About Us
Who Created TitleZ and Why?
TitleZ was created by an independent publishing company—The Planning Shop—initially for our own use.
As we were doing research on potential titles, we got tired of having to click through pages and pages of Amazon.com rankings to find competitive titles. And we were frustrated that all we could get was a snapshot of where a title ranked on any given day. What if that one day was an anomaly? Other book sales data sources we found difficult to use, impossible to adequately search on keywords, and really, really expensive.
So Arthur Wait, our VP of Product Development and Technology started tinkering around in that way Arthur has. He began to develop a tool that would enable us to compare competitive titles easily, based on Amazon’s sales rankings.
In November, 2004, with Amazon’s permission, we began storing topselling titles in our database. Every night, our servers go in and pull down data from Amazon. Yes, that’s one giant database we have. We currently have data on several hundred thousand topselling titles, and that number grows every day.
We realized we had something that many other publishers would find really helpful. And soon others—agents, acquisition editors, booksellers—told us they would like to have this too. And since we’re entrepreneurs (our books all focus on entrepreneurship) and we’re located in Silicon Valley, it seemed like there was only one thing to do…
We created TitleZ. Our goal is to have a powerful, affordable, easy-to-use tool to help publishers, agents, editors, and others in the publishing industry make better, more informed decisions.
Click here for the TitleZ homepage.