The only way is up (baby)... until it comes down

If there's one thing authors obsess about most it's sales figures for their books. This is often reflected in an addictive urge to check the Amazon sales rank - but that's only a substitute for the real thing. We want to know how many books are selling.

Publishers typically have a lot of information about sales, but rarely share it with the author in detail, except every six months or so in the royalty statement. But thanks to a service called Book Scan, the data is out there on a weekly basis for most (though admittedly not all) retail outlets. And we're not talking orders, which can always be returned, but hard sales through the till.

Amazingly Amazon now makes this available to authors with books published in the US. It's only paper books, not ebooks, but includes both Amazon and plenty of outlets. You can look back over 8 weeks data, broken down to the main selling books, a display that can either be uplifting or depressing, depending on the way the bars are going. The bar chart shown, by the way, is my sales for the last 8 weeks. You can either look on it that things are going rather well, or that they were rubbish 8 weeks ago. (The actual chart includes totals, and you can hover the mouse to see how many books are in each part of the bar.)

This is fascinating information - if you are published in the US and aren't on Amazon's Author Central service which provides this data, run don't walk to your computer.

Now I just have to wait to see if that slight fall was just a random variation or could be the start of a trend. Once more with the feeling. The only way is up...

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Search This Blog