October 21, 2011
By the ZippyCart Content Team
Three major publishers will soon provide authors with access to book sales data online through new author portals.
Publisher Simon & Schuster announced Wednesday the creation of its author portal that will allow authors and illustrators to see data online about the sales of their published material. Authors will have access to the last six weeks of sales data broken down by different types of booksellers and book formats. There will be data for e-book, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook sales.
Simon & Schuster’s author portal will also feature tools for authors to manage online interactions with readers. In addition, the publisher has released a portal for agents that will provide information similar to that stored on the author site.
Two other major publishers, Random House and the Hachette Book Group, also announced Wednesday that they are in the process of creating ecommerce solutions for authors. Hachette’s author portal will be up and running sometime in 2012; Random House has not publicly announced a date for the launch of their site. A spokesman for Random House said that their author portal will feature marketing tools and other information in addition to sales data.
This marks the first time that major publishers have provided authors with direct access to data about their book sales. Previously it could take months for authors to get information about how well their books were selling and they often would have to go through their agents to get data from a publisher. The new sites should ease some of the tension between authors and publishers regarding the availability of sales information.
Back in December 2010 ecommerce solution Amazon began offering authors access to Nielsen BookScan sales data. Nielsen BookScan provides limited data about print sales of books and, through Amazon’s “Author Central” site, authors can track the past four weeks of a book’s sales. BookScan is estimated to report on approximately 75 percent of print sales and does not track e-book sales. Amazon itself keeps track of e-book sales but currently only reports the figures to publishers and not to authors themselves.
The launch of services allowing authors direct access to sales data about their published material means that authors will be notified much sooner than in the past if their books are not doing well. With timely access to sales figures and information, authors will be better able to address problems and come up with a plan to market their books more effectively and boost shopping cart sales. Some of the additional tools and resources that these new author portals will provide to authors are focused on marketing strategies including the use of social media sites such as Twitter, as well as video promotion through sites like YouTube.
Gavin is a graduate of Washington State University where he studied Communication with a public relations emphasis. He left Pullman behind and currently resides in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle where you might run into him at happy hour. When he is not writing something for ZippyCart he enjoys travelling. His favorite film is Pulp Fiction (Say what again. Say what again, I dare you, I double dare you...! ) and his favorite movie genre is zombies. Follow him on Twitter: @_gdonnelly
