BookNet Canada has been tracking the sales of each of the books shortlisted for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and they’ve determined that, on average, sales of the books have increased by 195% since the nominees were announced on Oct. 7. According to the BookNet press release:
Leading the pack in percent increase is Barnacle Love, the debut short story collection by Anthony De Sa. Published by Doubleday, Barnacle Love saw a sales bump of 350% in just five days after the shortlist was made public.
Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott and The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan got lifts of 280% and 252%, respectively. The follow-up novels by Rawi Hage and Joseph Boyden were already selling at a brisk pace before the Giller list was announced; Cockroach increased in volume by 76% while Through Black Spruce saw a bump of 16%.
No actual unit sales were released, however. As always, these early Giller sales stats are most useful as an indicator of which titles had likely not been selling. With an uptake of 350%, Barnacle Love had presumably been in the sales doldrums, while the Swan and Endicott titles probably weren’t doing much better. Meanwhile, judging by its relatively small uptake, we can probably assume that Through Black Spruce was already performing reasonably well.
Does a sales bump of 350% represent sales from 10 to 45? Does a sales bump of 16% mean going from 10000 copies to 11600?
Quite a difference in sales and yet from the numbers presented above we’ve got no clue how impressive a jump any of these books have experienced.
Real numbers are needed here. Otherwise, reporting the jumps in terms of percentage is meaningless.