Episode 117 - Tracking Sales Data and How ScribeCount Can Help with Philippa Werner
January 25, 2022
Philippa Werner discusses the key pieces of sales and income data that an indy author should be collecting and tracking; the fact that consolidated sales and earnings reporting is a good reminder of how much of an indy author’s income may not (should not) come from Amazon; and how familiarity with this data can make you more nimble and responsive to marketing and promotion opportunities.
Philippa Werner is the public face of ScribeCount, overseeing the customer interaction, content, and overall service side of the company. Holding a Bachelor of Arts in Economics with a minor in Mathematics, she brings analytic skills and creative abilities to her work at ScribeCount. With 19 novels to her name, including 2 USA Today Bestsellers, Philippa speaks the complicated language of indie-author very well.
"I recommend scanning your sales for the past month or so every day, but then also looking at your month-by-month view without any calendar indicators, because that's a very good way also to pick up on anomalies that you might not have seen if you were looking for something else specific" —Philippa Werner
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Philippa Werner. Hey Philippa, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Philippa: Good, thank you. It's so good to be here.
[00:00:09] Matty: I am pleased to have you here. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Philippa is the public face of ScribeCount, overseeing the customer interaction content and overall service side of the company. She's also Bachelor of Arts in Economics and a Minor in Mathematics, and she brings analytical skills and creative abilities to her work at ScribeCount. She has 19 novels to her name, including two USA Today bestsellers and Philippa speaks the complicated language of indy author very well, which will be handy for us. And she's a native of Minnesota where she can often be found shoveling snow, watching science fiction movies, arguing thermostat settings, or getting socks on a fleeing toddler, and especially this time of year. We're recording this at the end of December so, socks on the toddler, especially important and thermostat settings.
[00:00:55] So I had invited Philippa on the podcast because I am a happy user of ScribeCount. And we're going to be talking about ScribeCount a bit specifically, but I also wanted to tap into Philippa's background as a data person, and how the data side works for indy authors. But whenever I talk to someone who has an author service like ScribeCount, I always like to ask, what did you see in the author community that led you to be part of the founding of ScribeCount and development of it?
[00:01:25] Philippa: Well, that's actually an easy answer. So the reason Randall developed it, to start with was that he wanted to use it and he kept waiting for someone else to develop it, and no one did. And that was very similar reason that I signed on, was when he said, okay hey, we're working on this, we're assembling a team, would you like to be part of it? Yeah, I would like that to be a lot easier for me to do. And so he and I both had this idea that we were going to develop ScribeCount. It would make our data collection a lot easier and then we'd have more time for writing. And of course it's been a year and a half now, and we're still pretty much full-time on ScribeCount, but the ScribeCount aspect turned out very well.
[00:02:07] Matty: Yeah, and it's working out well for the rest of us too, because I have to say, I almost cried with joy the first time I loaded my stuff into ScribeCount and saw the numbers because, and I'm sure this is like what your brochure says, I had been spending a lot of time collecting inaccurate data. One of the errors I always found myself falling into is I would get notifications of royalty payments and I get notifications of anticipated royalty payments, and I wasn't always careful about distinguishing those, and in some cases I was double counting earnings or I'm sure missing some earnings.
[00:02:39] So let's talk a little bit first independent of ScribeCount, if you're an indy author and you want to be reasonable about monitoring your business, what are the key pieces of data that an indy author should be collecting and tracking?
[00:02:54] Philippa: Well, I think you made a very good point with anticipated earnings versus actual earnings. Towards the dates that you start to get your earnings confirmations and payment confirmations, you can go to each retailer and download the final amounts for that relevant month. So it's usually a couple of months behind, or I believe Smashwords is still early. And that's important because, not only is that accounting for a whole bunch of returns, but you also have your different exchange rates going on there. So the anticipated payments will often deal with inexact exchange rates, and then once you have the payment confirmation, you can go to the reports, and you'll know exactly what you made in your currency.
[00:03:41] Matty: Returns is something, honestly, I've never looked at, except insofar as I have the sad story of having the in-person book event where the bookstore bought like 50 copies of my book and a lot of those 50 went back to Ingram. But generally speaking, I'm selling 97% of my books in ebook. I know people sometimes return ebooks, but I don't think I'm having that problem. Does ScribeCount reflect returns data?
[00:04:05] Philippa: Yes, it does. So it always reflects the most up-to-date data that are in the spreadsheet reports. So not what you're seeing on the dashboard, but what's reflected in the backend reports that have been pushed to users, which has occasionally given us the appearance of being able to see forward through time, which is hilarious. Because you will say, things are showing up here that aren't on my other dashboard and then they come true.
[00:04:32] Matty: That's totally worth $15 a month.
[00:04:35] Philippa: Yes, come on, we're seeing the future for you. But yes, it'll be updated. It won't tell you how many returns there were. You'll need to go to the actual platform if they're tracking returns to see that there. This is one of those things that generally isn't an issue but is occasionally indicative of a problem. So there was the glitch in Audible, for instance, ACX reporting, it must have been two years ago now, that showed people how many returns were happening. And that is what's led us to this point where it looks like Amazon's going to be making some changes there.
[00:05:20] Every once in a while, someone will say, out of nowhere, I got a huge number of returns for this book, or there are people going through and reading my entire series and then returning each one. What is that about? Generally, it's just one jerk and there's just kind of nothing to be done about it. It's like book piracy. I advise not thinking about it as much as possible because there's not much you can do, and it just makes you angry.
[00:05:51] Matty: I second that.
[00:05:52] Philippa: But if something really big comes up, then you have an idea of, okay, can I go contact this retailer and say, what the crap is going on? They don't want that either, right? Cause they've been paying to host and provide that data, so you all have a vested interest in figuring it out.
