Amazon.com recently started making book sales data from Nielsen BookScan available through their "Author Central" portal - and it yields some interesting data for those of us writing books. Now, it's not complete data as BookScan only covers about 75% of the online and offline booksellers, and it does NOT include ebooks, Kindle editions, etc. Still, it can provide some fun facts like the fact that the last purchases of Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks were in New York, Chicago and L.A.:
What's cool for me as an author is that it also aggregates and displays data across all my books. Now... my books are not exactly NY Times Bestsellers (what? you mean the world isn't racing to learn about UC security? :-) so the data isn't as exciting as it would be for those with more mainstream books... but it's very cool to see. Thanks to Amazon for making this data available (for free) to all of us who write books!
