Things I do that make me wonder if I'm obsessive-compulsive.
I've always been obsessed with statistics. When I sold art on eBay, I kept meticulous records of everything I sold and how much I made. I maintained huge spreadsheets and databases tracking sales and profits when I ran HammerTap.
My latest project, FAKE: Forgery, Lies & eBay, is more difficult to track. After months of effort put into writing and editing the book, which is now finally hitting the shelves of bookstores, I'm finding it impossible to discover how many copies are selling on a daily basis. I'm sure I'll eventually get a royalty break-down from my publisher, but in the meantime, I'm yearning for more immediate statistical gratification.
There is, of course, BookScan, a book sales tracking service from the people who brought us the Nielsen television ratings. But it's very expensive. My publisher gets these reports, but I'm not going to bother them every day for updates.
And so, to give myself some idea of how the book is selling, I do two things:
1. Booksandwriters.com. This service checks amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com sales rank figures and sends me an email message each time they change. These sites rank all the books they are selling, ordering them from best to worst-selling. The best-selling book on amazon.com, for instance, is ranked #1. As I write this, my book is ranked #152,439 on this site, which isn't very good, but this number fluctuates wildly from day-to-day. I was at 40,000 earlier today and if I sell a few more copies on Amazon tonight I will be back in the top 20,000. I hope, after the official release date, when we get some press, to do much better on Amazon. The problem with sales rank is that, while it tells you how the book is selling compared to other books, it doesn't give you much of an idea of how many books are actually selling. And these online sales venues, while they are huge, still account for a relatively small fraction of books sold at retail.
2. Ingram Book Group. As I understand it, this is one of the largest book distributors in the country, a middle-man that ships something like 10% of all books from publishers to retailers. And if you call Ingram at 615-213-6803, you can enter the ISBN for a book and listen to a silky-voiced robot tell you how many of that book the company has in stock and, more importantly, how many copies its retailers have sold. I've heard that you can take an Ingram sales figure, multiply it by ten, and get a rough idea of a book's total sales. I'm not sure if this is accurate, though. One of my publisher's books sold over 80,000 copies, and Ingram reports sales of fewer than 3000. But at this point, this is the best way I have to track day-to-day sales.
And I need a daily fix.
My latest project, FAKE: Forgery, Lies & eBay, is more difficult to track. After months of effort put into writing and editing the book, which is now finally hitting the shelves of bookstores, I'm finding it impossible to discover how many copies are selling on a daily basis. I'm sure I'll eventually get a royalty break-down from my publisher, but in the meantime, I'm yearning for more immediate statistical gratification.
There is, of course, BookScan, a book sales tracking service from the people who brought us the Nielsen television ratings. But it's very expensive. My publisher gets these reports, but I'm not going to bother them every day for updates.
And so, to give myself some idea of how the book is selling, I do two things:
1. Booksandwriters.com. This service checks amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com sales rank figures and sends me an email message each time they change. These sites rank all the books they are selling, ordering them from best to worst-selling. The best-selling book on amazon.com, for instance, is ranked #1. As I write this, my book is ranked #152,439 on this site, which isn't very good, but this number fluctuates wildly from day-to-day. I was at 40,000 earlier today and if I sell a few more copies on Amazon tonight I will be back in the top 20,000. I hope, after the official release date, when we get some press, to do much better on Amazon. The problem with sales rank is that, while it tells you how the book is selling compared to other books, it doesn't give you much of an idea of how many books are actually selling. And these online sales venues, while they are huge, still account for a relatively small fraction of books sold at retail.
2. Ingram Book Group. As I understand it, this is one of the largest book distributors in the country, a middle-man that ships something like 10% of all books from publishers to retailers. And if you call Ingram at 615-213-6803, you can enter the ISBN for a book and listen to a silky-voiced robot tell you how many of that book the company has in stock and, more importantly, how many copies its retailers have sold. I've heard that you can take an Ingram sales figure, multiply it by ten, and get a rough idea of a book's total sales. I'm not sure if this is accurate, though. One of my publisher's books sold over 80,000 copies, and Ingram reports sales of fewer than 3000. But at this point, this is the best way I have to track day-to-day sales.
And I need a daily fix.
3 Comments:
The thing about statistics like these, of course, is that when you have the numbers, you know where you are. You're not guessing, you're not assuming, you KNOW. This, of course, is important...
Yes, very true. For now, though, it's just a waiting game. And I'm an impatient man.
Ken, Just read your book! A must read for any eBay Powerseller! It rates in my top 3 ebay books list.
While you may have been looking back writing the book, I think the best of life for you has only begun! Best wishes never give up!
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