Image by Christian Ferrari - http://christian-ferrari.blogspot.com/

If you’re an author who has a book for sale through Amazon and you don’t have an AuthorCentral account, you’re missing out. Amazon has started giving authors free access to Neilsen BookScan info. If you aren’t familiar with Neilsen BookScan, well… it’s a tracking system that shows retail sales for books. It’s not perfect (it relies on barcode scans from retailers who report), but it does give authors more information than has been easily available in the past.

So, sign up! Go to it. Remember, like your Amazon sales rankings, this isn’t something to obsess over. But, you never know, you may find out that you’ve got a big fan base in, say, Wisconsin, that you didn’t know about.