A new site for sales information about books has just appeared – Bookstat.
PG hasn’t had any views behind the curtain, but the promises sound very good:
To be useful, sales data has to reflect what your customers are actually buying. When you rely on data that misses 37% of the ebook and audio dollars they spend each day, or 60% of the books they purchase online, you’re flying your business half-blind.
Bookstat is the only industry data service that tracks all online book purchases at the retail point of sale regardless of publisher type. Unlike Nielsen PubTrack and the AAP’s Statshots, which only tally self-reported sales from a narrow sector of today’s expanded publishing industry, Bookstat lets you see the whole market.
And what a difference that makes.
Bookstat reveals the hundreds of millions of additional online book purchases from nonreporting publishers that PubTrack and the AAP are blind to — untracked sales worth $1.25 billion a year.
When you can see all these ebook and audiobook dollars that others can’t, you end up with a very different picture of today’s market. Hidden genres are revealed with barely tapped potential, where burgeoning reader demand is being fulfilled by the nontraditional suppliers who currently dominate those genres. In many of today’s highest-selling online book categories, the vast majority of these consumer sales have gone entirely unreported. Until now.
A shrinking ebook market? For some, perhaps. But a billion untracked dollars a year says otherwise.
. . . .
Bookstat’s lightning-fast, responsive dashboard lets you search by publisher, genre, author, title, BISAC, ISBN, or ASIN. Discover the top-earning publishers, authors, and titles in each genre right now. See their total ebook, audiobook, and online print sales for last quarter, last week, or even yesterday. Drill down into thousands of subgenres. Analyze sales by price point. By publisher type. By online discount offered. Slice the data any way you want.
From the largest Big Five trade publishers down to the scrappiest garage micropresses, to sales from Amazon’s in-house publishing imprints and format-dominating Audible Studios to J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore — data that you’ll find nowhere else — even the sales of individual self-published authors: it’s all right there, live at your fingertips, ready for you to ask it the questions that drive your business.
Link to the rest at Bookstat
As you might have guessed, Data Guy is involved
Perhaps DG considers Nielsen Bookscan to be a wounded gazelle…
Its more like he’s designed a complement to Bookscan. He’s not tracking physical bookstore sales, after all. Bookscan is. That’s what it does well.
The service tracks in more or less real time the performance of millions of titles. Takes a lot to do that.
Also, if I understand how the KDP dashboard works, Indies already have that capability for their own titles. Curiosity aside what value to Indies to track tradpub sales that closely?
The pro bono high level reports are plenty useful by themselves. Like total sales, average sale price, and indie share by genre. Current report.
Thanks, Data Guy, and PG for posting this. I expect DG will be along presently to explain in the comments, but it looks to me as if the Bookstat service is aimed at corporates to provide them with near-realtime sales data, and to provide customizable slices through the data. The data crawling and analysis engine behind Bookstat is presumably the same one that will periodically be reported at author earnings. If corporate subscription fees pay for the work that comes out in authorearnings, then that’s a model I applaud. The latest author earnings report is out today: http://authorearnings.com/report/january-2018-report-us-online-book-sales-q2-q4-2017/
Yes. Unfortunately this doesn’t look like a service individual authors can use, though we would love to know which genres are selling best, which are losing readership. Looks like only big corporations could afford this, though they are exactly the entities that don’t want to know. they want to continue sticking their heads in the sand. There’s no indication that I could see how much this service would cost an individual writer.
Erm. “Find out more”
“If your company’s annual revenues are $10 million or more…”
Don’t think that I will be subscribing any time soon.
Dang! I hope that line is “lorem ipsum” leftover from the site’s template. I’ve never seen metrics providers specify company revenues in that way for potential subscribers. Then again, it has been a while for me. Perhaps there’s a “lite” version coming soon.
@WritingObserver, you forgot “From the largest Big Five trade publishers down to the scrappiest garage micropresses…”
Yeah. Not so much. Misleading, much?
He’s using Big Publishing to fund better data scraping methods. Author Earnings is still where indies are going to want to go. The data collected will be presented there like usual.
If Data Guy is involved, it’s worth looking at!
Somebody has been busy.