Bookscan
Busy day, so this is gonna be quick.
Agent Andrew Zack blogged the other day about Bookscan, a service to track and report book sales: The Lie that is Bookscan.
My own agent, Joshua Bilmes, has posted his own thoughts, disagreeing with Zack’s assessment: A Bookscanner Darkly
Personally, I tend to agree with Joshua, and not just because he sells my books. As far as I know, most writers, publishers, and agents know perfectly well that Bookscan represents a percentage of total sales, and that percentage could be anywhere from 70-80% for one author but under 50% for another. Bookscan seems to capture a lower fraction of mine, since I do better with independents.
I don’t think Bookscan ever claimed to report ALL sales. It’s more data than anything else I’ve seen, save from the publisher itself, but it’s definitely not 100% of my sales.
A publisher using Bookscan as the sole criterion for rejecting an author (as described in Zack’s post) is troubling, but I see that as a problem with the publisher, not with Bookscan.
(I do still track and graph my Bookscan numbers every week to fulfil my neurotic validation needs, of course. They don’t tell me actual sales, but they do help me see trends.)
Steven
June 30, 2009 @ 10:34 pm
I don’t have the ability to track Bookscan numbers; is it worth the cost to join/get the info or is it just as maddeningly insane in bouncing around as Amazon rankings (my only current measure, other than quarterly royalty reports, of my sales)?
SES
Jim C. Hines
July 1, 2009 @ 7:47 am
There’s no way I’d pay the $3000 – $5000 cost for an account. For individual authors, I don’t think it’s worth it. (Most authors I know either get the numbers from someone else, or in one case, they managed to set up a group account that ran about $100 – $150 per member.)
Steve Buchheit
July 1, 2009 @ 9:11 am
Garbage in, garbage out. But that garbage, having passed through an expensive computing system and costing the client tons of cash, then becomes sacrosanct and none dare criticize it. (programmer’s axiom circa 1980s).
Yeah, it’s the second generational effect. The first generation knows the numbers are wonky, have been since the beginning, but nobody has better numbers over a whole industry, so it becomes the only metric (If you data analysis requires a straight line graph, acquire only two data points, sadistic statistics rule #3). Then, the next generation, having not been around when everybody agreed the data was faulty but was used only because it was the only datum available, are taught that the numbers are golden and you can never vary from such numbers (or that, “Hey, this is usually only 70% of the actual sales” instead of “at best this is only 70%”). The third generation then worship at the alter of the numbers. The fourth generation realizes it’s all been a shell game, sees the business cycle spinning ever smaller towards it’s eventual crash, sets up their own faulty metrics counts which supplant the previous system, but have a greater reliability because everybody knows how wonky they are… (wash, rinse, repeat).
Jim C. Hines
July 1, 2009 @ 2:45 pm
Steve – I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but that makes sense. Interesting…