Hachette Launches New Sales Tracking Tool for Authors and Agents

Hachette today launched an ambitious initiative to share the entirety of its sales-data with its authors and their agents. The new sales channel, The Author and Agent Portal, will feature confidential sales reports for all of its titles, Nielsen BookScan weekly sales data, an online-piracy-reporting tool, prepublication timelines, and more. Agents will have access to all of the information that their author sees and will receive regular royalty statements through the platform.

Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch said in a press release today, "The Portal is designed to add transparency to the publishing experience by making sales data and resources readily available and easy to use to authors and agents, our valued partners in the publishing process."

The Portal will also provide information available to the public, including a dynamic title search, title metadata, and seasonal catalogs.

Following is Hachette's complete press release.

Hachette Book Group's Author and Agent Portal
October 9, 2014 - Hachette Book Group has just launched their Author and Agent Portal, an important new channel within hachettebookgroup.biz, the company's business platform. The Portal provides a self-service option that puts up-to-date information and resources at the authors' and agents' fingertips, including confidential sales information for all of their titles published by HBG, in all formats, as well as a variety of features and tools.

Enhanced features available to authors include:

• list of all of the author's works, with links to the individual book pages
• unit sales information
• Nielsen BookScan weekly sales data
• HBG's Guide for Authors, a detailed introduction to our publication process
• interactive publication timeline for the 12 months prepublication
• file-sharing feature for sending large files between editor and author
• online-piracy-reporting tool

Agents will have access to all of the information that their author sees, as well as PDFs of their author's royalty statements.