So how’s it selling? (or: superpowers for Lauren)

Publishers can’t easily tell you how many copies your book has sold.

I know this now.  But I didn’t always know it.  I once asked a publisher the same question.  Therefore I refuse to think of it as a stupid question, because I don’t ask stupid questions, right?  Uhm.  Anyway.

If it were a paper book, it would take a year to tell you how many copies sold.  This is because publishers allow bookstores to return unsold copies of books in case the bookstore decides to spend the money on something they think will sell better, like copies of a new book purporting to examine the evidence that Elvis is alive.

Even ebooks aren’t that easy to track.  You think it would be, since it’s all on computer.   But coming up with a number would mean someone who has real work to do would have to sit down and tabulate the results from every distributor involved.  Since the answer is probably less than one hundred and might even be less than ten, it’s not really worth the effort.  Even people like me who arguably don’t have much real work to do would have to bother someone who does in order to get figures to add up.

I blame Amazon.  They don’t tell you their sales numbers, but they do have this really strange sales rank thing.  People have tried to explain what their sales rank thing might mean (no one knows, possibly not even Amazon).  I think they make it up.  However, it does give authors something they can click on over and over, and tempts them to do silly things like have their friends buy copies of the ebook from Amazon all on the same day in an attempt to boost the magic number, even if the actual money made from this tactic is less than if everyone bought the book straight from the publisher for a higher royalty percentage.

I try to be gentle with people who ask for sales information even if I can’t give it.

This brings me to a letter of last night where an author asked me for sales information on not one but two books not published by Circlet.

It might be conceivable that I could know sales numbers from a book published by Circlet, even if I don’t.  But I’m not sure why she expected that I might know sales numbers from a book not even by the same publisher.  Is it possible she doesn’t know who is publishing her books?  I mean, she must have signed a contract at some point.   Presumably she read the contract.

In fact, it’s way too silly of her not to know who publishes her books that I will stick with an alternate explanation.  I have as of yet undiscovered superpowers to know sales figures from books from other publishers, and she was trying to do me a big favor by making me discover this ability.  That must be it.

What a lame superpower.