putting it above other features I’d like to add. I’d actually like to add back in the ability to track Kindle Edition books, since these are really huge sellers now, but Amazon removed the ability to get their information through the API (how I get the data), thus making it much harder for me get the hourly rankings. I want to resolve this, because it’s a market that is only growing each year.

ML: Sleep. I worked really hard for a few months to get it where it is now, and currently I’d give it a 7 on its usefulness for as many authors as possible. It can be better, and I want to get there, but I have to make time for it between my full-time job and the articles I post to the NovelRank blog that I think add some fresh information for authors. I really want to build an iPhone application that will make your phone ‘cha-ching’ whenever a sale is made; that idea alone motivated me a lot, and I don’t even have an iPhone. That will be late 2010 I’m sure, though other features will arrive sooner, such as the previously mentioned user ‘accounts’.
The other issue is that I’m a bit over halfway through my next book, a work of fiction about a sentient man trapped in his zombie body. Trust me, it’s awesome. I’m trying to finish that, revise it 2 or 3 times with some help, then get it self-published and in the public eye. I’m intending to donate 50% of the proceeds of that book to Child’s Play Charity, and use the other half to take a handful of friends living around the country on a group trip that none of us would or could do alone. I’ll need a bit of luck and a ton of sales, but I’m hoping the book and marketing will be good enough. Till then, I want to tell as many authors as possible about NovelRank; It’s nothing without them.