Next Big Sound Adds Analytics For Books
The ability to expand tools and services built for the music industry to other sectors is often a key part of the pitches that music tech startups maketo investors, Music data analytics provider Next Big Sound is making that pitch a reality with the launch of Next Big Book.
Aimed at book marketers and authors, Next Big Book has been tested for the last 8 months by Macmillan. The major publisher says the new tool, “draw sales, publicity, events, social media, web traffic, and web trends data together on a daily basis.”
“If we can accurately measure where people are spending their time and attention,” Next Big Sound and Next Big Book founder Alex White told the New York Times, “we can better forecast where they will spend their money.”
One interesting early trend, is that as in music, Wikipedia matters. “The one I couldn’t believe was the absolute overlapping correlation between traffic to an author’s Wikipedia site to book sales,” said Fritz Foy, Macmillan’s EVP for digital publishing and strategic technology “It is such a tight correlation that at first I thought it had to be wrong.”
