In an interesting move, Amazon has declared it will grant access to Neilson's Bookscan data for any author with an Author Central account. In street-monkey terms, this means if you sell books through amazon, either through self-publishing or the traditional model, you can view your books' print sales figures by geographic location for most of the world.

Bookscan collate the sale of books through various outlets, displaying which books are selling how much, where and when. This information is invaluable for publishers planning marketing campaigns, or deciding whether to back an author's next novel.

The reason this is news is that a subscription to Bookscan typically costs in the tens of thousands. Large publishing houses and large agencies (perhaps) can afford the data, but most of us get by with best seller lists, royalty statements and the good old fashion reckoning, as in: "I reckon they're selling alright." Suddenly, authors will have access to a rich source of data for how their book is doing in the brick-and-mortar world, without having to pay for it (unless they want more than the last four weeks' worth of data).

Why is Amazon doing this?

My guess would be they want authors to sign in, create profiles in Author Central to encourage fiction sales. They've been moving closer to a 'services' model for a while now, especially for authors, and this is a logical step. It's good publicity for them, and helps grease wheels with authors who may feel Amazon provides them with more than their publishing house does.

The Caveats

Neilson Bookscan isn't the be all and end all. For starters, it only collates the sales of printed books (with an ISBN) from participating retailers in participating countries, which excludes some major sellers like Wal-Mart, libraries and wholesalers like Ingram. Bookscan estimates they get 75% of the sales data, but that does not equate to 75% of the sales.

It also excludes any format other than print - kindle or other e-book formats, audio books and similar aren't counted (Neilson are reportedly working on this.)

So the Bookscan data is helpful for a rough idea of how or where your books might be selling, but only if you factor in the unrecorded sales. Unfortunately, most authors forget to do this on the odd occasion they're shown Bookscan figures. Hence a rather accurate tweet by YA author Christine Johnson: Breaking News: Amazon gives authors access to Bookscan numbers. In other news, thousands of authors go on automatic suicide watch.