Finding a publisher's sales

Get a Nielsen BookScan account.

Warning: Not cheap.

Warning 2: Incomplete; can be misleading.

Seconding James. Or you could ask them direct, and hope they respond; or you could look up their annual accounts, which should show you their turnover and so on, which might provide a useful parallel.

I wonder, though, why you want to find out this information.

If it's to help you decide which publishers to submit to there are other, far easier ways to work.

Here's an easy test:

Walk into your nearest bookstore. Are books from that publisher on the shelf? Yes/No.

Have you checked up on the publisher in our Bewares and Recommendations room? While it's tempting to accept an offer, it's better to remain unpublished than to be published badly, and without an agent to support you it's very difficult to work out what's a good contract and what's a bad one.

How to check sales history on a publisher?

I saw this today while looking through the Bewares forum. It was posted a couple of years ago re: a micro press that said it paid royalties but didn't mention anything about advances.

"If they're a royalty only paying publisher, then you should check their sales history because there's little point in getting a higher percentage of zero sales."

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6132739&postcount=3

I've seen similar statements in many other threads, when questions are asked about small publishers.

But - how does someone like me, without publishing connections, check sales history? I think agents and editors (and maybe anyone wiling to pay?) have access to BookScan, but I don't, and I imagine most other writers don't.

So - how to get that information?

Maybe you can email the authors they've published and ask for rough numbers? You're a fellow writer looking to verify how effective the publisher is; hopefully the writers would be amenable to giving you an honest heads-up about what their experience with that publisher has been.

Here's a roundabout and non-scientific way to get at least an estimate. If their books are sold on Amazon, look at the Amazon rankings for as many books as possible from that publisher. If more than half their catalog has rankings between 900,000 and 6 or 7 million, you know those particular books have not sold on Amazon in at least six months to a year. If the book has NO Amazon ranking, then that version of it has never sold on Amazon. Amazon is not the only outlet in the world, but it is one of the biggest.

Low numbers like that are often indicators for low sales in other markets, or at least little promotion on Amazon.

www.salesrankexpress.com can be unwieldy to use, but once you plug in the ISBN or Amazon number, you should get a snapshot of the book's current status within Amazon rankings. If the author or publisher has already activated the book within that service, you can also get an idea of its sales history from the time of activation. This ranking service is rather bad when it comes to high-sellers doing multiple sales a day, but it's more accurate for low-selling books (single or double-digits per month).

jjdebenedictis said:

Maybe you can email the authors they've published and ask for rough numbers? You're a fellow writer looking to verify how effective the publisher is; hopefully the writers would be amenable to giving you an honest heads-up about what their experience with that publisher has been.

Click to expand...

I had to add to this: don't count on it. Some authors may still be in the honeymoon phase with an unsatisfactory publisher. They may be unwilling to admit they made a mistake choosing this publisher. Or they may have ulterior motives to bring in more new and unsuspecting authors. By all means, ask. But try to verify by other methods. If the publisher is based in the US, sometimes you can access state tax data to find out what their declared income was in previous years.

The Amazon sales numbers are wildly unpredictable, besides being easily gamed by anyone who wants to do so. Get twenty friends together to order your book at the exact same time and watch your Amazon number shoot up the charts!

A book that sold 100 copies ten days ago and nothing since, and a book that sold nothing for the last ten days but 100 today, will have sales numbers that are orders of magnitude apart, even though each sold the exact same number of copies. Amazon doesn't report sales through any other channel, which is another degree of uncertainty. Add in the facts that Amazon adjusts its algorithm at random intervals, and that they apparently add, subtract, multiply, or divide by a fudge factor to keep B&N from knowing how many copies they've sold.... It all leads you to the conclusion that Amazon sales ranks are there as an advertising tool for Amazon, not as a source of information for anyone else.

Getting accurate sales data from a publisher is a bit like finding a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings: The area isn't all that large but, damn, there's a lot of sand to sift through.

