
Novelrank is gone - ilamont
https://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,266705.0.html
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bartkappenburg
From their site:

On August 21st, Amazon decided that after 9 years, without warning, NovelRank
violated their Terms of Use. On August 31st they followed up all appeals by
closing the final domain: Amazon.com, effectively killing NovelRank.

Please export any data you want to keep as soon as possible.

If any publisher or other entity is interested in purchasing the valuable
NovelRank domain please email me a reasonable offer: mlurig@novelrank.com.

I was NovelRank's biggest fan. I made it for authors like me; who barely sold
any books, but it still felt good to know that someone found your writing
valuable. It grew to be valuable to so many others. I'm sorry this has
happened and I have to now focus on my new wife (married for the 1st time Aug
3rd) and what my future can be now that my income is gone.

Regretfully, Mario Lurig Founder, Developer, Advocate: NovelRank.com

~~~
projectramo
I read that too. One mystery: How did he make income off it?

~~~
desdiv
A combination of donations, affiliate links, and enterprise subscriptions.

>How much does NovelRank cost?[0]

>It's completely free! The site is supported by author donations, Amazon
bounties, and affiliate income when book purchases occur from Amazon click-
throughs on NovelRank.

>NovelRank also introduced NovelRank Enterprise Edition and the BuyBox
Research Tool, which offers a private sales rank and price tracker for any
product on any Amazon domain.[1]

[0] [https://www.novelrank.com/faq](https://www.novelrank.com/faq)

[1]
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/novelrank](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/novelrank)

~~~
tanilama
Could the offering the subscription service be the cause of what Amazon
claimed as a violation of their ToS? It doesn't really lead traffic straight
to Amazon website, rather it feels like a resale/repackaging of Amazon's data.

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extarial
Building a business around another platform can be extremely profitable, but
has great risk attached to it as well. We have seen this time and time again.
Be it changes to Twitter's API or changes to Instagram's API, it happens time
and time again. The only way to stay safe from this is to build your business
around an open source system, like Wordpress. However, I do think that there
should be at least some protection against moves like these - depending on
context of course.

~~~
beager
If a company sees you bottling their moat, of course they’re going to come
after you. I think this particular thing could have been symbiotic, and maybe
valuable enough to be a reasonable acquisition target by Amazon, but it’s hard
to thread that needle as a 3rd party tool, especially when many of them are
adversarial because of lack of official API support, or the general difficulty
of running a business based entirely off another business’s data.

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Zanni
From reading the comments, it seems a novel sales tracking system, Novel Rank
[0], which depended entirely on Amazon sales rank data, has had their access
denied, essentially shuttering the business.

[0] [https://www.novelrank.com/](https://www.novelrank.com/)

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jaipilot747
Anyone else missing context? The link opens to what seems like a Kindle
related forum on mobile.

EDIT: Links to the forum post when I use "Request desktop site".

~~~
giancarlostoro
Yeah, feels like I don't know enough about how Novelrank worked to begin with
to understand why it's somehow completely dependent on Amazon and cannot
operate otherwise.

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wodenokoto
"NovelRank is the best free resource for authors to track the sales rank of
their print and ebooks on Amazon with charting, sales estimates, RSS feeds and
more."

I'm kinda surprised Amazon doesn't offer that as a dashboard to
authors/publishers.

~~~
craftyguy
Maybe they plan to, and killing the competition is the first step.

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ikeboy
They lost their source of revenue. But they can get the data easily by
scraping or paying for a 3rd party API like the keepa API.

Plenty of other sales estimation tools, viral launch’s market intelligence,
jungle scout, etc

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ummonk
Some of the stuff mentioned in the linked thread certainly smacks of
monopolistic behavior. Given how much Trump hates Bezos, there might be a very
real opportunity to get a govt. investigation of Amazon's anticompetetive
tactics.

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cabalamat
It's about time that data owned by big corporations be put in the public
domain.

~~~
greglindahl
Non-creative data can't be copyrighted. However, Amazon can have whatever
terms they like for their affiliate, bounty, and data APIs.

~~~
cabalamat
> Amazon can have whatever terms they like for their affiliate, bounty, and
> data APIs.

Not if the law said they couldn't.

