Comments on: Tracking Sales: Some Perspective

By: dwsmith

dwsmith — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:13:07 +0000

Marcel, I can’t upload my stuff at all because it’s mixed with so many other authors and the publishers (WMG) has it all coming in under one account. And thus why I am hoping to get something like this idea working. Without data entry I would love to be able to sort out my stuff without also being an expert at Excel. Some day I’m just going to go learn that program and be done with all this. But most indie writers won’t. Thanks!

By: dwsmith

dwsmith — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:10:23 +0000

Jane, the children’s books just take more formatting and a natural place for them is on the iPads and other tablets with the graphics. But they are more difficult, no doubt. Good luck and have fun.

By: dwsmith

dwsmith — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:08:42 +0000

Thanks, Rob, maybe others here can help. I can’t because it’s not all my stuff. There are a few others here who have already got web sites up and running. Shout out again, folks. Tell us what the problems are. And how far you are along in the process. Thanks!

By: Rob Rivera

Rob Rivera — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 19:00:47 +0000

Dean, Can you email (rgrivera1113@gmail.com) me a sample of the spreadsheets (I don’t need the actual numbers, just the spreadsheet formats.) and I’ll see what I can do. I’m a software engineer dabbling outside my specialty (avionics). It may take a while based on the demands of my day job, but I should be able to come up with something.

By: Jane Buttery

Jane Buttery — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 17:55:14 +0000

I write children’s books and I don’t think they work so well on Kindle. Maybe I’m wrong. But I worry about illustrations. I do have two novels which may work well but I feel technically inept about making them ebooks.
Thanks for your details here.

By: Alastair Mayer

Alastair Mayer — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 16:26:42 +0000

Ann, to amplify on Dean’s point, while they’re all files that can be opened by Excel (or other spreadsheet program, like OpenOffice Calc), they are a mix of .csv, .xls, and .txt files, some comma-delimited, some tab-delimited. All have different formats, sometimes wildly so. But it gets worse.

At least one reseller only does quarterly, not monthly, reports (although a monthly total is given, it isn’t broken out by title.) Another has changed formats between 2010 and 2011. A couple do regional (country) sales breakdowns without repeating the title on each row. One reports list-price in customer currency (including NZ dollars and Norwegian krone) but (thankfully) gives the royalty in USD regardless of country. (Which is fine unless you want to check the seller’s math.) Some don’t include critical information (like date ranges, or country) in the data, it has to determined from the file name.

In other words, like almost all programming tasks, the easy 80% takes 20% of the effort, but the remaining 20% corner-cases take 80%. At first glance, all you see is the easy part.

That’s not even getting into details like titles not reported exactly the same on different sites (possibly caused when uploading), or wanting to break it down by pen name, or … but you get the idea.

By: Marcel Popescu

Marcel Popescu — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:31:33 +0000

Dean – are you saying you’re ok with uploading those spreadsheets to a website? I didn’t want to write the program as an web app because I thought you wouldn’t want to upload the data. (I don’t plan on doing anything with it, of course, except for generating reports… but you’d have to trust that.)

If you are ok with uploading it, I can make it a web app, it would probably take me a couple of weeks. Please let me know

By: dwsmith

dwsmith — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:29:00 +0000

Ann,

Yup, they are, and yup, it is a huge problem. Give it a try and see for yourself. To make these things spit out simple information for non-spreadsheet people is very tough.

I want to go to a page, load in all the data from the different sources, then without using a spread sheet, type in a book title, a month, and know how many copies I sold and how much I made on that title that month. Seems like it should be easy. Nope.

And yes, they are all excel spreadsheets, which does a person who doesn’t use or want to use spreadsheets no good at all.

And yes, I could buy any off-the-shelf business program that has inventory control and do data entry. With ten books I could do that. Right now WMG has over 200 titles and growing. Data entry is a week of work every month.

And thus you see the problem.

By: Ann

Ann — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:05:43 +0000

Dean – sorry if this has been asked and answered in the 55 or so responses already, but are all of these spreadsheets either excel (doubt apple would give you excel) or as a .csv? I know Amazon is (yes, guilty as charged!), I’ve never bothered exporting Smashwords, but I’m guessing it’s one of the two. As long as they don’t change the structure of .xls/.csv reports, this shouldn’t be a problem for an Excel VBA programmer. At least a personalized one shouldn’t be a problem – I guess an off the shelf on that you and I could each use might be more difficult.

By: Alastair Mayer

Alastair Mayer — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:19:06 +0000

For the Mac and Linux (and Windows, if so inclined) users who want to obsess over sales tracking (grin), there’s MagicBakeshop tracking software.

Unfortunately I lost a few weeks of development time because of some unrelated emergencies. It does all the basics. I just wish I had more of my own sales to track . I’ll have it (with some dummy data) on my laptop at Worldcon; if anyone wants a demo or walk-through, track me down.