Highest rank ever!
A lot of people ask me how book sales are going, so I thought I’d share a little bit about what I know. You would this this would be an easy thing to track, but you would be wrong.
As of December 29th, 2010 – about 4 weeks after the book was released – a contact of mine at McGraw-Hill told me they had sold 2,335 units. That number sounded good to me! But the trick is those don’t really count as sold, because those are all the units that are sitting in warehouses of the resellers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc) and could potentially be returned. The “sell-through” number is the real indicator how how many customers have books in hand. That same day, McGraw-Hill told me the sell-through was 75-100 copies a week through the major resellers (mostly Amazon).
I was craving better data, and luckily Amazon answered my call with access to a new Sales Info tab within their site. Any author that has a book sold on Amazon has access to “Author Central” where you can change the description, upload an image of yourself, and now track sales:
Another trick in the numbers is that this data is provided by Nielsen BookScan and includes only approximately 75% of all retail print book sales in the U.S. Previously this data was only available to publishers, so this is a huge step forward. However, this number does not include international sales or eBook sales. As of January 7, 2011 McGraw-Hill told me there were 497 Kindle sales. That’s a pretty good number too, but that’s the only eBook format they have data on – no idea how many Nook Book or other downloads there have been.
Within the BookScan data, I can see sales by geographical region (above), and totals per week (below).
Now Amazon itself doesn’t track number of books sold (or at least they don’t give access to that data) but they do track sales rank for both paperback and Kindle versions. But although this rank gets updated hourly, the only data point that gets saved is the sales rank around midnight Pacific Time.
To me it seems silly to go to the trouble of calculating a sales rank every hour, then just losing all that valuable data! I’ve mentioned this a few times in emails to them, but haven’t seen any changes. It would be AMAZING to have more detailed data to track cause and effect of marketing efforts without refreshing my book’s page every hour. For example – what’s the best time to put up a blog post, tweet, or Facebook update in terms of driving sales rank?
Another thing that gets updated hourly but they don’t track at all is sales rank within category. My book has ranged from #1 to unlisted in a few different categories, but I have no access to that history at all.
I realize Amazon does have an API, and there may be some way for me to get all this data collected and stored, but I have no idea how that works – Leave a comment if you do! I would love to post a real time (updated hourly) graph of sales rank on this site but will have to settle for the limited-but-better-than-nothing data Amazon provides for now.
Thanks to everyone who bought my book and helped with these numbers! And finally, I would LOVE if you left your honest opinion in a review on Amazon. Whether you’re a middle school student or a college professor, your opinion is valuable and I would love to hear it.
ok. i really tried to resist. I wanted your book from the beginning but i said “no – you have so many books to read. not by now. and so on”
but now … i just had to buy 🙂 Got mine from amazon germany today and i am looking forward to reading it. Compared to amazon.com the book is somehow expensive (30 $) here but when i see all your effort around the book … i am sure it is worth every cent ; )
Haha great! I too have a too many books problem. Thanks!
Strange. I’ve got 21.13$ for the kindle edition here. This may be because I’m in Belgium.
Anyway, thanks for your quick answer. It’s really interesting to know a bit how things happen “behind the book”.
Regarding a CC license, this would definitely be very interesting too.
So you already have plans for another book? 🙂
Hi,
I’ve got some questions for you regarding your book and the different resellers selling it.
Do you know, for example, that your book is more expensive as ebook than as the actual paper one @ amazon? I’m not against paying 30$ for a book or an ebook as I think the writer should be paid for what he/she did. But when the ebook is more expensive than the printed version, I think something is wrong. So, I was wondering how this happened, and if we (as customers) can expect the ebook price to go under the printed price. (As common people think it should be)
I first saw your book at adafruit.com. And I’m quite excited about it. It looks great. But they haven’t got the ebook (I don’t know if they decided not to or if they do not have the choice in the format they can sell). Do you have more information about that?
kangooooooo – right now it’s $18.19 for the paperback and $16.37 for the Kindle version on Amazon. I did notice for a while as well that the Kindle version was more expensive, which I also thought was silly. Unfortunately Amazon does all the pricing themselves and neither the publisher or the author have much (if any) say over this other than listing a suggested retail price. Sorry for any frustrations, but thank you for your interest! I’m completely shut out from most of this, I wish I could get you a better answer. Maybe for my next book I’ll self publish under a CC license so I can do whatever I want with the content.
Adafruit is great and I’m excited that they’re carrying my book. I don’t think they sell eBook versions of any of the books they carry. You’ll have to ask them but I assume there are some tricky licensing/access provisions to make for eBooks that might only be worth the hassle (or even be possible) for larger online stores.
Woo hoo thanks! Yeah I have no way to track international sales besides for noting when people contact me through this blog, email, twitter, etc. Thanks for the head’s up! It’s amazing to know that you are reading my story a half a world away! I spent a few months in Perth for work and Cairns on vacation but have only ever been to the airport in Sydney. Enjoy!
Hi, I really like your book. I got my copy last week from Amazon. I’m in Sydney, Australia, so it looks like it won’t show up in your sales numbers yet.
Cheers,
Greg Newton