Providing usage stats to authors

[this article is a stub and could use a lot more fleshing out]

MPS authors often want to know how their books are doing. The best source of information on Fulcrum usage is the COUNTER report interface: https://www.fulcrum.org/admin/stats?locale=en;partial=counter

To generate a report that will show Title Requests, which are tallied each time a user clicks the Download or Read button on a book, visit that page and run a Master Report on the appropriate Press with the settings below, mutatis mutandis:

Open

The report will be emailed to you in about 5-10 minutes. It is also possible to pull sales numbers from the monthly sales report or directly from CISPUB – ask Jason for help with this if needed.

Here is a sample email Jason uses for these inquiries:

Hi [author],

[intro paragraph]

The book has sold 130 print copies so far with our distributor, University of Chicago Press. That’s a healthy number for a book like this – it would put it in the top third of our Maize Books overall.

I’m able to run COUNTER reports on Fulcrum and pull usage numbers for the open access book. I have attached an edited version of the Title Report (TR), which shows Item Requests on a monthly basis. (An Item Request, per the COUNTER standard, is any time a user clicks the Read or Download button on our platform.) I see just shy of 2000 item requests for the open access book in the reporting period.

Please let me know if you have any more questions.

Thanks,
Jason