We talked about Amazon book sales recently and how to decipher the ranking system. How many books are you selling per week when your ranking is in the 100,000 range versus the 300,000 or 1,000,000 range? Well, I discovered that there is a way to get at least a little bit more information. Join AuthorCentral at Amazon.com. If you have your books listed at Amazon.com, there is no additional fee to join AuthorCentral.
You’ve heard of the Nielsen ratings for TV. Well, Nielsen also rates books. The Nielsen BookScan program includes book sales through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other outlets. They include approximately 75 percent of all retail print book sales. But this does not include library sales and those to wholesalers. In fact, they claim that sales information at AuthorCentral may underestimate your total sales.
It’s interesting to see the reports related to your book sales. They give numbers of books sold during a certain time period. And they provide a map of the US with a color code showing where your books are selling.
Amazon also provides a graph showing your Kindle book activity. Find out here where your book is ranked among their collection of Kindle books.
We’ve talked about what the rankings means. I learned that the Nielsen report comes in on Fridays. So if there’s a big change in your Amazon book ranking on Friday, that could be the reason. However, they stress that if your ranking goes up, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your book sales were phenomenal that week—the ranking is, of course, affected by the sales of other books, as well. The same is true if your ranking figures go down—it might not mean that you sold fewer books, but that others sold more books.
It’s still not an exact science. You are warned at the AuthorCentral site that the statement from your publisher may differ from what you discover at AuthorCentral. But it certainly offers a bit more information than you had before visiting this site.
And if you want more information than is shown on your AuthorCentral pages, you can request additional sales data from Nielsen for a fee.
There used to be a number you could call to check on the sales of books distributed through Ingram. This was handy information to obtain when you were putting together the competition portion of your book proposal or determining the potential for a book you were planning. But that service is no longer available. I was hoping that you could use AuthorCentral to check sales on books other than your own. But it doesn’t appear that you can.
For now, I suggest that when you research your competition, you check the media pages at the author’s website to see if they have distributed press releases giving sales information or, at least, an indication of their book’s popularity.
In the meantime, if you have a book with a publisher and you are eager to find out how that book is doing in between receiving your royalty statements, you might want to sign up for AuthorCentral at Amazon and satisfy your curiosity—at least to a degree.
http://authorcentral.amazon.com