Academics / Undergraduate Program / Client Project Challenge / ProjectData Engineering and Forecasting Book Sales
July 8, 2024
Blackstone Publishing, a fast-growing publishing house, is embarking on an analytics journey. To help accelerate this journey, they recently completed a project with a student team from Northwestern’s Client Project Challenge class.
The project's goal was to develop a forecast of new book sales based on industry sales databases (like BookScan) and Blackstone’s internal data.
To support the forecast, the team had to help with the data engineering and building data pipelines to maintain the data.
The industry BookScan data reveals many trends that can be used to train machine learning models for Blackstone’s books.
For example, the following graph shows how books peak when released.
In another example, a classic book can continue to sell year after year:
The student team then built machine learning models to help determine the important features and create forecasting models.
“Ashley, Jaimin, Ana Paula, and Shingie were great to work with. The improved forecasting should help with financial planning and deciding how many books to print prior to the book’s release,” said Lee Leifsen, Senior Director of Finance & Analytics.
The student team was Ashley Burwell, Jaimin Khakhria, Ana Paula Mangabeira, Shingie Tande. The faculty advisor was Professor Ed Malthouse.
About Blackstone Publishing: (From the website):
1987, Blackstone Publishing was born out of a small garage in Southern Oregon. Founded by Craig and Michelle Black, the early days consisted of a handful of family members and employees working out of Craig and Michelle’s home, building the audiobook business one cassette tape at a time. With a fresh perspective on the reading experience, Craig and Michelle, along with their trusted team, found new and innovative methods to produce and distribute audiobooks, while pioneering creative ways to collaborate with publishers, booksellers, and the audiobook community.
In 2015, Blackstone Publishing expanded its mission and introduced hardcover, paperback, large print, and e-book formats while continuing to grow the audiobook business. Blackstone built its own state-of-the-art printing press to sustainably print books right at the Blackstone headquarters in Ashland, Oregon.
Today, Blackstone has firmly positioned itself as one of America's fastest-growing and respected publishing houses with multiple New York Times bestsellers, Grammy Award–winning audio productions, and books placed on the New York Times Best Books of the Year list. A truly independent, privately owned publisher, with offices on both coasts, Blackstone is home to a vibrant and eclectic community of storytellers and story lovers, adding hundreds of new titles each month to its catalog of tens of thousands of books.