How many books have been sold??

I would like to know that too.

hmmmmmm, I wonder.

Nielson Bookscan.

I went to the Neilsen Bookscan site at www.neilsenbookscan.com but it's not clear how to use it. Anyone know how to look up a certain book?

Cheryll

I believe you have to pay them for the service. And note that it only includes sales from participating book stores in the US; any sales outside the US will not be included, and some within aren't too, so it's probably not exactly what you want anyway.

You could try writing to the author and asking very nicely. If he's been paying attention to his royalty statements he should have a fair idea how many copies have been sold.

Math_Wiz said:

Let's say I go to the library and take out a book, and I find out that I really like it alot. And let's say I want to find out how many copies have been published and/or sold (plus or minus 50,000 copies). How would I go about doing that? Does anybody know?

Thanks,
Math_Wiz

Click to expand...

You can call Ingram at 1-800-937-8000 ext 36803 and put in the ISBN to get an idea of how many they sold this year, last year, and all time. Its not perfect, but it will give you some idea.

All of these only tell you part of the picture. If you need real, complete sales figure, you probably should ask the author, agent or the publisher.

Heh... authors have been trying to find out this same information since publishing began! Even semi-annual royalty statements don't tell an author how many books are SOLD. The publisher will only tell you how many have been shipped, and returned, but what might still be on the shelf in any particular store is unknown. BookScan has bits of the information. Mind you, they have the MOST bits of anyone, but lack significant secondary markets like Wal-Mart, Target, mom-and-pop groceries and independent bookstores (unless they happen to use a major distributor, like General Independents, to get their books.) And BookScan is EXPENSIVE! Each individual list (like Romance, or Science Fiction) costs thousands of dollars per year. I think I heard once that the FULL list is in the quarter million per year range.

It's frustrating, but there you go...

amazon.com sales rank data is free (although again, only part of the picture)

Amazon.com sales rank is good for nothing.

maestrowork said:

Amazon.com sales rank is good for nothing.

Click to expand...

Well, it's certainly of limited value, but it will indicate if a book is selling well at any given time. It's certainly better to be # 106 that #100,106.

It only makes a difference if you're in the 10,000 range. Outside, all it says is that your book sold one or two copies THIS week.