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Website Supplies a New Perspective on Book Sales and Trends
by Jamie Carter, Publisher Alley Operations Manager
As many can attest, YBP is an innovative company. We're tucked away up here in New Hampshire, but that doesn't mean we're out of touch. In fact, YBP is the proud founder of Publisher Alley, a subscription website used by publishers to analyze sales and inventory across all Baker & Taylor business units. Our IT staff develops the site, and three others here, along with one staff person in New Jersey, support the user community.
Recently, the Publisher Alley group launched a free companion site-called Alley Talk-to make available some of the sales data and analysis derived from the subscription site. This is available at www.alleytalk.com and offers several features that may interest the academic library community.
Industry Voices
The driving force behind the creation of Alley Talk were the feature articles written by Pub Alley staff and contributed by subscribers collected in a site area called Industry Voices. In some cases these are analytical, working closely with book sales data from Publisher Alley. Other articles describe the role of our publishing subscribers, or B&T staff, in the industry. Contributions from subscribers vary according to genre trends in their areas of expertise, and these are often surprising in their breadth and originality.
Alley Talk will release a new set of Industry Voices articles every other month.
A Synthesis
I came on board at Publisher Alley about a year ago, and at that time Alley Talk was already conceptualized. The articles were proposed to provide subscribers additional value in the form of analysis, and to offer models for producing similar sophisticated reports on Pub Alley. The idea was sound, but I thought subscribers would need a lure to devote time to the articles. I also doubted that we could produce articles quickly enough to build Alley Talk exclusively on the basis of that content.
A few months later, after I learned more about other development goals, I proposed a plan for Alley Talk that included the articles as well as bestseller lists powered by Pub Alley data. Subscribers had requested these, and it occurred to me that sales rankings themselves provide automatic industry analysis. These were in keeping with the original premise, and so they were added (see sample below).
We then decided to make the site open-as opposed password-only-in order to invite the broadest possible audience among our subscribing community. Even those who seldom do reports themselves are interested in the lessons that data provides. At that point we were hooked on the more inviting "community" concept, and we wanted to present the full picture of the book world. Other features of Alley Talk represent perspectives from the broad industry-from publishers to wholesalers, librarians, retailers, printers, readers, and authors.
We invite you to visit Alley Talk and let us know what you think. We are particularly interested in article ideas and suggestions for new list categories.
www.alleytalk.com
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