Is their any way to find out how many copies a particular book has sold?
Looks like the answer is no. At least the news has not come to Harvard.
Publishers know of course, and so do the authors in their royalty statements.
I was hoping there might be some back door approach, thats the same conclusion I came to. Myself and a few others co-authored a book a few years back and were paid a one time fee. The current owner of the book will just smile when asked and say it has done well. Just curious on my part.
Publishers keep that information very close to the vest. It’s known internally, and authors are given an accounting with their royalty checks every six months (which sometimes isn’t all that clear about it).
There’s no reason to report it. It’s not like movies, where the box office take influences who goes to the movie the next week. Books use the NY Times best seller list (usually), which is hardly comprehensive.
While I haven’t seen a copy in many years publishers used to selectively post print figures in ads in the Publishers Weekly for heavily selling books–as an inducement to get booksellers to stock the book.
For one source of current information you can see Amazon rankings of how books sell there:
"Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,878 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#62 in Books > Children's Books > Classics"
[This was for an edition of Tom Sawyer.]
To interpret these rankings see:
That link was useful, it gave me at least some feel for how many books he is selling. I think checking it periodicaly would give a better feel. I also know sales were strongest the first year of the release.
This, BookScan - Wikipedia , is the best one can do, unless you’re talking about books you’ve published yourself.
It’s a subscription service, I don’t know what the current cost is, sorry.
Let me add that the “number of books sold” over a relatively short time is a hit-or-miss matter. Even for a publisher interested in sales of its own books.
A publisher knows how many copies of a book it’s printed, and how many have been ordered or shipped (two different numbers) on any given date. A publisher will also know how many have been returned (most “trade” books–less so, I think, textbooks–are sold on a returnable basis) on any given date.
What a publisher can’t know universally, is how many of the copies it has sold to a wholesaler or distributor have since been sold to a library, school, or retailer. Nor can it tell how many copies are still unsold, sitting on booksellers shelves either on the sales floor, or on the back room shelves waiting to be returned.
A publisher can make occasional calls to it’s largest customers–or set up a digital linkage to wholesalers’ inventories, but getting accurate real-time numbers from retailers is much more difficult than from wholesalers, usually.
Now, these folks are pretty bright in general, have a pretty good sense of how things go, and can usually see anomalies from rule-of-thumb ratios of these various numbers pretty quickly.
But not always. One story goes that a well known publisher had to sell his controlling interest in his publishing house because he continued to print thousands of copies of various Star Wars books during the roll-out of the fourth movie, even after he was getting lots of returns. Perhaps apocryphal, but the timing of the sale fits the story.