Frequently Asked Questions
Nope. Well, almost nope: TitleZ is a software product, served via the
Internet in much the same way that other Internet-based products are delivered
(such as Yahoo! Mail or eBay). You don't need to install any special software
to use TitleZ, although you will need an Internet connection and your
existing Web browser.
A beta version is a pre-release version of a technology product. Since the
product isn’t finalized, it’s likely to have some problems and some features
won’t yet be implemented.
A beta release is used to test a product and learn how users interact with it
in real-life conditions. Thus, a beta release is limited to specific users who
are encouraged to provide feedback.
There are some nice advantages to being a beta user:
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You receive free
use of TitleZ during the beta period.
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You’ll receive at least
one month free and special low introductory pricing of TitleZ when paid
subscriptions begin.
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You’ll have the opportunity to tell us what you want in TitleZ and help shape
TitleZ to best serve the needs of people like yourself.
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You’ll be helping to create an easy, affordable, dynamic tool for people in the
publishing industry.
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You’ll be the first on your (virtual) block to use TitleZ. Cool!
Remember, you’re likely to experience “glitches” with the beta version of
TitleZ; these will be worked out before actual release. You’ll also find some
features that don’t yet work. But keep coming back to the TitleZ website
because improvements and enhancements will be made on an ongoing basis.
Most importantly, we really, really want to hear from beta users about their
experiences—bad and good—and their needs or requests they’d like to see as
TitleZ is developed in the future.
You can communicate directly with Arthur Wait, the developer of TitleZ, and
others working on this exciting product by emailing
info@TitleZ.com.
We anticipate offering TitleZ as a subscription, on a monthly basis. We're not
yet sure how much a monthly subscription will cost, but rest assured that it is
our goal to make TitleZ affordable for small publishers and authors. We
know, we know, that's not a particularly candid answer, but we're still working
on it.
We're shooting for later this year (2006).
Amazon rankings have become widely-used short-hand in the publishing
industry to gauge book trends and popularity. That being said, we’d love to add
other sources of book sales rankings. Do you know anyone we should talk to? Can
we use your name?
Yep. Amazon has made its data available and knows how we’re using it. We’ve got
their approval. It’s all legal…
Rankings are a comparative number; they indicate how a book is selling compared
to other books. Amazon assigns a unique rank to every book it sells, with the
best-selling title having a rank of "1", the second best-selling title having a
rank of "2", and so on. Amazon typically updates these ranks hourly.
We've found that a book’s sales rank, especially when tracked over time, gives
an excellent sense of how well that title is performing compared to other
titles—not just at Amazon, but in the book trade as a whole. It's good stuff.
All of the ranks you see on TitleZ are relative to Amazon's entire inventory of
books. In other words, a book with a rank of 2,500 is the 2,500th best-selling
book on all of Amazon (at the time the rank was calculated). The 7-, 30-,
90-day, and lifetime averages are also based on Amazon's entire inventory.
There is, of course, no hard and fast rule about what constitutes a
best-seller, whether you are looking at sales ranks or actual sales
volume. However, we'll throw caution to the wind and offer a few
generalizations.
First, it's important to look at a book's average sales rank over time--a
book that spikes to, say, number 25 on Amazon for an hour or two may be
selling well for that brief period of time (perhaps because the author just
appeared on a morning talk show or got a favorable review in a regional
newspaper), but you'll want to see how that book performs over days or weeks to
fairly judge its success. Plenty of books break into Amazon's top 1000 or even
top 100 for a few hours but are not able to sustain the high ranking over time.
So, bearing the above very much in mind, here's a temperature gauge you can
use to get an idea about a particular title's success. The following numbers
apply to average sales ranks over time:
< 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.
Keep in mind that books with average ranks above
100,000 may have performed much better before TitleZ started
tracking them. However, books that launch with ranks above
100,000 are probably not considered successful from a publishing industry point
of view. Of course, the book could be selling well through
non-bookstore channels such as trade shows, speaking events, etc. In general,
though, we've found that Amazon sales ranks provides a
good indicator for how a title is doing throughout the book market as a
whole.
...
There are probably two reasons for error reports.
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TitleZ is reliant on Amazon’s search engine. That means that if they’re having
a problem, we’re having a problem. One hint, though: when putting in terms for
a keyword search, try to limit your entry to as few words as possible. Amazon
seems to have the most trouble with longer phrases.
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This is the beta version. There are still lots of glitches in TitleZ. We’re
working as fast as we can to make this product as stable and robust as
possible. Bear with us.
PLEASE… let us know what you’re encountering, so we can do our best to fix it.
That’s why we’re running a beta version. Email us at
feedback@TitleZ.com or use the "Send Us Feedback" button at the bottom
of every page.
We here at The Planning Shop
originally created TitleZ for our own use so we could make better, more
informed decisions. We thought other publishers—and people in the publishing
industry—would find it useful, so we’ve decided to develop it into a marketable
product. You can read a bit more about our story here.
We’re reliant on Amazon’s search engine. If it’s not in Amazon’s database, it’s
not in ours. If your book doesn’t have a green triangle next to it, see above.
Click here for the TitleZ homepage.