Even those of us under contract to a major NY publisher and see royalty statements twice a year can't tell with reasonable accuracy how well the publisher is doing -- except when they announce year-end earnings in one of the trades. And even then you have to know the industry really well to interpret. (At least two of the big houses are family-owned media giants, so you can't even buy a few shares of stock and see yearly stock reports.)

All that said, it's more difficult still to get sales data from smaller or ebook-only pubs. It's not in their best interests to share, so they won't. Fact of publishing. They can be talking a great game one day, and filing for bankruptcy the next.

As for contacting authors published by that publisher ... well, I wouldn't ask them for sales info unless you have a personal relationship, and even then remember every author has a different sales history. Ask if they believe the publisher handled their books well, if there's anything they would have done differently, given the chance.

Go to a bookstore or six and see what's on the shelves, who's publishing what and where it's racked in the stores. Books on the front tables and on endcaps or ladders have had that space purchased by the publisher, which shows a level of commitment above and beyond what the author was paid. It's also an indication that they have a business plan and know which books they want to get behind, as opposed to those publishers who just print and "make available" titles in their catalog.

Amazon rankings don't mean much on their own. (Nothing, if you ask me.) If you can find somebody who subscribes to Bookscan or gets the lists from their publisher, that's an excellent source of what's selling most, since it covers about 80% of the market. The USA Today bestseller list also covers a lot of outlets, so the top 150 will, again, tell you what's selling best that week. Look at who's publishing top titles.

I don't know much about ebook-only pubs, and new small presses are popping up -- and vanishing -- regularly, so the ground outside the Old Guard in NY is a bit shaky. Everything's in flux, with ebooks now apparently cannibalizing mass-market paperback sales, so a lot of writers are seeing paper sales dip while ebook sales spike. (Luckily, publishers are looking at the same thing, so as long as overall sales numbers hold steady or increase, they tend to be happy.)

IMO, your best bet is always going to be to know or gather as much info on a publisher as you can before signing anything, to have an agent who knows what's what and who's who, and to pay a few hundred for a literary attorney to go over any contract, even if you're agented.

The main thing to remember is that you should be fairly paid for your work, preferably via an advance and decent royalty rates. So how they deal with you is probably going to tell you a lot more than any numbers you comb out of all that sand.

What CeCe and James said, really. Amazon numbers are obscure on their own, which is why I try to get a little more history with something like
NovelRank. It's still as murky an undertaking as old-school Roman augury.

For anyone who is still in uni, you might try the university library and see if they have a BookScan account, and might let you use it - or pay to have some ISBNs checked. That gives a much more accurate account of print sales, at least.

Amazon data can be unpredictable. But most data can. If I find all of a publisher's title rank above a million, either they sell in other channels, or they don't sell. It started to create a picture.

juniper said:

I saw this today while looking through the Bewares forum. It was posted a couple of years ago re: a micro press that said it paid royalties but didn't mention anything about advances.

"If they're a royalty only paying publisher, then you should check their sales history because there's little point in getting a higher percentage of zero sales."

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6132739&postcount=3

I've seen similar statements in many other threads, when questions are asked about small publishers.

But - how does someone like me, without publishing connections, check sales history? I think agents and editors (and maybe anyone wiling to pay?) have access to BookScan, but I don't, and I imagine most other writers don't.

So - how to get that information?

Click to expand...

If the small press is an epublisher that publishes erotica or romance, you might find some author-reported figures here: http://www.eroticromancepublishers.com/p/sales.html

I don't know if there's a similar resource for other genres. Sometimes I think of what it would take to start one...

One thing you can do is check local book stores and libraries, as well as World Cat.

Look for reviews of their books too. See if readers you know buy their books.

I check novel rank. But novel rank is notorious for undereporting sales. Also Amazon is not the be all and end all. Amazon equates for about a fifth of my royalties. However I feel that checking novel rank gives me a very vague indication of where publishers stand against each other that is useful.

There's also Brenda Hiatt's Show Me The Money, again focussing on romance and YA. She helpfully gives a range as well as the average earnings so you get an idea of whether one or two outliers are skewing the figures.

Oh yes I check Show Me the Money, and AW mod Emily Veinglory's site is excellent if you write erotic romance aimed at e-publishers.