Amazon gives Bookscan data access to authors

by John Jackson Miller

BookScan, the A.C. Nielsen service that tracks book sales using point-of-purchase information in thousands of bookstores — plus online sales from Amazon — has now made its sales data available through Amazon. If you're the book's author, that is. As the Los Angeles Times also reports, Amazon has added a Sales Data tab to the dashboards of Amazon Author Central accounts, providing geographical breakdowns of sales.

Sample of Amazon's geographical breakdown for a title

As an Amazon author, I took a test drive. First of all, a main page aggregates all an authors' sales over a four-week period, allowing you to see which of your books sold the most copies. Maps show the geographical breakdowns of sales — only the continental United States is depicted.

In the drilldowns, there are per-title sales by week, with four-week tracks that can be viewed by title or format, such as paperback and hardcover. Amazon Ranking History is also included, showing a book's ranking at Amazon over time. (To see how far back the tracking went, I checked on one of my older books; the three major graphics provided appear here, minus identifying detail.)

Sample of Amazon's Bookscan four-week copy counts for a title

Graphic novels and trade paperbacks are included for tracking. The Times report says that "BookScan's sales tallies do not currently include sales of e-books, for the Kindle or other devices," Amazon says, but I was able to view the Ranking History for my own e-books across time. So while Kindle numbers aren't provided, you do see the tracking. The "all available" track goes back six months for Kindle items; a little more than a year on books.

BookScan combines sales reported by participating retailers, including Borders and Walden, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Target, and Buy.Com. Some retailers do not participate, including Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. As such, it amounts to what Nielsen says is 75% of book sales in the United States. Diamond's sales through comics shops are not included.

Sample of Amazon's Rank History track for a title

Now, the trick with Amazon Author Central is that while it initially populates your list of titles based upon Amazon's records of author names, the search engine is not infallible; some of my own books are there, some not. It is up to the author to submit corrections to the list — a painless process, you just visit your book's page on Amazon and copy the item number. Those corrections are reviewed at Amazon, so you can't just create an account and track anybody's books.

The four-week track means it's more of a system designed to provide creators snapshots, as opposed to their own accounting system; you'd have to record the numbers every week. As yet, it's only a graphical interface; you can't pull down a table or Excel chart. Presumably that is a possibility for the future.

Still, this is a major innovation and one that will be very useful to many creators. Amazon gives an creator or author credit in its system not just to writers of graphic novels, but also to artists, so presumably, those creators would be eligible to apply for Amazon Author Central accounts as well.