Russell Davies is an author. He's been experimenting with ways of promoting his book, but wasn't sure of the best way to measure the results. The book's rank on Amazon seemed the best measure of its popularity, but he'd have to remember to check it regularly. Surely that's something a computer could do for him...

That's where we came in. We soon had a prototype up and running which was getting the rank from Amazon.co.uk and sending the result in a twitter to Russell. We figured that other authors would find it useful too, and Booklert has grown from there.

Track One Book. Track Many Books

Once you've signed up with Booklert, you can start tracking books. Any books that are in Amazon's catalogue. Your books; your competitors' books; your favourite books; the books you hate... Booklert doesn't care. It will send you the rank of whichever books you're tracking at the times you've chosen, and tell you whether each book is climbing the chart, or falling from grace.

Choose When and How You Get Updates

From your settings page you can decide how frequently you receive the updates and how the updates should be delivered. You can get them as often as every hour (although that's only for the rank addict) or as infrequently as once a week. You can even configure a "quiet time" when Booklert will stop sending you updates each day.

There are two different ways that updates can be sent - the obvious method is via email, but if you have a twitter account then you can receive the updates there too (which means you can even get them sent to your phone).

Show Off Your Rank

If you want to promote your book on your own website or blog then you can use the Booklert badges. Follow the simple steps and you'll soon have a badge showing your book's cover and its latest rank on your site. Then if web visitors click on the book they'll get taken straight to the book's page on Amazon where they can buy themselves a copy.

You Don't Need a High Rank to Top Our Charts

And as a final bonus, every Sunday we work out the Booklert rank chart. Rather than just show the books with the highest rank, we look at the fastest movers in the rankings over the previous week. If your book is soaring up the rankings (even if that's because it started at the bottom...) then it will feature in the "Top Climbers" chart, and similarly, the books dropping like a stone will have a last glimpse of the limelight in the "Going Down" chart.

Booklert: how's your book doing?

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