Amazon sales rank tracking is a favorite pastime of authors, musicians, publishers, editors and anyone else who sells stuff through Amazon.

Unfortunately, its also a bit of a waste of time because a) it is time consuming, and b) it is of little practical use.

That's not to say that the Amazon sales rank is useless, its just that it can be more useful to view it and interpret it properly.

In order to do this, there are a number of online tracking Websites that allow you to get Amazon sales rank info quickly, and some even allow you to track books sales rank over time - with graphs.

One, called RankTracer (http://www.ranktracer.com), has been designed as a powerful analysis tool (Complete with the latest Web 2.0 functionality such as Flash Graphs, drag and drop lists and AJAX calls) and lets you do the following quite easily:

1) track any number of products on any of the Amazon locales
2) Receive weekly and monthly PDF reports
3) Provide useful sales rank statistics
4) Provide powerful graphing facilities that allow you to specify and order which products sales rank history you would like to view, a date range, the order in which sales rank traces should appear on the graph (useful if you decide to make use of their 3d bar graphs), date grouping, and even the type of graph to display
5) Renders interactive flash based graphs
6) Allows you to set rank alert boundaries that email you automatically when your products drops below or above a specified range
7) Review alerts that email you whenever you have a new customer review

That's all good and well, but what really distinguishes RankTracer is the fact that they have developed proprietary algorithms that actually analyze your sales rank data and give you an accurate estimate of your Amazon sales.

Instead of waiting on your publisher to send you quarterly or bi-annual reports you can now get an excellent idea of what your actual sales figures are.

Of course, if you are a publisher yourself, you can now get a good idea of what your competitors titles are actually selling.

RankTracer has a number of other uses to...

For example, if you want to see whether a review in a certain blog or Website has affected your sales, simply check up on RankTracer and see if your sales or sales ranks were impacted soon after the review went live.

RankTracer also provides Trace Credit that can be redeemed against any new subscriptions or renewals and can even be emailed to other people to use. This means that your publisher can buy discounted Trace Credit and email it to you and all their other authors so that you can track your title absolutely free... (It only costs them $2 a month anyway)

There are some even more advanced features for those people wanting to track a wide variety and a large number of products. RankTracer allows for the creation of Comparison Groups that automatically create comparison graphs in a prespecified manner. This helps to prevent you from wasting time selecting which products to show in which graph and where...

If, of course, you aren't that fanatical about your sales and sales ranks then simply setting RankTracer to email you with a weekly or monthly report with all the latest up-to-date info on your title's performance (including graphs and review info) is probably the way to go.