That’s according to a blog post by author David Cullen. According to him his publisher won’t provide him with much data on the sales of his book Columbine. However, Amazon has, through a deal with Nielsen, now started to let authors see the last four weeks of Bookscan data for free. Cullen says this would have cost him thousands of dollars to buy from Nielsen.
Every author can get your info free by signing up for Amazon’s Author Central, which you are crazy not to be doing anyway.*
Amazon is not just giving away Amazon sales info, this is everything Nielsen collects, which includes most of their main competitors—about 75% of all print book sales, right from the cash register, so it’s immediate and authentic. It includes Barnes & Noble, Borders, Target, Amazon.com and some indies.
The main holdouts from BookScan are Walmart/Sam’s, plus some indies, bulk sales, etc. Ebooks are also excluded, but I get my Kindle numbers from novelrank.com.
Putting all these sources together, and making some estimates from the holes, Columbine appears to be selling about 650-750 copies per week, which is considerably higher than I thought. (And if brick/mortar sales mirror my Amazon paperback chart, I dropped steadily after release in March, until around Labor Day, when I leveled off and have remained in a consistent range.) …
With books, all that is hidden. Even from the author. We get a ridiculous royalty statement twice a year. It covers the six-month period that began about nine months earlier, and it’s only on books shipped to stores, not actually sold. And it has a big margin against returns removed, and that amount is not even specified. So I have to guess even at how many went to stores, with no indication of how many actually sold.
They never actually tell us how many sold in a period. A year and a half after my book’s release, I finally have a rough idea of how many it sold in hardcover the first six months, and only wild guesses about the paperback, launched nine months ago. …
I find it puzzling that publishing is so backward on this. I read an essay 3-4 years ago by an industry person making a very strong case for why publishers should share the info with authors realtime during the launch, and how authors could use it to mutual advantage.
The author said that someone in accounting or production was already keeping a spreadsheet with the info on a huge number of books anyway. All they had to do was give the author access. The author predicted the publishers would all ignore the suggestion. Correct.
Increasingly, authors are being asked carry a lot of the marketing of our own books. But publishers don’t give us any information to work with. We cast about in the dark, wondering if it’s having an impact, or we’re wasting our time. (Or more importantly, wondering which things that we’re doing are effective, vs the time-wasters.)
It seems like a no-brainer for publishers. And yet . . . nothing.
There’s a lot more information about all this in the blog post.
Via The Bookseller
Best of all, the sales are shown geographically on a map as well as over time. So if you’re making a promotional tour, you can measure the impact of those book signings. I know I was surprised to find that my books were doing well in NYC.
Many thanks to Amazon for funding this. Nielsen probably rightly figures that it’s not losing any income by allowing Amazon to pass this data along to authors. Few authors can afford their fees. But it is still good to know that this useful data is no longer the exclusive domain of the larger publishers.
Be sure to follow the link to Dave Cullen’s blog post for more details.
While written for print numbers, this piece reminds me of the main advantage that indie eBooks writers have in self-publishing. I can look up my sales statistics at any time of day ans see who bought what, when, how as well as where. I can also match these figures with daily website statistics and the number of reads/comments on our various blogs/Op-Ed pieces on several sites.
Maybe Amazon can create an app that tweets an author every time someone buys their book… lol.