Weird World War III: Second Week Sales Report

A Book Launch in the Time of COVID-19 and Cyberwar (Continued)

Last week, BookScan reported 110 Weird World War III US retail print sales in the first week. I suggested this data didn’t tell the full story because of several mitigating factors ranging from shipping delays to data lags to a cyberattack on the US’s largest book retailer. Based on these factors, I concluded that the book was doing a lot better than this initial report and that the data would point to this view in the second week.

With all that in mind, what does the data say?

Below are the BookScan US trade paperback sales as reported by Amazon for the period of October 12th through October 18th by geography. As a reminder, BookScan compiles point-of-sales data from ~10,000 retailers throughout the US, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Target, and Buy.Com. Retailers such as Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club do not participate. As such, BookScan estimates that this point-of-sales data represent about 75% of all brick-and-mortar and online retail print book sales in the US. It does not include ebook sales, sales outside the US, sales to libraries, or used book sales.

According to Bookscan, Weird World War III sold 49 copies last week. So the book did worse in the second week than it did in the first–which doesn’t seem to foot with Amazon’s rankings. Between Books‘ total sales last week were 41, which implies that Amazon and all other bookstores in the US sold only 8 copies, which is extremely unlikely. If you look even more closely at sales by geography, the data implies that Between Books sold 0 copies last week because the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania geography (which includes Delaware in BookScan) registered 0 sales. In other words, the data is just plain wrong. It’s hard to tell how the book will ultimately do, but I hope these data issues are settled soon. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next week.

Stay tuned!

On a positive note, Amazon reviews for Weird World War III are slowly trickling in, so at least the book is at least making steady progress there.

Also, if you’re reading this and still haven’t purchased a copy yet, please do. All you need do is click one of the links below. If you have purchased a copy, thank you so much. If you don’t mind doing a quick Amazon review, I would be even more grateful.

Onward!