Monique Mongeon updates us on what 2022 brought for SalesData and LibraryData. Learn about subject trends we’ve seen, new features and upgrades, and what’s in store for 2023. Link to presentation: https://youtu.be/CmpbLDubSSM Presented by BookNet Canada on April 11, 2023 with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.

1. Nataly Alarcón: BookNet Canada acknowledges that its operations are remote
and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the
Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Wendat and Mi'kmaq
Peoples, the original nations of the lands we now called Beeton, Brampton,
Guelph, Halifax, Toronto, and Vaughan. We endorse the Calls to Action from
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and support an ongoing
shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry.
Monique Mongeon: Welcome to Tech Forum Online. My name is Monique
Mongeon. I'm gonna be talking about what's new in SalesData and LibraryData.
SalesData and LibraryData are reporting tools that allow retailers, publishers,
libraries, and other members of the book industry to access sales, circulation,
and inventory data from retailers and libraries across Canada. For more
information, you can find us at booknetcanada.ca.
For those of you who are already familiar with SalesData and LibraryData and
heavy users of our products, welcome back. We'll be going through an update
on what we've added this last year and what we have coming in the future.
So, let's start with a year in review. When I'm recording this, we're not quite at
the end of the 2023 fiscal year, but so far, our users have run 242,852 reports on
the SalesData and LibraryData platform. That's over 970 reports per business
day, so far this year. And on a weekly basis, users receive 1,220 scheduled
reports. That saves users about 40 and a half hours each week. And that adds up
to 2,037 hours each year or about 58 weeks of full-time work saved for the
industry. Or if you're looking to measure that time in a different unit of
measure, that's enough time to watch every current episode of "Taskmaster" at
least, 21 times. So lots of time saved for the industry to do other really
important things with their time.
But where is all the data everybody's reporting on coming from? We picked up
over 25 new reporting retailers this year from coast to coast, bringing our total
up to 232. And those retailers have over 1,500 store locations. We've had some
really great presenters over the last little while here at Tech Forum from
retailers, so check out some links in the video description to find those.
We have integrations built for nine different point-of-sale systems, and our data
processing supports many others. We currently support BookManager,
Wordstock, ViGIE 3000, Nebraska, Shopify, Square, Lightspeed, Ratex, and
we are working with Givex on a new POS reporting tool.

2. If your store is not using one of these POS systems, don't worry, we are happy
to discuss reporting options with you. Drop us a line at
salesdata@booknetcanada.ca to get started.
In addition to the platforms I spoke about, we are also looking for retailers
using the WooCommerce POS to pilot an integration with us, particularly those
who use the inventory management features in WooCommerce. If that's you,
please, reach out to us. We really wanna hear from you.
Our library data comes from 82 libraries with over 800 branches across the
country. Here are some of them. And we are adding more as time goes on. We
are really excited to have so many amazing libraries working with us.
We have integrations built for six ILS systems with two more on the way. We
currently integrate well with Evergreen, Horizon, Infor VSmart, Koha, Polaris,
and Symphony. We have a new integration in beta with Sierra, and we are also
working on reporting with Insignia. If your library doesn't use one of these
ILSs, you can reach out to us anyway. We really look forward to working with
you and your ILS to get your data on board.
If you use Sierra version 5.5, our integration is ready to test. So if you have
been waiting to participate in LibraryData for this Sierra upgrade, please, get in
touch with us at librarydata@booknetcanada.ca, and we'll get you all set to
start.
Libraries contributing to LibraryData also have their stats counted toward Loan
Stars, which are lists of the most ordered titles in Canadian libraries. For more
information, please, check out my colleague Jackie's presentation on Lone
Stars, which is linked in the description. The Loan Stars lists are really
interesting, and it is a great place to find out what library stars from coast to
coast are most interested in.
Some interesting trends we've seen in the SalesData over the last year, across
adult young adult and juvenile subjects, comics and graphic novels are up 22%
in 2022, over 2021. It's important to remember this is growth upon growth. In
2021, comics and graphic novels were up 35% over 2020. So when we compare
2022 to 2020, comics and graphic novels are up 66%, really exciting growth in
a really fun and fascinating category.
It's really hard to talk about 2022 without also talking about romance. Across
the adult, YA and juvenile subjects, romance was up 51% in 2022, over 2021.
Really exciting time for romance.

