BookScan Gets an Upgrade

The industry resource for researching book sales—which hasn’t been changed or improved since 2001—is getting a long-overdue upgrade from its new owners, NPD

Established in 2001 by Nielsen, BookScan collects point-of-sale data from thousands of retailers across the United States. Prior to its launch, only a book’s publishers knew how well a book had sold. In an industry that rather likes such privacy (or secrecy, depending on your view), the introduction of BookScan was greeted with some anxiety—especially among literary agents. A 2004 Publishers Weekly article reported on how the system could be misused as a “blunt instrument in negotiations,” while publishers said it would underreport the success of some titles. Both concerns remain, although all major publishers and many agents use the service.

In January 2017, NPD Group acquired Nielsen’s US market research services for the book industry: BookScan (print book sales tracking), PubTrack digital (ebook sales), and more. NPD already offered such market research across twenty industries, so the acquisition was a natural fit. According to its own estimates, BookScan captures 80 to 85 percent of US retail sales, and PubTrack 80 percent of traditional ebook sales. (Self-published titles are not included in the latter, as the relevant sales data comes from 450 top publishers and not retailers.)

This week, BookScan data transitions from the old Nielsen platform to the NPD system, known as DecisionKey. Sara Grace in Publishers Lunch wrote an item (subscription required) about the upgrade, raising a few points of interest to authors.

NPD Book President Jonathan Stolper told Publishers Lunch that BookScan data has been “vastly underutilized” and that the new system will make it easier to access the rich data available—and thus lead to “much better decisions.” There are new ways to search the data, there are more specific geographical market regions, and—perhaps most important—the new system allows for a greater volume of complex queries. In the past, querying functions had to be restricted to a small group, but in the future, more people will have access to the full extent of BookScan’s data. Eventually, NPD will allow users to see print and ebook sales data side by side.

When we asked industry veteran Mike Shatzkin what this change might portend for publishing, he said: “Querying for data about a single title is of very limited value. What one needs to do meaningful analysis is to look across a range of titles and to do exception reporting, which this seems to enable. For example, you might want to know whether books on a particular topic hit price point pressure at $8 or $10 or whatever. You might want to know whether a particular publisher has a higher hit rate with certain types of books. Or you might want to look at the characteristics of books that had appreciable sales increases some months after they came out. All these things can only be done by querying across a range of titles.”

Other changes ahead for BookScan:

• NPD hopes to close the 15 percent gap that now exists in its coverage of the print book sales market. In the future, BookScan will include sales data from museum shops, dollar stores, comic book stores, and more.
• NPD is rolling out license reporting to give users insights into performance based on license, licensor, category, publisher, and imprint. (For example, one could learn how well National Geographic books did last year.)
• Finally, the transition may result in some “variances” in book sales data—an increase in reported sales, thankfully—because NPD tracks retail sales across many industries and will be able to include that data in BookScan reporting.

Authors have access to BookScan data for their own titles if they claim their free Amazon Author Central Account. But you can’t see sales figures beyond your own work, so the upgrade will not meaningfully change authors’ insights. However, if willing to pay the money (thousands per year), you can gain access as a Publishers Marketplace member or IBPA member.

Bottom line: Some industry folk have been frank with authors about the power of BookScan to scuttle a deal or decrease bookstore orders. Editor Alan Rinzler wrote on his blog in 2009, “Even if a book is ultimately appealing, recent low Nielsen numbers will impact the all-important realistic projections for the new book’s potential sales. This can affect not only the advance, since most publishers predicate the amount paid on signing on projected first-year sales, but also the first printing. That’s because sales reps know that the major accounts will also consult Nielsen as well as their own internal records to determine how many they’ll order of the new title.” While those effects are likely to continue, the freedom and ability to conduct deep data dives may lead to more strategic use—as Shatzkin points out—in both acquisitions (e.g., the categories publishers should push into) as well as marketing (e.g., pricing, format, positioning).