This is a new blog intended to provide information on Snowbooks’ sales to our authors. The posts are password protected: to request a password please email emma@snowbooks.com. As well as Snowbooks’ authors, we will consider requests from students, other publishers large and small, and other people who feel their knowledge, businesses or careers would benefit from access to these data.

We’re providing data on this blog because it’s a cheap, easy to maintain and quick way to improve our authors’ experience with Snowbooks. We also would like to make our data available to others for benchmarking or study purposes. Whilst some company data is indeed commercially sensitive, we don’t think that you can do much harm to our company by knowing our sales data. Indeed, we think that by being open and sharing data we can all benefit:

  • Authors – you can keep an eye on whether your local stores are ordering, or let us know if you think there are additional opportunities we’re not getting. Plus you can get a feel for how your book is selling rather than waiting for the 6 monthly royalty statements, or trying to figure out the Amazon rankings algorithm. You can also benchmark your book’s performance against other Snowbooks titles.
  • Fellow publishers – you can benchmark your sales against ours, to see if there are any stores we sell to who might like your books, and vice versa. If you see any gaps in our customer base, reciprocate and let us know!
  • Students – we’ve been asked a number of times for actual data to help students understand the realities of publishing, so we hope this helps you to become better publishers when you graduate. Do acknowledge us in your essays and projects if you find these data useful.

Of course, ideally we’d write a bespoke reporting solution with all manner of data, analyses and search functions but that would cost time and money which we don’t have. We’d rather just get on and have *something* tangible available, rather than nothing but good ideas. I’ll welcome comments and questions, and suggestions for other data which could be provided but please:

  • don’t expect miracles. You may well want daily sales by store, but we’re not going to be able to provide it.
  • bear in mind how tiny the Snowbooks team is. What we’d ideally like to do and what we realistically can achieve are not the same thing. We won’t be able to dedicate much time to maintaining this blog or providing deeper analyses, but we figure something is better than nothing.
  • don’t flame us on this blog, or in email, for not selling sufficient copies of your book / failing to stem returns / other things you’re not happy with as a result of reading these data. We are on the same side, here. If you do flame us your access will be repealed. This data is intended to illuminate and to help us work more effectively and openly together, so please take it in the spirit it’s intended.
  • of course, do leave constructive comments and feedback. We’ll do what we can to accommodate and respond. I would prefer all comments and feedback to be on this site, rather than by email, so that all viewers can benefit from my explanation or answer.

We’ll trial this website for a couple of months and take a view on whether it’s successful or not at the end of Feb 09. Until then, we hope you find it useful. All comments and feedback to emma@snowbooks.com, please, or in the comments section of the relevant post on this blog.

//update//

The end of Feb has been and gone, and people have responded very well to this blog. So on it goes. Hope you continue to find it helpful.

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