Why don't you have book sales stats?

We are a book discovery website, so we don't sell books directly.

We refer readers to Bookshop.org and Amazon (and eventually, I'd like to add more partners). 

Why don't we have book sales data?

Affiliate tracking systems are pretty bad and generally don't give you great data. Our partners put a lot of conditions in place so they don't have to pay us for the sales we generate.

Here are some examples of how they do that:

• Amazon only gives us credit for a sale if someone buys a book within 24 hours. We send a lot more sales to Amazon than are represented in the data they give us. Bookshop.org only gives us credit if someone buys the book within 48 hours, which is not much different (which is a pity).
• In general, affiliate tracking is a mess, and there are plenty of cases where we won't get credit for a sale depending on what link was clicked first, last, etc. 
• There are a lot of issues with affiliate tracking and cookies, and many changes in the last few years have made that unpredictable. 

Not only does this hurt us financially, but it also means we get no stats for that sale. 

Remember that our share of book sales from partners is ~4%, which only funds about 40% of our costs. 

See our business model here and join as a Founding Member to help us stay independent and innovating. Everything we raise from members goes toward new feature development.