Should authors pay attention to their sales numbers?
It feels like a rhetorical question, akin to asking a scuba diver to ignore her oxygen tank or telling a pilot not to worry too much about that pesky altitude meter. But recently, I was chatting with an author who’d left Penguin Random House—where every author has access to an “author portal” with which we can monitor estimated sales figures in real time—for a smaller publisher, one that didn’t offer an ever-updating dashboard.
“But you won’t be able to track your sales!” I cried.
“Is your life really improved by that knowledge?” he replied, which left me…dumbfounded.
Numbers matter, of course. On a surface level, you want people to read the thing you spent years working on. And from an economics perspective, your sales are one (just one!) of the factors that determine how big of an advance you’ll get on your next book. It’s interesting to monitor how, say, a media mention or TikTok endorsement or ebook promotion affects sales.
Said author friend pointed out that, pre-portal, he’d simply ask his agent how his book was doing, and he’d get a ballpark answer—sales are “healthy",” not quite as robust as we hoped, etc. The publishing equivalent of getting an “exceeds expectations” in class instead of a letter grade. It meant he was bubble-wrapped from the daily agony of checking stats. (Which is pointless anyway, because the totals slowly build throughout the week and aren’t final until, like, a week later. Which doesn’t stop me from checking!!)
Folks have asked me what kind of sales info I can access on my portal, so I thought, what the hey—I’ll go ahead and show you a screenshot of my last six months of sales for The Lost Night, my debut murder-mystery set in the warehouse parties and indie-sleaze scene of circa-2009 Brooklyn1. I’ll also share some stats on my other titles. Behold:
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