PaidContent reports that the Wall Street Journal is going to begin running e-book bestseller lists. The lists will cover combined e-book and physical sales and e-book sales only for both fiction and non-fiction books. This will include self-published titles. The most interesting thing about this move is that the lists will be based on data from Nielsen BookScan, which has tracked paper book sales but has not publicly tracked e-book sales before now. The New York Times runs a similar set of print plus e- and e- only bestseller lists, but they use data from a different...

My cozy mystery, Sweet Ginger Poison is on several Kindle Bestseller lists: #4 in Women Sleuths, #6 in Mystery, #28 in Suspense. The chart below is screenshot of the sales info from my Amazon Author Central account. (Click for a larger view.) Three of my other books have also been on bestseller lists. Naked Frame is the most consistent seller of the three. So how do I do it? Out of the 750,000 books in the Kindle store, what did I do to get my books ranked so highly? I don’t exactly know. I mean, there’s no secret, guaranteed formula. But I can tell you the things I...

Mike Shatzkin has an interesting essay on his blog about how sales of e-books seem to concentrate amid bestsellers—while the percentage of e-books sold seems to be in the teens generally, some bestselling titles report moving as many as 50% of their units as e-books. Shatzkin places the blame for this on the relatively few choices that can be presented at one time on a screen compared to a bookstore. Bookstores, Shatzkin explains, know all about the value of facing titles out on a shoulder-level bookshelf to bring them to readers’ attention. It used to be that as...

An interesting article in Publishing Trends . Discussing the New York Times ebook bestseller list, the article says: The tracking system the paper developed was two years in the making. The Times is working on the lists with RoyaltyShare, and PT spoke to CEO Bob Kohn about the process. Kohn said RoyaltyShare is helping the Times to validate the data it receives from e-book vendors by comparing the data against sales data those same vendors send to book publishers in the course of their regular reporting. “We have the cooperation and permission of the book publishers to do this, and the...

Futureebook has: Here is today's e-bestseller list with prices from major e-tailers. Prices supplied by Luzme.com (formerly ebookprice.info). The FutureBook e-bestseller list is compiled by The Bookseller's chart expert Philip Stone. He uses a points-based system based on e-tailer chart positions and estimated e-tailer market shares. It is compiled at the same time each week. This will be replace[d] by a more robust e-chart when it is available. Thanks to reader Howard for the link....

Every week it seems something new is happening in eBookland to set the ebook cause back a decade or two. Always at the forefront of the reversal of fortune is greed. This week’s menace to eBookland is literary agent Andrew Wylie and his new publishing venture Odyssey. Wylie could have summed up his actions in simple terms: to disserve both his clients and the ebook-buying public. What, you ask, did he do? He agreed to give Amazon exclusive rights for 2 years to his authors’ backlist titles; Wylie will publish the books and exclusively sell them through Amazon. The backlist includes...

It has been only 15 days since our last systematic look at the population of ebook price points in the Kindle Store, but there are two reasons why it makes a lot of sense to take a fresh look today: first, Amazon fulfilled its plan to restructure its Kindle Store bestseller lists and divide them into "paid" and "free" listings overnight last night; and equally important, during the past 15 days the Kindle Store catalog has experienced its most explosive growth ever, averaging over 5,000 new titles per...