From Forbes (January 2013):
When Colleen Doran, an author and artist who has worked with luminaries such as Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis, recently compared her Nielsen BookScan sales figures with her actual sales figures, she got a bit of a shock.
Nielsen’s BookScan is one of the publishing industry’s key metrics service, providing book sales numbers for the US, UK, Australia and other countries. It does this by collecting sales information from retailers every Saturday night, aggregating them, and then selling the results. Without an expensive subscription to BookScan, it used to be impossible to see your own figures, but now BookScan feeds its data into Amazon where authors can access it through Author Central.
When Doran did the maths on her BookScan numbers, she found that for some of her books, Nielsen was underreporting by quite a bit:
OK, so let’s have a look at one of my books published after Amazon linked to Bookscan. I am not going to tell you what this book was, just that it is a book from a major publisher.
According to Bookscan, it has sold 542 copies in hardcover. Ouch. What a bummer! This is accurate as of yesterday.
Except I got a royalty statement on this thing. And according to my royalty statement, this book sold 7181 copies by end of the accounting period, which was last summer. As of now, it has sold over 10,000 copies in hardcover. Respectable numbers. Not tearing up the charts, but enough to issue a new edition.
It’s widely recognised that BookScan doesn’t and cannot count every single book sold in every single outlet, but it’s usually assumed to capture a decent percentage, anywhere up to 70 80 (see update below) per cent of US sales to 95 per cent of UK sales, according to one British publisher who wished to remain anonymous. He went on to explain Bookscan’s major limitations:
[In the UK] BookScan has almost complete coverage of the major indie and high street booksellers, Amazon and supermarkets. But it doesn’t capture specialist retailers [such as] the specialty comics trade. For most books that’s not an issue, but in science fiction, which is sold into specialists like . . Page 45, we had very good sales but they weren’t visible to Bookscan.
. . . .
Ottaviani, whose recent book, Feynman, debuted at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list for graphic novels, started out in non-fiction self-publishing in 1997. Both Feynman and his upcoming book, Primates, are published by First Second, a division of Macmillan. He told me:
Most publishers, both within comics and in the prose world, had no idea what to do with my books at the time. So I published them myself; I’m glad I did, and that the comics world — from readers to distributors — has always been more accepting of self-published work than the rest of the book trade.
In my discussion of numbers I’m talking mainly about that self-published work, and I know that sales numbers for those books put me squarely in the so-called midlist author range.
And midlist authors are the most vulnerable, not quite successful enough to guarantee a continued relationship with their publisher, but not bombing to the point where they know they are going to get dropped regardless. For a midlist author, their career could go either way and so large discrepancies in how their sales are reported to the industry are frustrating and alarming. No one wants the world, or the industry, to think their book is underselling when in fact its doing quite well.
For tech author Tom Hughes-Croucher, the key problem with BookScan is that it doesn’t count ebooks:
For technical books, ebooks greatly outweigh physical books now, and I think that’s an increasing trend everywhere. I’ve also noticed that my publisher, O’Reilly, sell a fair amount of e-books directly because it means they deliver it in more formats than just Kindle.
According to the British publisher I spoke to, digital sales are now expected to be between 25 and 55 per cent for general trade fiction, which is a huge problem for BookScan.
Link to the rest at Forbes
An interesting article but it was written 7 years ago (as PG makes clear) and I’d be interested if anyone can point to a more recent piece about BookScan’s current coverage of the market.