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Author Earnings Report Grows Up, Becomes BookStat.com

For a period of about three years (2014 to 2017) the publishing industry was turned upside down by a pseudonymous market analytics expert called Data Guy. His quarterly Author Earnings Report painted a picture of the ebook market that showed just how much was missed by official sources like PubTrack Digital, Nielsen, etc.

But then early last year the Author Earnings Report site went dormant. All DG would say when queried was that he was working on a major update. That update is going to arrive later today in the form of a new more comprehensive Author Earnings Report that benefits from leveraging the far richer data feed from Data Guy’s company, BookStat.com.

For almost as long as DG has been releasing quarterly reports, he has also been consulting with publishers. Those consulting gigs grew into a company which now has a name and a website.

DG told me by email that he will be keeping a firewall between the two projects. "Bookstat.com is totally separate commercial business from Author Earnings, with an informal agreement to occasionally provide some aggregate data to AE on a pro-bono basis," he wrote. "Like Bookscan, Bookstat’s customers are generally businesses with at least $10 million in annual revenues, to be able to afford Bookstat.com yearly subscription fees."

h\t to Mike Shatzkin

image by reynermedia

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Comments


Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt January 23, 2018 um 10:20 am

It will be interesting to see how, if at all, this contributes to the view of the publishing world for an individual author, traditional, hybrid, or indie. Is there a place where one can scoop up just a teaspoonful of useful data out of the mighty river?

Author Earnings reports were useful to me as a writer. Haven’t been able to USE that information well yet, as I’m a very SLOW writer, but it was fascinating to see indies populate the lower prices, and traditional publishers hang on to the higher price ranges and 'literary' category.

The rise of the Amazon imprints – sitting potentially on top of the mountain of Amazon data we mortals are not privy to – is something I’ve watched since the beginning. With frustration. Because their selection process has been even more opaque than that of the big publishers! They occupied, quietly and without much fanfare, the center of the earnings chart, and expanded in both directions.

They kindly send me, as an Amazon customer, a list of books to try each month for free – and I haven’t found a one yet I liked (I poke at the literary ones each month). And yet that segment’s growth continues.

Data, and more data, and not a drop to drink!


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