In case any authors out there don’t already know it, you can get the Neilson Bookscan numbers for your books through Author Central on Amazon. I’ll confess to being able to imagine the worst, so I find the numbers amazingly soothing. Did The Wednesday Sisters sell at all in the last four weeks? It’s been out for two and a half years now; even the paperback has been out for almost two years. One look at the map on Amazon Central, though, shows me that not only did it sell, but it sold in every geographic area in the country that bookscan looks at, with the strongest sales in, surprisingly, Los Angeles. So instead of imagine that my little book is dead, now I can imagine that one of the top producers in Hollywood is trying to decide how much to bid for the movie rights. Or at least settle down to write the next one, which is the soothing I really need.
If you haven’t already figured out how to do this:
1. Go to one of your books on Amazon.
2. Click on your name and go to your author page. If you don’t already have one, you can set one up at authorcentral.amazon.com.
3. Scroll down to the box labelled “Feedback” and click on the link that says “Visit Author Central”
4. Click on the menu bar link for “Sales Info”
Voila! A nifty little map and graph, with all sorts of information you can dice all sorts of ways. Just in case you were getting tired of checking your Amazon ranking, or wondering what it means.
Neilson Bookscan, by the way, provides point of sale data for the publishing industry. It doesn’t capture all book sales, but the things I’ve read suggest they capture about 75% of print books. No e-books, though. So your numbers will be understated. And Amazon updates the sales data at 12 a.m. Pacific Time every Friday. –Meg
