The Bookseller launches indie sales tracker

The Bookseller has launched an independent author e-book sales tracker, inviting authors and small digital publishers whose e-book sales data currently goes unreported to complete a simple online form designed to capture their 2015 e-book sales information. The results will be used by The Bookseller to analyse the self-published digital market.

The online form can be completed here.

The move acknowledges that, though under-reported, the self-published e-book sector is a growing area of the overall book business. Amazon, which has by far the largest market share of this sector, does not release e-book sales numbers to any third party analytics company, or respond to media requests for such data.

The Bookseller has pioneered the gathering of industry e-book sales data, having launched a monthly e-book ranking in 2013 with publisher-supplied e-book sales volume numbers, and an imminent weekly e-book chart, in partnership with The Sunday Times.

Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, said: “We’ve long acknowledged that there is a big and growing part of this sector that we cannot track in any of the usual ways. We hope indie authors, or small digital-only publishers, will complete the simple survey, so that we can begin to understand what is happening in this market, and better reflect it in our overall coverage. Of course, there is much the survey won’t tell us, but there are some usual things it will reveal, and hopefully the results will allow us to build out a more comprehensive solution for indie writers.”

The survey is focused on 2015 UK e-book sales, but if the up-take merits it, then The Bookseller will look to repeat the survey each month so that it complements its current monthly e-book ranking of traditional publisher sales.