"I'm the author, how many books have I sold?"

Knowing how many books an author has sold is essential to know how a book is doing, of course, but sometimes the access of authors – writers, translators or illustrators – to the figures is not easy. They depend on the information provided by the publisher. Knowing the data directly was – and is – a historical claim of writers and illustrators. To try to remedy this, the Spanish Confederation of Booksellers’ Guilds and Associations (Cegal) has signed separate agreements with the Collegiate Writers’ Association (ACE) and the Federation of Associations of Professional Illustrators of Spain (Fadip) so that authors can have the sales figures through their LibriRed tool.

And the fact is that the only way for authors to know how many books they have sold was the annual liquidations made by the publishers, a fact that has often raised suspicions: the sales figure is with the publisher, an interested party, and it goes from there the author’s profit, around 10% depending on whether the contract has been negotiated. But the operation of the book chain has not made it easy to know the exact number of books sold.

Let’s go to Pams. The author gives the original to the publisher, who turns it into a book and sends it to the distributor, who delivers it to the bookstore, who sells it to the reader. Easy, right? Not exactly, because, as we can assume, not all copies are sold. They can be returned, of course. Thus, the bookseller returns them to the distributor, who does not return the money directly, but instead remains on credit, as it were, while the publisher does not pay the distributor either, but incurs a debt. And so, both serve for the following books. Then, when that book that the publisher and author had placed returns, the money that had been earned is subtracted: it is common for a book to have a positive settlement in the first year and the following two to be negative, due to returns. All this means that the data of books actually sold remains in a nebula and the money that the author receives is often made from an approximation.

Bookstores communicate the sales they make, of course, data that is collected and offered with market studies and projections by the companies Nielsen and GfK, on ​​the one hand, and LibriRed, on the other. The latter is a tool owned by Cegal, which obtains its data from the bookstores themselves, which at the same time serve to compile many of the lists of best-selling books. Yes, like the ones we’ll see tomorrow.

Publishers pay to have information on competitor sales and market trends, and LibriRed provides concrete sales data recorded by bookstores (a data system that bookstores themselves find useful for their work). With the agreements they have signed, Álvaro Manso, spokesperson for Cegal, assures that what they want is to “offer more transparency to the book chain”, and more so considering that it is a collective project, which makes it complex and rich at the same time

However, LibriRed is missing important players, such as El Corte Inglés and Fnac, as well as one of the most important in recent years: Amazon. According to Cegal, of all kinds, 70% is covered from the more than a thousand bookstores that work there.

“I wouldn’t pay for 30% uncertainty,” says Bernat Ruiz Domènech, editor of Apostrophe and expert in the world of books. For him, what would be necessary is to “release the tools”, which “have been financed, at least partially, with public money, and should be public, free and even mandatory” because, if not, those who end up leaving harmed are the small publishers, who in the case of LibriRed, he says, “pay the party for the big ones, since the first ones are many and on their scale it is not so cheap”.

Some editors have been surprised by the uproar over Cegal’s announcement, among other things because they feel as if they are being accused of bad practices. “It’s an urban legend,” says definitively José Ángel Martos, editor of Diëresis, who assures that “today the author is very well protected, the Intellectual Property law protects him a lot”. For him, he says, if authors know first-hand the sales, the trust between author and publisher is strengthened. But in addition, “deceiving an author would be more complicated than it seems, it wouldn’t even work out”, because today information flows more than decades ago. He also explains that in his case, as other publishers also do –Ruiz Domènech corroborates this–, if the interested party wants to see his data, they will not put a finger on it: “With the author you have to be a partner, which today in addition it has to be involved much more as a personal brand, it’s not like before when you gave the original and it was all the editor’s job. We have to go together.”

Manuel Rico, president of ACE, justifies the need for the agreements in the fact that every year they receive more than a thousand legal inquiries from their partners about dubious settlements. In any case, he explains that it is a paid service in which the author must request an annual report – for which he will pay around €10, because €15 of the cost is assumed by the ACE – on the titles he wants to know about. Rico also points out that transparency is today a requirement of European directives, and defends that other associations could also negotiate similar agreements.

And the fact is that neither the Association of Writers in the Catalan Language (AELC) nor the Associació Col·legial d’Escriptors de Catalunya (ACEC) – nor the Galician or Basque ones – have an agreement. “If they really wanted transparency, no agreement was needed, they could have opened it up to the authors directly,” says Ruiz Domènech.

According to the president of the AELC, Sebastià Portell, “the relationship between author and publisher must be one of trust, because if it is not like that it has no meaning”. David Castillo, president of ACEC, acknowledges that some authors “think they are being cheated because some publishers have tended to obscurantism”, and after all, he says, writers are the weak link in the chain: “Editors publish and they sell more books by more authors, and each author sells less”. “It is a perverse and harmful system for the authors, especially those who want to make a living” and, beyond knowing the information, he calls for a more equitable distribution of the percentages.

Will anything change, for the writers? “It doesn’t occur to me that a publisher has an interest in deceiving you, because everything ends up being known”, says Adrià Pujol Cruells, who has more than fifteen books in circulation with various publishers. “I care so much, but if it helps some author to have their accounts clear, go ahead.”