We receive sales information directly from Ingram Wholesalers, who compile that data based upon all the wholesale orders that occur from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Ingram, Baker & Taylor and everywhere else your book is listed.
It takes them approximately 30 days to provide us with a monthly report summarizing all the wholesale orders that occurred for your book in the previous month.
What I would like to know, is when is this sent from Ingram? And why doesn't Outskirts post the sales on the same date every month?
My first report was made on the 17th of Jan
My second report was made on the 28th of Feb (and that was only after I sent a note to Outskirts)
Why can't the report be posted on the same date every month? Whether it's 0 or 200, you should be getting the info from Ingram on a very systematic basis.
We receive the information from Ingram on "roughly" a systematic basis. It varies by what they call "accounting" months, which is not exactly the same as a calendar month. According to Ingram, some "accounting" months may be 28 days even if their calendar days are 30 or 31 days long (or vise versa). This varies by year and depends upon when weekends fall. For the convenience of our authors, we report to them on calendar months (because it's easier to remember that January has 31 days in it, rather than 28 days in 2010 and 30 days in 2011, for example). And since we need the information from Ingram before we can report the sales data, we are at the mercy of their "accounting" month but also want to report within the calendar month. Additionally, we want to report as quickly as we can for the benefit of our authors. Most of our authors would rather receive the sales data on the 17th if its ready, rather than having to wait for the 28th just as an arbitrary rule to report the data on the same "date" every month. If it helps, you may decide to only check your own Publishing Center for sales data on the last date of each month. That way, you'll always be receiving your own sales data on the same date every month. Although, if our experience tells us anything, you'll probably find yourself checking earlier "just in case" it's uploaded earlier. We upload it as soon as we can. That's why it's not on the same date every month.
It's not necessary to write a note every month. Contractually we have 60 days from the end of the reported month to post sales results. We typically do it within 30. The February sales report was an exception. They were posted on April 4th. The reason for this particular delay is because we're beta-testing sales/royalties reporting for our upcoming iPad Edition option and we want to be sure we always deliver the correct royalty figures to our authors. The accuracy of the information is the most important thing to us.
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