I’ve got a guest column in the new edition of The Bookseller, the trade magazine for the UK publishing industry. It’s called “Tangible Assets,” and it points out that of all the fights that publishing has had with the ebook sector — DRM, pricing, promotion — the one they’ve missed is access to data. Whatever else is going on with publishers and Amazon, Google, Apple, et al, the fact that publishing knows almost nothing about its ebook customers and has no realtime view into its ebook sales; and that the ebook channel knows almost everything, instantaneously, is untenable and unsustainable.
I just came off a US tour for my YA novel Homeland, which Tor Teen published in the US in February, and which Titan will publish this coming September in the UK. I went to 23 cities in 25 days, a kind of bleary and awesome whirlwind where I got to see friends from across the USA—Internet People to a one—for about 8.5 minutes each, in a caffeinated, exhausted rush.
Inevitably, I had this conversation: “How’s the book doing?” and I got to say: “Oh, awesome! It’s a New York Times and Indienet bestseller!” (It stayed on the NYT list for four weeks, so I got to say this a lot). And then, always: “So, how many copies does that
come out to?” And my answer was always, “No one knows.”This is where the Internet People began to boggle. “No one knows?”
“Oh, there’s some Nielsen reporting from the tills of participating booksellers—you can get that if you spend a fortune. But there’s no realtime e-book numbers given to the publishers. We’ll all find out exactly how the book performed in a couple of months.”
And that’s where they lost their minds. The irate squawks that emerged from their throats were audible for miles. “You mean Amazon, Apple and Google knows exactly who comes to their stores, how they find their way to your books, where they’re coming in from, how many devices they use and when, and they don’t tell the publishers?”
