Deborah Cooke: Author

Yesterday, it was announced that Amazon.com had launched a new service for authors. Those authors who are registered with Amazon’s Author Central program can now see their Bookscan data for the past month.

For free.

Sorted by title and by geographic region.

Although Bookscan does not include Kindle copies sold (Bookscan is for print books) Amazon does offer a Kindle sales activity graph for each title and also Amazon sales ranking data over time.

Wow! It sounded almost too good to be true, but I checked it out, and it’s even better than expected. I am enormously impressed.

Okay, what do all these phrases mean? First of all, Amazon Author Central is a program which lets authors provide data to Amazon, so that books can be sold more effectively. Through Author Central, an author can blog directly on Amazon, or create an RSS feed from an existing blog so it will appear on Amazon. Authors can upload photographs and create lists (or correct existing lists) of their books and backlist. For example, while I was on Amazon checking out the Bookscan feature, I added both DARKFIRE KISS and FLYING BLIND to my booklist. This means they will be displayed to readers as being of my Deborah Cooke author list, and that my bio, website link, blog etc. will be displayed on those book’s pages as well. This is a very useful thing in itself.

Bookscan is a service which tracks point of sale data for print books in the U.S. Not all sources report to Bookscan (Walmart is a notable exception) but Bookscan provides the closest thing to sales data on the closest thing to real time basis. Their numbers are compiled weekly for members/subscribers. It is, however, a very expensive service and there is some data sharing traditionally associated with subscription, so it has tended to be data accessible by big publishers. This leaves authors and agents somewhat in the dark in terms of timely sales data. RWA does offer a Bookscan subscription service to PAN members which provides some data on a weekly basis – subscribers can see the sales data for the previous week for the top 100 selling titles in the Romance category of Bookscan. Once a title drops to #101, though, its data is no longer visible. For most authors, this only provides data in the month immediately after a print release. Publishers Lunch has recently launched a service for agents to subscribe to Bookscan.

It seems that how Bookscan manages these cheaper subscriptions is to make only part of the data visible on the cheaper deal. My understanding is that publishers (or full subscribers) can search by title with no limitations in terms of time or sales ranking.

So, the Amazon feature is wonderful. It only allows an author to see his or her own data, but really, that’s what I’m most interested in seeing. And I can see it regardless of how many units have sold or relative ranking – I could see, for example, that three copies of THE PRINCESS sold last week, as well as where they sold. (Incredible that that book is selling at any level, twelve years on!) This opens lots of possibilities – not just in terms of having more information, but in terms of measuring whether any given promotion has been effective, on a regional or national basis.

And that’s just exciting.

Thanks Amazon! In the ever-changing landscape of publishing, it’s great to see something good happen for authors.