It's easy to check with your distributor to find out how many books they've sent to stores, but how do you track how many are selling in those stores and how do you track your e-sales?
Ebook tracking
Smashwords sales-go to your dashboard to get a quick look for books sold and how many total downloads free and paid. Just subtract the sold total from the total downloads and you have how many you gave for free,too.
To get more specific information, click on sales and payment information on the right sidebar. If you scroll down you will be able to see where exactly your sales came from unless you hit a quarterly reporting period. If there is no information listed when you scroll down, just click on the quarterly earnings mapping report at the top of the page. It will give you a quarterly report and show very specifically where your sales came from.
Kindle sales
Go to your KDP author site and click on reports at the top of the page. You can generate 3 different sales reports from there: prior month, previous 6 weeks or month to month. Just click on one and the details will pop up before your eyes.
Also, using Author Central, available free to all KDP authors, you can see your ranking and a graph of your sales. It also shows your ranking. See below for more information on Amazon Central. The ebook information on this site is updated hourly.
Print sales
Createspace tracks your sales on their site. Just log into your book and go to sales.
If you have a distributor other than Createspace, you can go to Author Central.
It is a free service that KDP offers all its authors.
Once you sign up, you not only put in a profile, you can put in signings and a blog and twitter link. Most importantly, it puts you in touch with Nielson Book Scan that shows, with up to 75% accuracy, your print book sales in 100 different regions throughout the U.S. It is quite remarkable to see the data. It graphs it as well as showing you sales by geography. It does not purport to catch all sales, but enough to show you significant things. This data is updated every Friday.
Click on this link to read more about Amazon and its effect on publishers and authors. Quite remarkable. Amazon seems unstoppable. NY Times article
Next week I'll clue you in on how you get paid from all these sites and how often. It's not what you think....
Happy tracking sales!
