locating book sales figures

[Badia, Janet]

Dear SHARPists:

I am hoping someone can help me with a research query. I need to locate sales figures for several books published in the U.S. and U.K. over the past 40 years. I'd like to find data from both the time of the books' initial publication and their sales-to-date. Any suggestions as to where I might find this kind of information?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best,
Janet Badia
***@marshall.edu

[Helen Ryan]

Book sales figures are some of the hardest facts to determine in the industry. (And one of the most frequently asked.) You can get a rough sense from publisher's ads when they are pushing a hot item by reporting big numbers (if you want to believe them). Otherwise you have to get into the publishers archives, which may or may not be available. I have worked on this question a number of times as a research librarian and my experience is that you will fail. Even if you make a personal trip (or call) to the publisher, you won't get an answer.

Helen Ryan
Univresity of Iowa

[Alistair McCleery]

I think part of the problem in contemporary terms is that this issue
involves not only publishers but authors for whom sales figures translate
into income. With the honourable exception of Norway (that publishes tax
returns on the web for a limited period each year, I believe) we guard
individual income figures more securely than a lot of other personal data.

Conversely, as far as dead and archived authors are concerned, you can often
find out sales figures from the royalty statements preserved among their
personal papers (sometimes, for the reason above. preserved with more care
and more securely than any ms).

Alistair McCleery

Post by Helen Ryan
Book sales figures are some of the hardest facts to determine in the industry.
(And one of the most frequently asked.) You can get a rough sense from
publisher's ads when they are pushing a hot item by reporting big numbers (if
you want to believe them). Otherwise you have to get into the publishers
archives, which may or may not be available. I have worked on this question a
number of times as a research librarian and my experience is that you will
fail. Even if you make a personal trip (or call) to the publisher, you won't
get an answer.
Helen Ryan
Univresity of Iowa

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[Juliet Gardiner]

Alistair McCleery is right to suggest that author sensitivity is an
important reason why publishers are so reluctant to disclose book run
figures. As he says such information might reveal an author's income
(though only in a rather crude sense since various discounts, review
copies etc would have to be factored in) but it my experience it is
more complex than that.

Print runs are an indication of the publisher's confidence in a
book. So to tell a trade author, for example, that his or her
publisher's forecast for sales is, say, 3,000, when the author wants
reassurance that the publisher regards the book as a potential best
seller and will throw all resources into making it so, risks an
author/publisher set to and souring of relations. So while publishers
probably don't lie to authors they rarely seem to volunteer this
information and can be somewhat vague when tackled by author or his
or her agent and are certainly not likely to reveal it to the wider
world.

As Alistair says individual author royalty accounts , when archived,
can be used to reconstruct this information, but it's a slow process
and makes it hard to discern trends.


Juliet Gardiner

[B***@ASU.EDU]

Helen Ryan is absolutely right. These numbers are nearly impossible to find
without archival material--and even then, it's iffy. The only helpful hint I
can add is that Publishers Weekly sometimes publishes sales figures for books
that do exceptionally well--usually in a column or brief note. Those are, I
believe, more trustworthy than the figures in the ads, but they may not be
final, and they may not be accurate because they rarely reflect returns.

Beth Luey