Setting Up Daily Book Monitoring

What Book Monitoring Does

Book Monitoring is the foundation of PublishRank's subscription value. It tracks your books' BSR, review count, star rating, price, and category ranks over time. Instead of checking Amazon manually, you get a daily snapshot with historical charts — so you can see trends rather than isolated moments.

This data powers other tools too. Rank Momentum needs at least 7 days of BSR data to show your trajectory. Your 90-Day Roadmap pulls from your monitoring history. Getting your books into monitoring early is essential.

How to Add Books

1. 1

   Go to My Books (Book Monitoring dashboard)

2. 2

   Click Add Book

3. 3

   Paste your book's ASIN or Amazon URL

4. 4

   Confirm — PublishRank pulls your title and cover and begins daily tracking immediately

You can add up to 50 books per account. These can be your own titles, competitor books you're benchmarking, or books you're researching. Each book gets its own BSR chart, review history, and individual alert settings.

What Gets Tracked

For each monitored book, PublishRank records:

• BSR — Amazon Best Sellers Rank, updated daily (or more often if you choose a higher polling frequency)
• Review count — total number of customer reviews
• Star rating — average rating
• Price — Kindle and paperback prices when applicable
• Category ranks — your position within each Amazon subcategory you're listed in

All of this builds into historical charts you can view on each book's detail page. The more days of data you have, the more useful Rank Momentum and trend analysis become.

Setting Up Alerts

Alerts notify you the moment something changes. You can configure them per book from the book detail page or from the Alerts settings. Available alert types include:

• New review — when your review count goes up
• Review dropped — when Amazon removes a review (optional, off by default)
• BSR major change — when BSR improves or drops significantly (e.g. 20% or more)
• Bestseller badge — when your book hits #1 in a subcategory and earns the orange badge
• Rating dropped — when your star rating falls below a threshold
• Category rank change — when your category rank shifts

You can choose whether to receive alerts in-app only, or by email as well. Alerts are shown on your Dashboard and in the Alerts section.

Polling Frequency

By default, each book is checked daily. You can increase the frequency (e.g. twice daily or hourly) for books you're actively promoting — more frequent checks mean alerts fire sooner and your charts have finer resolution.

Higher frequency uses more of your account's scraping capacity. If you're monitoring many books, keeping most on daily and only boosting frequency for a few key titles is a good balance.

Pausing and Removing Books

You can pause monitoring for any book without losing its history. Paused books stop being scraped until you resume. Use this when a book is unpublished or you're temporarily not interested in tracking it.

Removing a book deletes it from your monitoring list. Historical data may be retained for a period — check your account settings. If you need the slot for a different book and you've hit the 50-book limit, removing a low-priority book frees up space.