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More recently, Amazon has given sellers a dashboard that allows for in-depth time and location analysis for sales that occur through them. But Next Big Sound believes that overlaying sales data with information from social media and elsewhere vastly improves the industry's current technology.

Fritz Foy, Macmillan's executive vice president for digital publishing and strategic technology, says that in limited testing the Next Big Book tool had provided insights.

"The one I couldn't believe was the absolute overlapping correlation between traffic to an author's Wikipedia site to book sales," Foy says. "It is such a tight correlation that at first I thought it had to be wrong."

The company has also found correlation between spiking interest on Goodreads, the social media site owned by Amazon and focused on books, and sales at Barnes & Noble stores.

Macmillan employees are experimenting with the data. Brittney Kleinfelter, a marketer at the company, noticed that one of her authors was selling well in the same geographic regions as a rival author who wrote similar books.

As a result, she decided to move ad dollars to markets where neither author is selling well yet, but where she sees growth potential.

"We want to target our marketing campaign where the other author isn't," she says. "That way there will be less competition."

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