Earlier I blogged about market research and how expensive it can be. Here’s one source that is free (for now!).
Titlez.com is a handy website for interpreting some of the mounds of data found on Amazon.com (with permission). Ever been frustrated trying to get sales ranks and other information? Enter a search phrase, book title, author or publisher and TitleZ gives you a list of books along with historical sales data.
Want to know what are the best-selling books on Amazon from a given publisher? Want to know how books from a given author are doing on Amazon? Want to see how other books on a similar topic are doing? TitleZ will quickly give you the information, arranged in a much handier format than Amazon’s–everything is on one page, whereas with Amazon you’d have to hunt down every single book and check its rank.
While Amazon generally lists books (by topic or author) in order of sales rank, TitleZ gives you the actual ranking as well as the history of a book’s sales rank. There’s also a compare feature. Check four or five titles from a list then click the “Compare” button at the bottom, and a more detailed chart comparing those titles will appear.
Marketers can track promotional opportunities and see which of several books your book is best paired with. They can also see changes more easily tied to other promotional appearances, tours or other marketing activities.
There are many other ways TitleZ allows users to customize the data as well. And did I say it was free? Well, it is during its beta phase. And you do have to sign up to use it. What will it cost and when will they start charging? They’re not saying yet.
