By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I mentioned briefly in last Sunday’s Twitterific that I was a beta tester for a new tool for writers. Vook’s Author Control launched over a week ago. I wasn’t paid for my testing, but asked to give feedback and a fair review or endorsement if I liked the service.
I’ve blogged before that I’ve been frustrated with some of the business/financial aspects of publishing. For one, it’s time-consuming to track of income. That meant that I wasn’t doing a wonderful job keeping track of income, which meant that I had an unfortunate tax bill when I went to my CPA in February. I’ve made some changes since then. For one, I have a separate bank account that writing-related income is directly deposited to, so that it doesn’t mix in with our general household funds (a recommendation the CPA had made last year but that I was slow to follow up on).
But I still faced the slow tracking of income—in particular of my self-publishing, which is producing nearly 70% of my income. It’s nice to keep tabs on our income for a variety of different reasons: matching sales against payments, tracking trends/popularity of books or series, seeing how various books are performing at different retailers, experimenting with price points, and knowing what to put away for taxes. Oh—and it’s also handy to know what we’ll be paid 60 days later by these retailers.
But the process looked like this (sure this is familiar to most of you): login and open the financial tabs for Nook, Amazon’s KDP, Apple iConnect, Smashwords, and CreateSpace (ACX for me, also). Find units sold for the month-to-date. And…do a bit of mathematics. For KDP, I’m multiplying the price of each book times the units sold. Sometimes I also lowered or raised prices of the books in the middle of the month, so I had to take those differences into account, too. No, the math isn’t hard, yes, I used a calculator. But it’s time-consuming. And I made errors when multiplying. It was a pain, actually. Because I really just wanted the bottom line—how much income am I generating?
So when I was asked to try beta software from Vook—AuthorControl—as an early user, I was happy to give it a go. I was to test it and offer suggestions for improvement, report any issues, and give my thoughts.
Basically, you sign up through the Vook site. You give your login credentials for the various retailers that you work with (the site states that Vook uses industry best practices to encrypt data). Vook verifies your account. Then you have a single dashboard that reports sales for whatever period of time you want to focus on…and the results are in dollars and cents. We can see gross sales and net sales in addition to unit sales.
You can create graphs (pie chart, line graph, bar graph) to help understand the stats more clearly. And you can export your sales report to a .csv.
You can focus on a particular title or time period.
The first ten books are free to track…tracking more requires an upgrade to subscription plans.
Vook also offers a variety of other (paid) services for writers, including cover design, editing, and distribution, but writers are not required to purchase those services to use the free sales tracking.
I do feel a sense of relief that a lot of the unwieldiness of the process has been taken care of and that sales tracking is more streamlined (since sales tracking still isn’t my most favorite thing in the world to do…but important as a publisher and a small business owner). And it makes me feel more professional and on top of it.
For more information, Publishers Weekly also wrote about the service, here.
When you sign up, you’ll get tracking from the day you sign up, moving forward (so no historical data prior to signing up). Correction: Vook’s sales tracking will now show up to a year of historical data for writers signing up for the service.
That’s my tip of the day… a helpful resource for writers. And I’m happy to answer any questions about it if I can. If I can’t, I can try to loop in some folks from Vook to help me out.
How much sales tracking do you do? How do you use sales tracking?
I spend too much time tracking my stats. But I think if I didn’t, I’d find something else that is utterly urgent to do (like vacuuming the cat).
However, I like the idea of a unified report. I will definitely save the link and keep Vook in mind.
Camille–Vacuuming the cat–always an urgent task, yes!
That’s one thing that can never be said of me (spend too much time with stats…lol!) I have to put it on my to-do list.
Vook makes the report pretty, too. The interface is a reason why I dislike looking at my KDP page (very accounting-esque) and the i-Connect page (ugh. Just ugh. Thought Apple was supposed to be good with design. Apple is the absolute worst of the retailers in regard to ease of use.)
Sounds like a great tool for self-published authors.
Alex–It’s been very helpful for me.
Any chance they’ll work with traditional publishers in the future to help them give their authors actual numbers?
