While I'm always happy to participate in the "sales" threads, I always feel like part of my accomplishment is left out of the equation.
For example, my 11,000 books in May ranked on 55th on Soph's list, yet I was the only person on the list selling books at $9.99.
I'm not saying it's "bad" or less of an accomplishment to sell 100,000 at .99 versus my 10K at 9.99 - I don't think the "bias" should go either direction.
I do agree with you. It's hard to factor that in, though, and I think it'd be harder to get authors to divulge $$ income and rank it that way. Also, I think it's more enticing for readers to see how many copies have been distributed, than how much in total was paid for the books sold.
Where will this list be maintained? I think that will help you answer who the intended audience is. (I view the "Writer's Cafe" to be for writers... not readers...)
I think that any authors with publishing deals should, essentially, have an asterisk denoting such. Nothing too specific, just something that indicates to the other writers that "Hey, this guy has some sort of publishing deal."
I'd also angle for a bit more of a breakdown...
1k, 5k, 10k, 25k, 50k, 100k, 250k, 500k, 1M
I'd even be a fan of 500, but it may not hold up to a cost/benefit discussion.
The sales data will be maintained directly by authors, with each author being able to update only their own sales records. The resulting information will be put in our header menus, our blog, and Facebook pages, so it's intended to be of interest to readers, writers, and media outlets.
Right now I have the sales milestones set as 1000, 5000, 10000, 50000, 100000, 250000, 500000, 750000, and 1000000. If that's too broad a range, it will be easy to add additional milestones later. Thanks!
I just want to suggest something to help you manage the data....
Google docs. You can make a form for people to fill in and it will dynamically add the data to a spreadsheet that you can work with online or download to Excel. I know you have assistants in your business here, so it might be helpful to have something that can be group-accessed. It's great because it can be manipulated like an Excel sheet, with sorting, averaging, graphs, charts, blah, blah, awesomeness, blah.
Here's an example of the type of form you can make. Recently sophrosyne did one as well to track monthly indie sales too. I use this resource for doing my massive indie book giveaways too.
http://ellecasey.com/book-bloggers/
Thanks! I've used Google docs too and find they're great for collaborative data sharing, and data gathering. For this, though, there are some advantages in having the information in a database and driving the forms from there. I'll be announcing what I've come up with, in this thread, in the next few minutes.