3. And within romance, there's some really interesting category growth in new
adult romance, which is up 120% in 2022, over 2021. Unlike we saw with
comics and graphic novels, this is growth upon growth. 2021, new adult
romance was up 119% over 2020. So really interesting growth in a very, sort of,
niche section of the romance genre.
In subject trends that's maybe a little bit more from left field, here we're looking
at unit sales of books on mushrooms, they had incredibly huge growth between
2020 and 2021, over 107%, and continued growth on a smaller scale in 2022.
We're looking forward to see how mushrooms can play a role in trends moving
forward.
If you wanna learn more about mushrooms, and lots of other interesting trends,
across the book space and others, check out our recent Trendspotting session
right here on our YouTube channel, where we discussed all the growing trends
in book sales and what might be coming for the rest of 2023. As a hint, we're
thinking about meth, mushrooms, and goblins, so you don't wanna miss it.
Let's talk about what was new for SalesData and LibraryData as features in
2022. The first were Title-Level Canadian Contributor Filters. These filters
allow you to filter all of the title-level reports in both SalesData and
LibraryData by Canadian contributors, so you can better identify our local and
national authors, illustrators, editors, and more.
We also made some upgrades to the Library Trend Analysis Report, which
allowed for additional timeframes options in the reporting period. So you can
select now from the snapshot and year-over-year options in this report, super
helpful for those longer-range trends studies.
We also made some changes in the Library Trend Analysis Report, to allow
Canadian Contributor Filters, so not only can you look at the performance of a
subject or language over time, but you can also filter that down to only
Canadian contributor titles, which is really helpful if you're looking for that
level of trend analysis at your library.
And we have a lot of really exciting things coming next that are getting
extremely close to release to the main site. First, we are adding Canadian
Contributor Filters to the market share and market comp reports, which are
reports looking at market-level performance. This is gonna be especially helpful
for retailers working on their applications to DCH book-selling programs and
other programs coast to coast, and it also allows us to track the sales of

4. Canadian-contributed titles much more easily. Really exciting report. We're
excited to have you try this one.
We're also adding additional filters to the market share and market comp
reports. This will allow you to compare things over time with additional filters.
Previously, you could look at, for example, a publisher over time, but you
couldn't filter that by a specific subject or format, you will now be able to do
that. And we are adding filters to all of the permutations of the market share and
market comp reports. This will be so exciting. I can't wait for you to try it.
We're also working on adding ISBN counts to the market share and market
comp reports. The questions we get asked the most, especially when we're
talking about subject trends, like I talked about earlier in this presentation, is
whether sales growth is due to growing numbers of ISBNs being published in a
certain category, or if a single title has exploded in popularity and is sort of
uplifting an entire genre.
Adding ISBN count data to these reports will help add this context to your
subject and format-level reporting, as well as your publisher-level reporting.
Really exciting stuff coming with ISBN counts.
Looking farther out into our roadmap, we're also looking forward to adding
age-range data and filtering to our reports. That's something that's especially of
interest to those who publish a lot in the children's subject areas, so we're
excited to work on that and offer that. Of course, this is not exhaustive. We
always have lots of interesting ideas in the can, and most of those ideas for how
we can improve SalesData and LibraryData, come from you, our users. So
please, do let us know what would make your life easier, and what sort of data
you really wish you had your hands on, and we will do our best to help you.
Like all BookNet products, our future development is driven by stakeholder
feedback, so please, please, get in touch. We would love to hear from you, and
how we can make your work in 2023 and beyond easier and more data-driven.
If you have feedback or questions, please email us data@booknetcanada.ca.
You can find us on the internet at booknetcanada.ca, on Facebook, Twitter, all
the places. We really would love to hear from you and hear your ideas for how
we can continue improving these tools for the future. Thanks so much for
watching. Have a great day.