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Jun. 24th, 2009

  • 8:41 AM
SGA
link: The Lie That is Bookscan Today I had a project rejected by a publisher. It's the author's third book and the prior two books had been well received and have sold well. But according to this publisher, "the Bookscan sales of his two titles have been modest in comparison to the great praise and attention his work has received, and in this economy that’s a very difficult obstacle for us to overcome with our accounts and booksellers."

There's only one problem with this argument: The Bookscan numbers are wrong.

According to the royalty statements I've received, the author's first book has net sales of just under 14,000 copies. According to this editor, Bookscan shows sales just over 7,200 copies. That's nearly a 100% difference!

There's some interesting debate in the comments.

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Comments

( 7 comments — Leave a comment )
[info]oldcharliebrown wrote:
Jun. 24th, 2009 01:58 pm (UTC)
The Bookscan numbers are correct, for what they are reporting . . . you could, indeed, sell 7000 copies to Amazon, the chains, and sell another few thousand to libraries, which don't report to Bookscan. The non-reporting sales channels could constitute quite a lot, certainly, but a publisher already knows from their distributor sales reports how much a book has sold . . .

People just don't understand how bookscan works. And if you're a publisher who wants a certain percentage of sales to sell into chains, as that is your business model, then if the bookscan #'s are low, it's a legitimate argument to pass up on further books. However I agree with this statement: "The editor was clearly trying to soften the blow for all involved and grasped at the Bookscan straw without knowing any better."

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[info]dancinghorse wrote:
Jun. 24th, 2009 06:35 pm (UTC)
I got the same line last year. The numbers quoted were half what the royalty statement eventually showed.

It appears to me that publishers at this point only want books that will make the NYT list. Everything else is being dropped. Short-term thinking. It's going to bite them hard in a couple of years.
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[info]oldcharliebrown wrote:
Jun. 24th, 2009 07:05 pm (UTC)
"Everything else is being dropped." I don't find this to be true, necessarily, but with regards to midlist, if they don't perform according to certain expectations, well, that's what happens. Nothing gives an author the right to be continually published. It's rare when that happens, but great when it does :-)
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[info]dancinghorse wrote:
Jun. 24th, 2009 07:26 pm (UTC)
I'm quoting editors. "Bestsellers only. The midlist is dead." Distribution bottleneck, demise of mass market, etc. The trends have always been there, but they've accelerated and the general feeling is that they've passed the event horizon. The traditional model of publishing, in a word, has failed. (Also quoting editors--who are dropping like flies.)

Various alternative models are evolving. It's similar to where the music industry was a decade or so ago. Will be interesting to see where it all goes.
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[info]book_wench wrote:
Jun. 26th, 2009 06:45 am (UTC)
Demise of mass market? That's the only thing that's still selling (I work in a bookstore). What are they referring to? I think I'm missing something.
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[info]dancinghorse wrote:
Jun. 26th, 2009 06:54 am (UTC)
The collapse of distributors has severely bottlenecked the mass market. Editors are going crazy over it. Sales have dropped precipitously. Numbers that put a book on the NYT list now used to be considered very mediocre midlist.

I've been in the business since the early Eighties, and the change in the numbers is really noticeable. It's been a long erosion, but in the past couple of years the pace has accelerated. I see it in the dropping away of formerly reliable royalties, the dramatic reduction in available markets for submissions, the disappearance of whole tribes of publishing staff (over half the editors one of my agents submitted one of my mss. to last summer have since been let go)--it's scary out there.

Alternative options are looking more and more like the way to go.
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[info]morfin wrote:
Jun. 24th, 2009 08:52 pm (UTC)
Nothing may give an author the right to be continually published, but I do believe they have the right to have their true sales accurately reported, especially when these figures are used to determine on whether to publish or not. It seems to me this is something the FTC needs to look into and make sure that trade is based upon accurate, reliable data.
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( 7 comments — Leave a comment )