A Publisher's Conversation with Authors: Is It Possible to Track Book Sales? Or why did Mother's purchase of my book not show up in book sales tracking?

 

 

1.     It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side.

Today's topic shares information about tracking book sales. In complete frankness, it is a repeat of an explanation I provided to MSI Press LLC authors in one of our monthly newsletters. 

An author recently asked (and others have previously asked) how to tell if a particular action results in a specific number of sales. Alas, we have no way to tell unless we are in direct contact with a bookstore making a large order. Book reports from Ingram (distributor) come as total sales. I wish there were a way to tell sources. It would make marketing and promotion a science instead of an art. Our distributor will not provide us with that level of granularity; it is far too costly, especially when you are talking about 5-10 books here, a couple of books there, and a couple dozen elsewhere. I have tried to get them to do big swath information dumps (libraries, bookstores, online sellers), but they won't. So, we are stuck with guess work and the need for strategic marketing/promotion so that we can figure out some things for ourselves.  

Here are some things that can provide insight:

• Once a book settles down (typically after the first three months of generally good sales), it reaches an equilibrium based on our social marketing and an author's ongoing promotion. If we only do one thing at a time to disturb that equilibrium, we can assume any bump in sales came from that additional activity (and we do try to organize that way), which does give us a sense of the value of things. 
• Sometimes, an influencer notices an advertisement, gets the book right away or later, and then later shares the information -- the bump could come months later and we would not know why. However, googling the book when bumps arrive can sometimes take us back to the helpful post by an Influencer and comments on the post often indicate that readers are picking up on it. 
• Amazon sales ranking will not help because it only shows relative (compared to other books) sales volume over the past hour. Some strategic promotions, such as a 5-day Kindle promotion, however, can show a bump in the ranking, and that may be due to the promotion. Repeat the promotion with the same bump -- more evidence that it represents increased sales that are likely due to the promotion. 

What we can find out:

•   Publishers can get a breakdown by date. At least, Ingram will provide the sales record for any given book on any given date. That, though, is the date a book is purchased from the distributor, not necessarily the date purchased by a reader from a bookseller. Booksellers will purchase multiple copies, so if your next-door neighbor, for example, buys a book today and you know therefore that a sale has been made, that purchase may not show up as a sale in the distributor’s database if the bookseller already has the book in inventory. Nor will it show up if the neighbor buys a used book. 
• Nor will Amazon help because its ranking shows the relative (comparison with other books) volume (not actual volume) over the last hour.
• Recently, Ingram has begun providing a breakdown by category on a daily basis as well as aggregate for a week or a month. That is quite helpful (at least for a publisher) in knowing what genres of books are selling. It does not, however, tell us much about which individual books acre carrying that genre to success; for that, we need the breakdown by date. 

The bottom line is that while sales figures are generally available and clear, the source of those sales is not. You will not be helped much in finding the source by a distributor or bookseller. If you are traditionally published, your publisher will likely have more insights a self-published author can gain but nonetheless is operating partially in the dark. 

Lesson for today's Tuesday talk: Use strategic book promotion, track it over time, and talk to your publisher to gain some insight into the markets you should be targeting for book cost-effective promotion.

Read more posts about publishing HERE.

The Tuesday talks reflect real discussions between the management of MSI Press LLC and our own authors or those would-be authors who come through our doors but don't make the cut--yet. If you have a topic you would like addressed, leave the question in the comment section. Chances are, in our 18 years of publishing first-time and experiences authors, we have had a conversation with one of our authors that we can share with you.

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