Analyzing Book Sales
Insights into Author Popularity and Trends
Link to project repository on GitHub
This project is inspired by my love of reading. I wanted to explore a database of book sales information, with a particular focus on books released after the year 2000. More specifically, I was curious about author information (I wanted to see how my favourite authors are doing). I aimed to get insights about an authors popularity, general rating, and sales trends. I used excel to perform a general cleaning of the database and then developed an interactive dashboard to present my findings.
Metrics and Dimensions
- Average Book Rating: The average rating given to the book by readers
- Units Sold: Total number of copies sold
- Gross Sales: The total sales revenue generated by each book
- Publisher Revenue: The revenue earned by publishers from selling each book
If you wish to take a closer look at the excel file and use the dashboard, you can download the .xlsx file here.
Summary of Findings
Note: You can analyze any author in the list but here is the summary for the author Stephen King
Average Book Rating
- Stephen King has an average book rating of around 3.95/5★
- His highest rated book is The Dark Tower (2004) with a rating of 4.27★
- His lowest rated book is Cell (2006) with a rating of 3.64★
Units Sold
- He has a total of 61,052 units sold
- He sold the most copies of the book Joyland (2013), with 42,768 copies sold
- He sold the least copies of Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (2002), with 106 copies sold
Gross Sales
- He has a total $11,862.35 in gross sales
- His highest grossing book is Cell (2006), with $5,933.78 in gross sales
- His lowest grossing book is Finders Keepers (2015), with $107.90 in gross sales
Publisher Revenue
- He earned a total of $6,178.03 in publisher revenue
- The book that earned the highest publisher revenue is Cell (2006), earning $3,560.27 in publisher revenue
- The book that earned the lowest publisher revenue is Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (2002), earning $190.00 in publisher revenue (some books were missing this information)
Other
- His most used publisher is Amazon Digital Services INC.
- He has 10 recorded books in this database
Recommended Next Steps
- Investigate how book sale prices correlate with copies sold and revenue to optimize pricing strategies.
- Merge with an updated database to include more authors and books for comprehensive comparative analysis.
Database Information
Database: https://data.world/josh-nbu/books
Each row represents an instance of a particular book with the following information:
- Book Name: The title of each book
- Author: The name of the author(s)
- Language Code: The code representing the language the book was written in
- Author Rating: The rating assigned to the author (Excellent, Intermediate, Famous, Novice)
- Book Average Rating: The average rating given to the book by readers
- Book Ratings Count: The quanitity of ratings given to the book by readers
- Genre: The genre or category of the book (children, fiction, nonfiction)
- Gross Sales: The total sales revenue generated by each book
- Publisher Revenue: The revenue earned by publishers from selling each book
- Sale Price: The price to purchase one copy of the book
- Sales Rank: A numeric value indicating a book's rank based on its sales performance in comparison to other books within its category (genre)
- Units Sold : Total number of copies sold