Self-Published Revisited

A comment appeared on my post about self-published works that I felt warranted its own post.

Question: Where do the agents and publishers get the sales numbers for a self-published book? The author? Does the author provide financials as proof? Or is there another way to know for sure how many copies have been sold (not just printed)?

Publishers and agents will get this information from Bookscan, and while we all know by now that Bookscan isn’t perfect, and you can read more in my previous post on the subject, we also know that it’s the go-to for publishing professionals when it comes to numbers.

And this is the struggle with Bookscan. If you’ve gotten even a few stores to carry your books it can tweak your numbers significantly and, if you’re getting the kinds of numbers most publishers and agents are looking for, it should appear somewhere on Bookscan.


Jessica

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