20 August 2024
Congratulations! You're a published author! You went through all the effort of writing your book and now you're neck-deep in "what comes next" territory. You want to know how well your book is doing. Is it getting ratings? Is it getting sales? Are retailers giving discounts on your book without telling you?
Even if you're only selling on Amazon, it can be a chore to manually keep track of all that information. Every website puts information in slightly different places and sometimes calls that information different things. And what about the sites that you're not selling, but where readers to go share ratings? Monitoring all of these different book sites can consume hours of your week, hours you could be using to write your next book.
Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to do that? Good news! You don't. There are a bunch of different tools out there that will do this work for you. In this article, I'm going to give you an overview of what's available.
I'm going to admit that I'm 100% biased for this tool. That's because I built it. I had a very specific list of requirements:
These are the needs that I designed Tablescraps to fulfill. It checks the public-facing pages where my books live, so I don't need to share any login credentials. And since it works that way, it supports retailers, review sites, traditionally published books, and even web serials. It's a webapp that runs independently, so there's nothing to install. It stays out of the way and only sends me notifications about updates that I actually care about.
And the pricing is simple. $3.99/month for the first book and just $1/month for every book after that. Plus it has a 7-day free trial so you can test it without providing any payment information.
Does it do everything I want it to? Not yet. There are more book sites to support. I'd like to see the changes to my books' stats over time. And as I add a lot of books, I'd like to have more ways to group and organize them. Fortunately, I know the developer and I have it on good authority that all of those features are coming.
Tablescraps suits me, but maybe it doesn't suit you. Fortunately, you have options. Let's take a look at them.
Fair warning, as of this writing, the BookTrakr website is down, and apparently has been for quite some time. That said, while it was working BookTrakr was probably one of the closest matches for my list of requirements. It's a website that checks your book stats for a wide array of sales platforms and sends you reports and updates when they happen. It does require that you share your login credentials for each of your sales dashboards, but because of that, it can get information that Tablescraps can't, like the number of sales you've made and how much money you've made. It also has a pretty welcoming interface that's simple and straight-forward.
In terms of pricing, BookTrakr is pretty reasonable even if you're not making many sales. That said, it's a bit complicated. It uses a tiered pricing scheme, based on the number of books and book sites (known as SKUs) that you're tracking. There's also different features available based on whether you choose a Basic or Pro plan. Entry cost is $0.99/month for 0-9 SKUs on their Basic plan and can go as high as $99.99/month for up to 999 SKUs on their Pro plan. If you choose to use annual pricing, you can get a bit of a discount. And, like many of these tools, there's a free trial period.
When I first started talking about Tablescraps to people, the thing I heard the most in response was, "Oh, so it's like ScribeCount?" The answer is yes... and no. Like Tablescraps and BookTrakr, it can track data and generate reports on how your book is performing on a wide variety of platforms. And like BookTrakr (but unlike Tablescraps), ScribeCount can access a lot of detailed information because it uses your login credentials for each of those platforms. To be clear, those credentials aren't sent to ScribeCount's servers. ScribeCount works as a Chrome browser extension, so all of that information is stored locally on your own computer.
One of the really cool things about ScribeCount is how it visualizes all the information that it gathers for you. Not only are their graphs good at making sense of a huge amount of data, they're also just downright sexy to look at. As someone with a background in design, I absolutely appreciate that.
And the number of sites that ScribeCount supports continues to grow. The tool can also track performance from your email list provider and advertising platforms.
As far as pricing goes, ScribeCount has a simple tiered system, based on your income from book sales. If you make less than $1000 a month, your rate is $9.99/month. For authors making more than $1000 each month, your rate is $19.99/month. And like BookTrakr, there's a discounted annual plan. For trying out ScribeCount, there's a free 14-day trial.
Publishwide distinguishes itself by giving you the option of either running it as a Chrome browser extension or as a stand-alone application in Window or Mac OS. There is a lot in this reporting tool and some folks have found the setup and configuration process to be a bit complicated. But really, it's certainly not any harder than getting your books published in the first place. Like BookTrakr and ScribeCount, Publishwide logs into your dashboards on a wide variety of book retailers and it can therefore give you detailed sales information. That does mean it needs your login credentials, though.
One other notable integration in Publishwide is the ability to connect to your Meta Business account. So if you're running ads on Facebook or Instagram, you can track their performance right alongside all your other book data. Quite handy.
As far as pricing goes, Publishwide is a bit steep in comparision to other tools at $29/month for anyone making less than $1 million per year from their book sales. And it's likely to increase once they get out of their early adopter phase. That said, it's a pretty simple pricing structure and there's 14-day free trial to test it out.
If you're just starting out, the Book Report's pricing model is pretty nice. Like a lot of the other tools in this article, Book Report is a browser extension. Though, notably, Book Report supports both Chrome and Firefox whereas all the other extension-based tools are Chrome-only. As an extension, Book Report uses your login credentials to pull information from the dashboards of multiple book distributors. It offers clear visualizations of that data in a variety of charts and graphs with a nice, clean interface.
The pricing structure is similar to that of ScribeCount with the important distinction that it's free for anyone earning less than $1000 per month from book sales. If you're over that threshold, the price is $19/month. Regardless, like the other providers, Book Report has a free trial period that you can use to test the tool without providing any payment information.
If you're exclusively selling on Amazon and want a free tool that's specifically tuned to that platform, then I'd say ReaderScout is worth a look. It's a Chrome browser extension that monitors how your book performs in Amazon. It does a pretty good job of tracking the important information on that platform, including reviews, price, and how many followers you have on your author account. And it's absolutely free to use for up to 50 books. There's no way to pay to increase how many books it checks, so if you have more than 50, you'll have to prioritize which ones you want to track the most.
So, that's what's out there in the world of book tracking right now. There are a lot of options out there for you to choose from. All of them offer free trials, so I'd say that it makes sense to try them all out and see with fits your needs the most. Some of them, like ReaderScout and Book Report can be used (with some limitations) for free, so maybe it makes sense to use a combination of tools.
For myself, though, I'm going to keep using Tablescraps and adding more features to it as I go. Yeah, yeah... I know. Big surprise. The guy who created a tool chooses to use that one. Then again, maybe it's reassuring that I'm "eating my own dogfood" and using this tool every single day. More importantly, maybe you have the same list of requirements that I did when I started making Tablescraps. If so, I'm here for you.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions... or suggestions.