In all the recent sturm und drang over e-book pricing (whether the retailer or the publisher should set the prices), it seems to me the debate has been over what can only be considered a minor point in the future of what will be a major market segment. Far more important to writers of tomorrow—and to publishers and readers, too—is accountability on the number of sales. It doesn’t really matter if an e-book is listed at $9.99 or $19.99—or if a retailer sells it at full price, a 30% discount, or a 90% discount—if the retailers can report any sales numbers they want, regardless of the facts.
In traditional publishing, it’s very easy to keep track of sales. The publisher prints a certain number of books, and then keeps track of how many go to which retailer and how many are returned, and therefore has a very good idea of the number actually sold. With e-books, however, retailers can sell as many copies as they want, and report however many of those sales they can afford. Had a bad month at the track? Report sales of only 90% of the e-books that actually sold, and keep all the revenue from the other 10%. Is the bottom line looking a little anemic for the stockholders? Then tell the publishers you only sold 75% of what you sold, and that the rest of the sales were public domain titles. Now you get to keep the publisher’s 30% or 50% or however much the publisher and the author are supposed to earn from those sales. Who’s to know?
In my own case, my book, The Presidential Book of Lists, was published in October 2008. Nine months later, I received the sales report for its first six months on the stands. The physical copies sold are very clearly accounted: so many books shipped, payment for so many withheld in case they’re returned, and an actual number (about 6,000). But for e-books sold, all the publisher reports is a single number (well, it was actually a double-digit number). But several times during those six months, my book was the #1 Kindle seller in Amazon’s trivia category. Yet my publisher reported a total of 39 electronic copies sold. It reached the top of its category several times, yet sold fewer than 40 copies in six months on Amazon? It doesn’t matter if they’re selling the book for $0.99, $9.99, or $999, if they can report any number of sales they want.
And while the failing may be in the publisher under-reporting, their records are easy to audit (indeed, my contract allows me to do just that). If Amazon (and BarnesandNoble, and the eighteen other e-tailers carrying the e-book) reported far more sales, and paid for them, it’s fairly easy for me to discover that. But if the e-tailers under-report to my publisher, well, where’s the paper trail then?
And it’s not just e-books that leave themselves open to creative accounting. Print-on-demand books are easy to keep track of, unless the retailer has his own printer. Amazon has them, physical bookstores are getting them, and soon we’ll have no real way to know how many copies of which book has sold.
While underpriced e-books may devalue printed books, under-reported book sales of any type are the far more pernicious threat to writers making a living, to publishers staying in business, and even to readers. Best-seller lists (and any sort of sales rankings) become meaningless and untrustworthy in the era of e-books and local printing.
But perhaps there is a solution.
There are auditing bureaus for magazine circulation: companies that track numbers of subscribers to free magazines, so that advertisers can have a semi-honest estimate of how widely their ads are distributed. Perhaps e-book publishing needs something similar. Obviously, calling purchasers one by one isn’t the answer. But perhaps adding an electronic counter or serial number to each sale, a counter that will tick up once with each sale, and that the publisher can check through the simple expedient of “buying” a copy, will encourage retailers to report honest numbers. I’m not asking for retailers to keep track of who has bought which copy of which book, nor for any stronger digital rights management nonsense. But with numbers of several dollars per copy, the temptation to cheat could be very great.
This is just the first cut at a solution. I’m interested in hearing what you have to say.
So, essentially, humans will probably continue to be both greedy and dishonest.
The question of how the author can track their book sales has always been with us, ever since there were authors and publishers. But you’ve identified a new wrinkle when it comes to ebooks which I don’t think many have pondered before. After all, there’s no such thing as keeping track of returns for ebooks.
Here’s a suggestion for you personally: take a look at whose trivia book is ranked at #2 and #3 on Amazon’s list, get in touch with them, and offer to compare sales data.
You’re absolutely right, but there may be a mitigating factor. One sales tool that publishers (or distributors) have is to claim that a given title is a “best seller.” They’ll still want to be able to claim that. That may not help in calculating absolute numbers of sales, but it may give a *comparative* number of sales–Book A sold more than Book B. If the publisher claims one book is a hot seller, it will need some results that match that claim. This will at least give a toehold to begin accounting procedures.
>One sales tool that publishers (or distributors) have is to claim that a given title is a “best seller.” They’ll still want to be able to claim that.<
That’s one of my points, Stephen. The publisher wants to be able to say that, but that title comes from appearance on best-seller lists. Will the New York Times, or USA Today, or PW be able to gather sufficient information to determine e-best sellers? Remember, in the world of e-books and locally printed books, there is no distributor to count units sold.
This is tricky. One obvious point is that magazine circulation auditing, like Nielsen TV ratings, is far from unimpeachable science itself.
One other obvious point is that no system the New York Times bestseller lists has been gamed by several authors. More than one author has figured out which small percentage of the total trade is actually tracked through the bestseller lists and bought up a few thousand copies of their own title in order to try and reap the much larger rewards of attention and long term sales that yields. I don’t want to mention specific titles because my memory is faulty and I don’t want to impugn anyone. I believe Dianetics was one early example of this, and at least one of the bestselling business titles was infamous for breaking through in that manner.
Last point. Amazon has been cagey about how many Kindles they’ve sold and the total sales of their titles. Your number does look suspiciously low, but Amazon has almost definitely been playing close to the vest because kindle sales are smaller than they’d like to admit, perhaps dramatically so? (they did have to halt MacMillan’s sales of physical books in order to make a point in the recent pricing war. Stopping ebook sales wouldn’t have been enough to notice, I’m afraid.
I tend to agree with Mr. Laden. If e-books were big sellers, Amazon would not be so secretive about its numbers. At the risk of hurting the author’s pride, maybe the low number really was accurate, and the case for the impending takeover of the e-book is vastly overstated.