Tag: wide sales reporting

I was just poking around writing down some sales numbers and it occurred to me there were things to share about self-pub that maybe others don’t know but that could be useful to know. This is for those who are wide not Amazon-exclusive.

So in no particular order…

• If you chose to list your books on D2D through libraries or stores other than the major ones, don’t trust the sales numbers for the month until you get those emails that finalize your numbers. Places like Scribd, Vivlio, Hoopla, etc. don’t report real-time. For me, since I only do Apple and the libraries and smaller stores through them that means my numbers are usually twice what I see on the sales dashboard throughout the month.
• For Kobo you won’t know Kobo Plus sales until they publish their monthly reports. Usually that’s at the end of the next month and the only way to see the Kobo Plus numbers is by downloading the sales report. It won’t show on the sales dashboard. (At least not the one I currently have.) This is another one where you basically don’t know how much you’ve earned until the end of the next month.
• Last I checked Google sales are delayed a few days in reporting. Sometimes not, but often, but I haven’t checked in a bit.
• Nook sales, for the last two days you need to scroll down to the bottom of the reporting page to see those values. The monthly total does not include the last two days.
• Apple if you download their sales reporting file for direct sales, use 7-Zip to unzip the file, open Excel, set it to look for text files, and then you can open the sales report through Excel and import as a delimited file and it will look like an Excel report by the time you import it.
• IngramSpark you can look at the report of print sales on the screen for the month, but you have to do it using Classic reports, Print Sales, and then go by each operating unit/currency/type combo. So LS US/USD/Global Connect, LS US/USD/POD, LS UK/GBP/POD, and LS AU/AUD/POD.
• I’ve never seen Euro sales on IngramSpark even though they list that as an option.
• Also IngramSpark pays for USD sales on a different schedule than AUD and GBP, so if you’re selling in all three expect two sets of payments. Also expect that they take absolutely forever to pay out compared to everyone else. I think they say two months but it feels more like three.
• Of course on Amazon you won’t know the page rate for KU page reads until the 15th of the next month. They don’t actually tell you the number but it’s easy enough to calculate.
• Don’t forget currency conversion. Without looking I want to say that for Amazon, IngramSpark, and Apple reporting I have to convert the values from whatever currency they occurred into USD. (Apple’s the one I’m not 100% sure on, but I think that’s the other one. With Google you have to be careful which report you download, but if you download the correct report–which is not the default one–it will have the conversion in there for you.)
• If you do a promo with Kobo and it includes a 10% fee on sales that will show up in the month-end report. You have a column that shows your revenue and then there’s an adjustment column and a final value column.

There are probably other things, but those are the ones I remembered today that sometimes trip me up or I have to be careful about. Basically for me revenues for the month aren’t final at month-end for Amazon, D2D, or Kobo and sometimes I need to be careful with Google for a couple days, too. Oh, and Authors Republic and ACX on the audio side don’t report until the end of the next month but audio is so small for me it’s not something I even pay attention to until the reports are out.

Hope that helps someone.