We’re coming up on the 2015/16 PubFight season very soon, so we’re here to offer some sage advice for anyone who desires to become a PubFight Master (available only to those who’ve got access to SalesData—sorry, educational leagues!).
Bestseller Reports:
Click to view larger.While a PubFight Padawan can guestimate print runs for each of their titles based on units sold the previous week or old-fashioned instinct, a true Master will use two other numbers available in SalesData for their print-run forecasting: units on order (OO) and units on hand (OH). For example, if stores aren’t ordering a lot of units, you may not want to print very many.
To easily view these numbers for your PubFight titles, run a Bestseller Report in SalesData:
Gather your list of ISBNs.
Plug them into the SalesData Bestseller Report in the “ISBN” field.
For the market drop-down, select “All Markets.”
Create the report.
Title Trend Reports:
Click to view larger.Another good report to run is the Title Trend, which displays multiple titles’ performance across weeks, quarters, or years in 13 columns for the selected timeframe from either the first on hand date, the first sale date, or another week of your choice. This is especially helpful if you’ve done some research and have good comp titles to track the trend of units on hand and sold. The steps are basically the same:
Gather your list of ISBNs.
Plug them into the SalesData Title Trend report in the “ISBN” field and click the “Retain ISBN order” checkbox.
From the market drop-down, select “All Markets.”
For the “From what date do you want to compare titles?” search criteria, accept the “Week Ending” default with the current week selected.
Select the checkboxes for “# Units Sold” and “# On Hand.”
Create the report.
BONUS: You can save any of these reports and have it sent to you automatically by clicking “Save Report.” In the pop-up window that appears, give your report a name, and select your preferred file format and frequency (we recommend weekly).
ANOTHER BONUS: You can also create reports for individual markets, like major retail stores, by changing the market from “All Markets” when running a report.
Now go forth and use the reports, PubFight Masters! And don’t forget to use #PubFight when you’re gloating about your print-run glory on Twitter.
