I think the great philosopher, Rodney “Rod” Tidwell, best summed up both the existential question and the nature of an author’s reality when he said, “Show me the money.” Sure, Jerry Maguire gets all the credit, but we all know Rod had life pegged.
The thing the separates indie publishers from hobbyists is income. Measuring that income is part of the business of being an author, so knowing how to find your sales and royalties is a must. That’s one of the reasons we created our sales and reporting tools. We made this easy, so that you could concentrate less on spreadsheets and more on writing.
The Basics—3 Easy Steps
Here’s how to track your sales and royalties with Draft2Digital’s easy reporting tools.
- Log in to your account at Draft2Digital.com
- From your Author Dashboard, click My Reports in the navigation menu.
- From the My Reports page you can now see some at-a-glance data, including your total books sold (overall, last month, and this month) and Total Royalties Accrued (last month and this month). You can also see your Verified Royalties Due.
That’s it! Those are the basics, and that page will allow you to keep track of how you’re doing over the course of the month, as well as how things are going compared to the previous month.
Check out this video walk-thru:
Of course, you’ll probably want more than just the basics. Which is why we’ve built in some expanded reporting tools that give you a lot more insight into the particulars of your sales.
Advanced Reporting—Dig a Little Deeper
From the My Reports page you’ll notice a menu on the left-hand side of the page, which includes a variety of advanced options. The option we’re focusing on for the moment is Charts.
Clicking on Charts, you’ll be greeted with a graph that shows all of your sales for the current month. You’ll also notice a new set of options appear in the left-hand column. These are presented on two tabs: Chart Structure and Chart Contents. Under each tab are a variety of options for sorting and filtering your sales data.
Under Chart Structure you can:
- Show Values in net unit sales or in estimated royalties
- Show Values by groups of Book Titles, Contributors, Dates, List Prices, Sales Channels or Series Titles
- Change the Sort Order to see your sales by Book Title, Total Sales, or Release Date
- Change the Interval for the reporting, and sort by Today, Yesterday, Last 14 Days, This Month, Last Month, or This Year. You can even choose Custom to chart a fixed date range (for example, if you wanted to see all sales figures from a specific day last month, or from a specific range of dates)
Under Chart Contents you can:
- Include data from Paid books, Free books, or both Paid and Free books
- Select which Books to include in your charge, choosing between a specific title or All Books
- Choose which Contributor is included in the data, either selecting a specific contributor or All Contributors. This is handy if you have pen names, or if you are publishing work on behalf of other authors.
- Choose the List Price you want to track, including a specific list price or All List Prices. This can help you determine which price point is selling best with your readers.
- Select which Publisher you want to track, including a specific publisher or All Publishers.
- Select with Sales Channel to include, either narrowing things down to just one of our sales channels or selecting All Channels.
- Choose which Series to include in the data, from either a single series or All Series
Basically, you get a lot of control over what data is displayed in your charts. And once you’ve customized your chart to display the data you want, you can save that chart for future use by clicking on the little Diskette icon in the upper-right corner of the chart.
Incidentally, if you click the little sales tag icon it will turn on labels for each bar in the chart. This makes it easier to see actual sales numbers per data set, or to see which sales channels are being represented.
Here’s the video walk-thru for these features:
That’s the low-down on tracking your sales and royalties with D2D. We built our reporting tools to make it easy to get at-a-glance data, or to drill down for more to work with. If you have any questions or issues, reach out to us at Support@draft2Digital.com.