Measure
Measure book sales around the world
Nielsen BookScan is the world’s first continuous retail sales monitoring service for print books.
About
Nielsen BookScan is the world’s first continuous retail sales monitoring service for print books, based on electronic point of sale data collected directly from tills and despatch systems.
Nielsen BookScan monitors sales from high street and internet book shops, supermarkets, museums, specialist shops and independent bookshops in 12 territories: United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Poland, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
Data is available via subscriptions or on an ad-hoc basis and can be catered to your organisation’s size and needs.
Find out more about our services below, for more information email infobookresearch@nielseniq.com or call +44 (0)1483 712 243.
Why use Nielsen BookScan?
Our clients include publishers, booksellers, agents, authors, libraries and media outlets and they use are services for a range of reasons including:
- Monitoring titles and authors against the competition and overall market
- Analysing pricing and discounting by format or category
- Gauging the success of marketing campaigns and promotions
- Seeing which categories are growing and declining
- Learning what works in a particular market and how that might differ from other countries
Retailers
Retailers who contribute sales data to Nielsen BookScan can monitor market share each week in order to see how your leading titles compare to the overall market and to identify popular titles that you may not be stocking.
Nielsen BookScan allows you to verify your sales by category to spot strengths and weaknesses; monitor consumer trends by category, format or price point; and make improvements to your inventory and subsequent turnover.
Publishers
Nielsen BookScan can be used at any step of the publishing process to inform acquisitions, marketing and publicity campaigns, sales promotions, reprint decisions and overall publishing strategy.
Strategy and new title development
Our data can help you research a new genre or potential acquisition, providing easy access to sales patterns, bestselling titles and authors and format and pricing information. Nielsen BookScan can help you identify when a certain type of book debuts successfully, what categories are in growth or decline, and how you are faring against your primary competitors.
Supply chain and reprint decisions
Nielsen BookScan provides visibility on what is selling through the trade, allowing you to estimate initial print runs for new titles and monitor whether retailers and distributors have the right amount of stock to meet demand, ultimately helping you to minimise returns and manage costs. You can also spot if there’s a new trend that has the potential to increase your backlist sales, leading to repackaging or reprinting of older titles.
Sales and marketing measurement
You can measure the impact of promotions for your titles and those of your competitors in order to better understand what works and what doesn’t for a particular title, genre or region. Use the Average Selling Price (ASP) to see how prices and discounts vary by week or by retailer, and regularly monitor whether you’re on track to meet sales targets.
Libraries
Combining the skill and knowledge of staff with actual sales and borrowing data allows libraries to use valuable book budgets effectively and enables library acquisitions to more closely match consumer preference and demand.
Using Nielsen BookScan for Libraries, you can access weekly charts of bestselling authors and titles by genre to see what’s selling through the UK market as well as run lifetime sales for specific authors and titles in order to curate title selection and reader lists.
Nielsen LibScan was launched in 2009 to collect and measure public library print book borrowing data. There are currently over 70 public library authorities participating, adding up to more than 2,000 individual branches.
Panel participation is free of charge
Contributing libraries have access to our Nielsen LibScan online reporting tool, providing you with authority-level and national library lending statistics to create genre, author and title charts, ranked by borrowing. This valuable borrowing data will assist your stock and purchasing decisions and help increase the number of users and borrowings.
Authors
As an author, you can see the sales performance of your titles regardless of whether they’re published by you or a mainstream publisher. Nielsen BookScan data can help you gain a better understanding of your sales, giving you the ability to track weekly trends, monitor the effects of a promotional or signing tour, examine how your sales may differ by region, and use data as a reference when checking your royalty statements or negotiating future books.
Agents
Through Nielsen BookScan, literary agents can see authors’ sales firsthand, rather than relying on information provided by the publisher. You can monitor promotional activity for your authors in most territories by region and use concrete data in rights negotiations with publishers, film and TV companies and other potential outlets. The data can also be used to spot new trends and inform you on the potential market for new authors and titles.
Media
Nielsen BookScan provides weekly bestseller charts to The Sunday Times and a number of other UK and Irish newspapers, as well as ad-hoc data for articles about trends in books. Beyond the publishing industry, BookScan data has been used by film studios and games companies looking to source new ideas and food manufacturers researching what types of cookbooks consumers are buying – our data can help to drive revenue and guide key decisions in any number of ways.
PubTrack Digital
Gain a more comprehensive view of digital trends and bestsellers
Nielsen PubTrack Digital was launched in 2016 as the UK’s first dedicated e-book sales reporting service.
Nielsen PubTrack Digital consolidates UK e-book sales data from a panel of participating publishers to form a market measure using invoiced sales data. E-book volume sales are reported monthly and in arrears, with users able to run reports based on author, title, ISBN, publisher and category.
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