Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinisajoy
If this is data guy, they have a program that looks at all ebook sales on Amazon.
|
It is.
And they benchmark their spider data against confidential data from other sources.
They've been doing this for two years now and their methodology has been challenged, studied, and validated. Their quarterly reports include both the raw data and detailed descriptions of their methology. Knowledgeable people have analyzed their work and nobody has raised a valid challenge that withstood scrutiny.
Even tradpub pundits that tried to deprecate the reports early on have since come to grudgingly accept that the numbers reflect reality. All it takes is a reading of the full reports and at least a basic familiarity with statistics and economics.
If anything, DataGuy's reports are conservative and overstate the tradpub numbers.
(To appreciate how far they go, consider they sorted all the titles in the samples, going back to their first report, by publisher and matched them to the list of publishers reporting to the AAP and then compared their numbers to the numbers reported by the AAP.)
Quote:
One by one, we went through through the thousands of publishers and publishing imprints appearing in each of our seven quarterly AE datasets. We looked up each book’s publisher against the list of 1200 AAP-reporting participants. To make sure we got it right, we received off-the-record help from some of the savviest experts reporting on the traditional side of the industry. By the time we were finished, every book in each AE dataset, and all of its sales, had been tagged as either AAP-reported . . . or not.
So now, finally, Author Earnings could do a true apples-to-apples comparison with the AAP’s numbers.
|
If anybody has better numbers, they're not publishing them.
(Amazon does but they're not talking.)