What is Bestsellers Reporting?

ABA member bookstores may report their weekly sales which are used to create ABA’s weekly bestsellers lists, and are shared on BookWeb.org in various formats to facilitate stores' marketing and ordering needs. Please take a look at the Why Bestsellers List Reporting Is Vital video on the importance of reporting.

In addition, If you opt to share your data with Circana/BookScan, ABA will transmit your sales files to them. The information contributes to the industry's view of the independent bookstore channel and provides access to the BookScan point-of-sale tracking tool. Please refer to the Circana BookScan Overview for more details.  Email us at [email protected] to opt to share your sales with Circana or to confirm that you are already doing so.

(As of October 2022, ABA is BookScan’s official aggregator for independent bookstore data. Nielsen is no longer involved in this process. ABA sends the weekly sales data to Circana for stores that have opted to share with them.)  

You may also report your sales to the NY Times Best Sellers List. (Note that sales to the NY Times are not included in creating the weekly Indie Bestsellers List.)  Please follow this link to request access. Additional information on the NY Times Best Sellers lists can be found on the NY Times website and in this article. Other questions can be directed to [email protected].  

Information on your store’s most recent reporting can be viewed on your Member Dashboard. 

What to Report?

  • Your report should include sales occurring during the week beginning 12:01 am Sunday through midnight Saturday. 
  • Stores should include only new print sales.  Do not include used books, digital audiobooks, e-books, or canceled/unfulfilled orders.  
  • Pre-order sales should be reported the week of the book's publication/on-sale date.  
  • Sales from author events should be included in that week’s sales report.  
  • There is no minimum # of units or minimum total # number of items for reporting.  
  • Please report each location separately, if possible.  
  • Do not report your Bookshop.org sales. They will be reported by Bookshop.org.  
  • Invalid ISBNs will be rejected from ABA processing.  

 

How to Report?

You may report your sales in one of these three ways:

  1. Automated weekly reporting to the ABA ftp server via your POS. Currently: Anthology, Basil, Booklog, Bookmanager, IBID, iMRCHNT, and WordStock offer this option.
  2. File Upload to BookWeb.org. 
  3. Manual Entry to BookWeb.org

See this page for instructions on all methods. Please keep the following in mind when reporting your sales:

  • Files sent via file upload or manual entry to BookWeb.org will be overwritten by subsequent files — the last file sent is the one that will be processed.
  • Do not send files via multiple methods.  
  • Sales data is provided by stores on BookWeb.org (manual entry and file upload) or sent to the ABA ftp server by their POS.  All the files are then fed into a time-sensitive automated process to create the information needed for our Bestsellers Lists and to send the data to Circana for stores opting to share sales.
  • There is no capability to intervene in this process with special files, including emailed files.  
  • Bestsellers Reporting is open to ABA bookstore members only.  

 

When to Report?

The BookWeb.org reporting site for manual entry and file upload is available from Saturday at 3:00 pm ET until Tuesday at 3:00 am ET and can be accessed on the Reporting Sales page. 

Reports provided through automated POS processes to the ABA FTP server should be transmitted by 1:00 pm ET each Monday.  

Stores will receive an email reminder each Saturday that the reporting site is open for file upload or manual entry to BookWeb.org — this reminder does not indicate that your store has not reported yet for that week.