Bookscan is officially dead.

[seawasp]

Went to check Author Central on Amazon as I do every Friday.

According to Bookscan: "0 copies were sold between 12/31/2012 and 1/6/2013"

Understand, I'm no huge bestseller author. However, declines in sales as one goes on are fairly easy to predict (in fact, for Threshold they were following a roughly 11% decrease per week very closely, until the holiday sales spike).

I have *NEVER* had a week since they started tracking of "zero" sales. Never. Even in the days just before the paperback of Threshold came out, which was a pretty long dry spell, I was always shown as selling several copies per week; in fact, the LOWEST it ever went was 10 copies in one week. Yes, there's an expected decrease in sales after Christmas, but this is just Not Believable. Absolutely not. Last week my sales were a total of 120 books in the one week. They want me to believe that NOT ONE of my books registered a SINGLE sale throughout the country? (I don't know for sure if they pay attention to Amazon sales -- if they don't it'd be rather ironic that their info's being distributed by Amazon -- but I know for a fact that there WERE Amazon sales in that time period of several of my books)

So now that titan of publishing information, Bookscan, apparently has given up even a pretense of being accurate. Rather tragic, in a way, as it would have been nice if one could rely on it in some fashion.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Daniel Abraham just made a very similar complaint.

[remus-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Bookscan relies on book sellers sending them weekly reports of their receipts. Could it be that the first week of January the book store managers were all on vacation, and neglected to send out reports?

[seawasp]

I would find that improbable to the point of near-impossible. SOME of them, yes, but based on prior statistics gathered over months the number this week should have been around 100, scattered around the entire country. To get ZERO, that would mean that *every single one* of the store managers in EVERY story I sold ANYTHING in failed to send in their stuff.

Seems exceedingly unlikely.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

*every single one* of the store managers in EVERY story I sold ANYTHING in failed to send in their stuff.

If they were all sold by Barnes and Noble, then we have a possibility of one person messing it up. Or it could have been one person at Bookscan messing up.

[sorek.livejournal.com]

maybe *that's* the person on vacation?

[laurenbjorkman.livejournal.com]

Several other authors, including me, experienced the same thing on Friday. I believe it's a glitch. In fact, I had a store event on the 4th, and know I sold at least 10 copies that evening.

If any authors got positive numbers through Author Central, let's hear from you!