Audiobooks, authors, actors and direction
Wow — I wonder, and I get an answer. Now THAT is service. Thanks, Mr. Hewson!
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I’ve been thinking about the Publishers Weekly article “How Many Copies Does It Take To Be an Amazon Bestseller?” It discusses this for print copies as follows:
Amazon, the biggest bookseller in America, is also famously one of the most tight-lipped. Sales rankings are available on the Web site and are updated hourly, but the company doesn’t provide information on how many unit sales it takes to make a title an Amazon bestseller.
Like everyone else, PW couldn’t get sales numbers from Amazon, but by studying the print bestseller list for a two-week period, we were able to determine that a title in Amazon’s top five averages 1,094 print copies sold across all channels, including other retailers, on a typical day. And because the general industry thinking is that Amazon accounts for about 30% of print sales, that means it likely takes around 300 copies per day to reach Amazon’s top five, depending on the day of the week and the time of year.
This article appeared in the 3/10/2013 In other words even journalists wonder and don’t get answers to this kind of question.
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It’s not really in anyone’s interest to release those numbers, period, except at the point at which royalties are paid (when it’s required as a matter of bookkeeping) and during contract negotiations for the next book / production. Anyone who’s likely to be in a position to want to negotiate anything would prefer to keep their market position / share silent, I would say, because it creates potential false assumptions during the negotiation process if numbers are circulated (and then possibly passed on incorrectly, creating rumors), because those numbers have different meanings to everyone. Big sales to me are not big sales to someone else and so on. markets for digital materials change hour by hour, let alone over three years.
I know some people really like to know this stuff; however, my position is that I simply want to enjoy the outcome and the way that art inspires. I know from my own writing (and academic writers almost never get royalties for most of what they write) that the chief enjoyment happens when someone emails me to say they enjoyed something.
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I wasn’t suggesting that individuals are entitled to specific information about specific works, but rather the opposite that this is proprietary information and therefore isn’t public. However, it doesn’t seem to me that a leading trade publication is out of line to look into Amazon’s numbers. I remember that bestseller lists like those in the NY Times and I think in PW itself were examined for where the numbers were coming from etc. in other eras. For instance if you are buying books and use Amazon as one of many of your guides to reader interest, looking for things you missed etc., it is good to know 300 copies a day can temporarily effect a placement on the bestseller list.
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and there are companies you can pay to twist your amazon numbers, temporary elevating them. It turns out, too, for academic authors, that if you buy just five copies of your own book you affect the ranking by millions. You can be ranked a million something and buy five copies and be ranked 50,000 or something afterwards.
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Thanks for suggesting blog posts on questions I can answer! I’m always happy to let people peek beneath the hood of writing – I’m hoping if I try to do that enough I’ll understand a bit more about the process myself.
I’ve no idea who ‘Bianca’ is but these questions sound very like the ones we’ve already been asked which seem to say, ‘We’re entitled to confidential sales and contractual information because we’re owed.’
All I can repeat is… the whole numbers thing bores me.They’re just numbers. Lots of the authors I love most sell or sold very little at all. Am I supposed to think worse of them for that?
Really … who the hell cares? And why? It’s the work that matters. Nothing else.
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Thanks for paying attention!
Comparisons are odious. I seem to remember some important English author saying that. Not Shakespeare, though. 🙂
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One thing I found interesting about your explanation was the “chop up” of the script with the comments in the right margin — it fascinates me that that would work as a sort of visual cue. (Well, thespians are more together than I am.)
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I think Bianca was basically agreeing that getting answers to the questions was never gonna happen if something like Publishers Weekly hit a brick wall in its pursuit of data – nor should it happen since it’s not the public’s right to know – but there are people who will wonder about that kind of thing regardless. I don’t think she meant to imply anyone is entitled to proprietary information, she seemed to be trying to rationalize why someone would behave that way.
It’s nice (and pretty characteristic) that so many of RA’s fans jumped to the authors’ defense but let’s not become so paranoid about bad behavior that we criticize anyone who isn’t joining us with pitchforks and would rather stand on the sidelines and provide color commentary.
I, for one, have zero interest in box office numbers, sales figures, etc. I wanted to buy the audiobook as soon as I heard RA was going to be narrating. I didn’t need to see its ranking rise up up up to convince me. I’m still not sure why anyone (fans, PW, etc) would want to know something that has nothing to do with the enjoyment of the material. It’s not like I’d enjoy Hamlet more if it was a bestseller or outpaced Game of Thrones.
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I’m going to close this thread because i really don’t want to talk about the contratemps — I reblogged this simply because I got the answer to my question, which Mr. Hewson was so helpful as to provide. If you would like to comment on the fan issue, you can do that at the blogs that raised that issue specifically. If you would like to talk about the neat piece of this, which was the creation of the audiobooks and the script by Hartley and Hewson, please go back to my original thread on that topic.
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Here is the original thread I provided for that topic. I know many of us are interested in the creative and production process that Hewson has described in such detail.
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