Authors to Get Sales Data From Three Big Publishers

Simon Schuster announced the creation of an author portal, a Web site where authors and illustrators can check sales of their books, broken down by type of merchant and book format, including digital.

Random House and the Hachette Book Group also said on Wednesday that they were in the planning stages of creating their own portals for authors that would offer sales and other relevant information. Sophie Cottrell, a spokeswoman for Hachette, said the company’s portal would be introduced sometime in 2012.

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, said a date had not yet been set, but that the site would provide sales data in all formats, in addition to marketing tools and related information.

The new services may help publishers strengthen their relationships with authors who have expressed frustration at the difficulty of getting up-to-date sales information. In the absence of data from their publishers, many writers turn to Amazon, which last year began giving them access to data from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 75 percent of print sales. This has helped forge stronger ties between Amazon and authors at a time when publishers are already feeling competitive pressure from Amazon’s plans to accelerate its own book publishing program. Carolyn K. Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon Schuster, said that the portal was not a response to Amazon, but rather an effort to accede to authors’ requests to have immediate access to their sales figures, without being forced to ask their editors or agents to provide the information.

“There isn’t any place where they can go and get all of their sales figures,” Ms. Reidy said, adding that the project was years in the making. “We realized that we can give them the knowledge we have.”

For authors desperate to know how many copies their books have sold, there are few attractive options. Checking a book’s sales rank on Amazon only reveals how a book is selling compared to other books on Amazon. While book publishers say that they openly share information with authors and agents, they will sometimes hesitate to do so if a book is not selling well.

Authors who use Simon Schuster’s site are instructed not to share the data with anyone other than their literary agents. The site also features links to publishing news and instructional tips on using social media, blogs and videos to promote their books.

Agents and authors said they welcomed the news. “It’s a growing move toward transparency that the business has been going toward anyway,” said Christy Fletcher, a literary agent. “There’s much more equilibrium. Now everyone’s getting the same information.”

Dave Cullen, the author of “Columbine,” a nonfiction book published in 2009 by Twelve, part of Hachette, said he had become accustomed to haranguing his publisher for sales data. While his publisher was patient and accommodating, Mr. Cullen said, he frequently wondered why he could not check the same information himself.

“Some of this is the publishers trying to be competitive,” Mr. Cullen said. “And some of it is that they’re opening their eyes. Publishers didn’t realize the frustration that authors have.”

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