Sandy–I can ask. I have a feeling that would be a challenge, since they’d have to probably go through Bookscan or something. I’m with you…very frustrating not having data on sales through the trad pubs. I never have any sort of idea what sort of royalty check I’m getting…twice a year. :(
Elizabeth – This is a really helpful post to me. Like you, I’ve gotten a bit frustrated with the clumsy process for looking at sales data, etc. using Amazon. It can be hard to interpret and it’s time-consuming. This sounds like a more efficient way of doing it and if I’m right it sounds intuitive. Thanks for sharing.
Margot–It’s pretty intuitive. It took me a few minutes to understand how to set up the retail accounts to monitor, but the tracking is a breeze.
Great news . Also, great news you segregated you accounts. Now, make sure you are funding your IRA before paying yourself. That’s “free” money!
I have a friend who is a very successful artist. Finally, I have him using a business manager. He bought a house this year. His first ever. He just couldn’t manage the documentation requirements before and had no idea of his income and cash management.
I love creative folks. I love organized business minds. I do what the accountant says my personal life. Keeps me out of hock.
Glad all is well and the tool is working.
Jack–Yes, funding the 401K is top priority—well, after I send off this check to the IRS! Bleh.
My CPA says the creative clients she has are just like me. I know there are many writers who are also smart business people, but….I think there are more that are fairly clueless like me and are working hard to stay on top of it.
Sounds great – I’ll definitely look into it when I’m ready to pub!
Hope it will help, Jemi!
Now that is just brilliant!
That’s what I said! I figured they’d been reading my blog posts about how lost I’ve been with the business end of sales tracking and that’s why they were interested in my beta testing. :)
Actually, although I watch units sold, I don’t do any ‘accounting’ until the money shows up in my bank account. I print out the Amazon reports (which, as you said, are 2 months prior to payment) and when I get the money, I enter it into my spreadsheet and move the printout into my ‘income’ folder. All the e-tailers provide monthly reports with breakdowns of books sold, and if I needed to match them one by one, I’d go nuts. I just keep a spreadsheet based on Schedule C, and put income and expenses into each category. This year, I’m going to try to be more timely about getting the numbers in there. A program that does this for me is interesting, but I haven’t found my own system to be particularly complicated. And since I created a shortcut key on my keyboard to open the file, which saves several clicks and waits, it’s easier for me to keep current.
Terry–I’m embarrassed to admit that I can’t even use a spreadsheet. I can use the one I created (basic, very basic) for the ebook services pro directory, but that’s all I can do. I need to take an Excel course online.
Elizabeth,
Thank you for the thoughtful blog post. (Everyone — this is Matt, Co-Founder at Vook). We’re working hard right now to collect new features that authors will want, and to figure out what kind of directional data that we can provide to authors to help them achieve their goals.
The good news is we are collecting historical information now, so anyone who signs up will see up to a year of historical sales data. Elizabeth — I’ll follow up on email and see what we can do about activating historical for your account.
Thanks!
Matt
Thanks for coming by, Matt. I’ll correct the post regarding historical data–that’s great news!
There was a question on here from Sandy regarding trad-publishing numbers…she was curious to find out if there could be a way for Vook to tap into that (I know that’s complex…Bookscan data, etc., I’m guessing?)
Sorry Elizabeth — I just caught this question. Let’s just say we have ideas about how we could start providing more data on trad-publishin. :)
Thanks, Matt! Much appreciated.
Elizabeth– I look forward to the day when Vook will be an indispensable item in my writer’s toolbox.
Barry–I have a feeling you’ll soon have a whole bookshelf that will need tracking!
Well, you strike me as someone with plenty of intuition, so hold that thought!
Tax bills always come as a surprise. I pay 48% income tax and still the authorities want more. I should probably be happy that I have no income in my writing. It would just make more tax, unless I could hide the money in a secret bank account in Lichtenstein >:)
48% on regular, non-royalty income….bleh! I’m taxed around that, but that’s because I’m self-employed.
This sounds like a useful tool. This is what know about myself, I am not business minded. Anything to help me be so, I embrace.
Teresa—Me too! :)
Oh, wow, this is great! I’m going to sign up right now. I haven’t even tracked my sales because it gives me a headache. I hear of people tracking daily, weekly, and monthly sales. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. Thanks for the great info.
Julie–It’s something I’be put off doing because it’s clumsy…and this makes it much easier. :)
Hi Elizabeth – Vook sounds really useful .. and to see that the owner came on line to make contact is good news too … shows respect for the work you’re doing on all sides of the fence …
Cheers – Hilary