Christian retailers are being given the opportunity to study publishers' sales data to help them stay on top of the market.

Stores that provide information for the PubTrack Christian data service can now obtain quarterly reports that track eight categories-Auto/Biography, Bibles, Biblical Studies & Reference, Christian Life & Inspiration, Christian Fiction, Diet & Health, Pentecostal & Charismatic and Kids.

Operated by bibliographic information specialist R.R. Bowker and marketed by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA), PubTrack Christian collects data from more than 500 Christian retail outlets across the country.

The Quarterly Category Analysis Reports detail the market share of publishers, leading suppliers by sales, listings of the top authors, information about average title retail price and "most efficient authors" in terms of sales per title.

Introduced last year, the reports have so far been available only to publishers. PubTrack Christian publisher subscriptions include three free category reports, with the others available for $750 each annually. Non-PubTrack Christian publishers pay $1,000 a year per category.

The response to the reports had been "very positive," said ECPA Director of Information and Education Michael Covington, with many subscribing publishers signing up to receive additional reports. Now retailers who provide their sales data to PubTrack Christian will be able to obtain a year of quarterly analysis reports for $49 per category. The fee was to cover administrative costs, Covington said.

"Providing these reports to retailers is not a revenue stream, but instead is meant to raise awareness of the importance of reporting to industry data pools, and the potential benefits for doing so mean that publishers can create more targeted Christian-retail strategies," he said.

Used to produce the ECPA's monthly best-seller lists, PubTrack Christian "was built to serve the publishing community as they seek to create better strategies for selling more books through Christian retail," said Covington. "We are often thanked by Christian retailers who receive the lists," he added. "We feel that stores who submit their data should also have the opportunity to benefit from the intelligence created from it."

The PubTrack Christian data is available only to publishers and retailers involved with the Christian retail channel. The monthly ECPA charts are based on trade discounted titles selling in at least 20% of reporting stores. The association also recently launched a multi-channel sales chart, drawn from Christian, general market and Internet retailers.

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