Authors with books for sale on Amazon who have signed up to use Author Central, the site's free author portal, will be able to see the book-sales information starting Thursday morning.
The data, provided by Nielsen BookScan, include nationwide sales information from Barnes & Noble, Target and other big-box brick-and-mortar retailers, from Amazon.com and from some independent booksellers. Nielsen estimates that BookScan captures 75% of print book sales in the U.S. retail market.
BookScan's sales tallies do not currently include sales of e-books, for the Kindle or other devices.
Authors who use Amazon's Author Central will see a geographic sales map of books sold during a four-week window, with a lag of about a week. Early Thursday, the sales figures displayed included Nov. 1 to 28; later Thursday, Amazon expects a new week to load, so the information will span Nov. 8 through Dec. 5.
This is the closest thing to real-time aggregate sales data available to publishers, and it hasn't been cheap. Nielsen's BookScan, now a decade old, began to find widespread enrollment with major publishers in 2004, when fees ran $100,000 and more per year.
It would have been far beyond the reach of most individual authors, if it had been available to them.
In recent years, individual authors have increasingly been asked to take part in the marketing and promotion of their own books. Publishers have faced budget cutbacks, and the Internet has provided authors with more ways of reaching readers -- and potential book buyers. Amazon sees the Nielsen BookScan data as a tool to that end. "The geographic view of print sales will help authors identify trends to help their promotion efforts and enables authors to develop more effective methods for reaching the widest possible audience," Amazon's Kinley Campbell wrote in an e-mail.
Just in time for Christmas, Amazon may be turning authors into an army of booksellers.
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