[00:06:10] Matty: if people are doing this themselves, is there a period of time that you should wait after the close of some reporting period in order to go to a platform and know that the numbers you're getting are reasonably final, or does it vary so much from platform to platform, that there's not a general guideline?
[00:06:30] Philippa: Well, it varies, and unfortunately, you're probably not likely to see those final numbers until around the payment date, because that's when they set all the various exchange rates that they will be using. So there's stuff built into the contract that states that they can use whichever exchange rate they see fit at the time. It'll usually be right around what the exchange rate is, but because those rates fluctuate so much, they'll choose one right around at the payment date, and that's when you'll know exactly how much you're making.
[00:07:02] Matty: And I think another tricky thing about doing this manually is that you would think that everybody would track things on a monthly basis, but no. Apple maybe, I forget one of them it's like ...
[00:07:14] Philippa: Five days off. Yeah.
[00:07:17] Matty: So like using the Aztec calendar or something like that.
[00:07:20] Philippa: Yeah, exactly. If we moved to a 13-month schedule and you're like, okay cool, whatever.
[00:07:27] Matty: I guess these are just some great illustrations of why, if you can find a way not to do this yourself and have an expert do it for you, it is a good thing to do. And so, number of books is something that I think people like to know. There's the whole bank over rank, so maybe the money that's coming into your account is more important than the number of books you sold. Can you talk a little bit about how ScribeCount has decided to weight what it shows and what it goes after in the reporting it provides?
[00:07:57] Philippa: Yes, absolutely. Our main feature is the sunburst graphics. So the idea was that you could take a look in the morning and have at a glance, half-second to a second-and-a-half idea of where you stand for the month, the week, or whatever time period you've set up your dashboard to show. And so that's front and center on the dashboard. And then there are these little mini sunbursts across the top that show the weighting of Amazon versus all of the other retailers. There's a KU specific one if you have books in KU. Free versus paid units and then the percentages from different formats, so audio, paperback, ebook, KU pages.
[00:08:43] Matty: I realize I should have asked first of all, for you to just describe a little bit for people who haven't seen ScribeCount, what data it's showing, where it's pulling from, what platforms and media it's covering.
[00:08:54] Philippa: Okay. So, we'll start out right at the top. There's a big pie chart that shows you how much money is coming in from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google, Apple, Draft2Digital, Smashwords, and Kobo. And you can also add in your own income, so if you're making income from selling books out of the trunk of your car or whatever it might be, shark training, you can put that in there if you want. There are some people that like to put in their day jobs so they can see their royalties measured against their day job and get a sense of when might be a good time to switch over to full-time writing, things like that.
[00:09:37] As you scroll down, it will show you a list, what looks like an Excel spreadsheet but small and manageable, of your top books and the total royalties, the units that are being sold. And you can modify that to show which columns are useful to you. Then there's a day-by-day or month-by-month bar chart that shows you which books are selling and what the overall amount is for each day.
[00:10:07] And from there, it'll go down to a redux of the pie chart, but with unit breakdowns. So you can see, okay, I'm earning, so right now I can say, I'm earning 67% of my royalties on Amazon for the month, but 61% of my free units are coming from Amazon. So it's slightly outperforming in terms of free units to paid sales. And that's one of the ways I like to look at it. And below that there are the maps, you can see where your sales are coming from, which I really like.
[00:10:43] Matty: I'll just throw out some examples of ways that I found this very useful is that I have created my author strategic plan based on the fact that I'm favoring ebook sales, not print sales, and favoring online sales over bookstore sales, for example. I'm just looking at my dashboard, and I would not have guessed that it's almost 97% ebook, a little more than 3% paperback. I wouldn't have guessed that it was that big a spread, but I felt like it was a good confirmation, either that I was pursuing the right strategy or that my strategy was resulting in the numbers that I'm seeing.
[00:11:21] Philippa: That is one of the things that is so useful about those pie chart graphics is, that I can log in, and right now I just had a BookBub, and so it's very heavily weighted to Amazon, which is what happens for me every time I do BookBub. But normally when I come in in a month, Kobo and/or Apple are giving Amazon a run for their money in terms of how much they're selling.
[00:11:46] And that's a very good reminder. It is so easy for us to forget how much of our income is coming in from other places. And so to be able to see that, have the incentive to grow it, and then also remember, oh, I've got a lot there, I can push some promos there. It really does intuitively shape your approach to each month.
[00:12:10] Matty: And as someone who is both a data scientist and an indy author, do you have a sense of how you're balancing for your own business? Like I said, what comes first? What came first for me, the fact that I had a strategy of favoring eBooks and it's paying off or that coincidentally, that's happening. How do you assess that difference between balancing your strategy and balancing and assessment of your data?
[00:12:39] Philippa: Interesting. So obviously, the standard disclaimer, right, is that past performance is not an indicator of future performance. But you do get an idea of how different things affect the various ecosystem of your books. When I look at different events, so for instance, I have looked at a calendar of a few months, day-by-day, and I've done that every day, you start to pick out little patterns and you start to look at how promoting one book can change sales to other books. You just start to develop a familiarity with that data.
[00:13:23] And so it otherwise gets you used to seeing it. I mean, obviously we all have eyes, we're all looking at this data, but getting used to all of the different fluctuations makes it much more likely that you'll scroll down to your day-by-day calendar one day and you'll say, that's a really interesting spike of this one book. I'm going to see what I can do with that. And so it makes you more nimble and responsive, is really what it is. You get a sense of how things have gone in the past and you get more used to seeing anomalies.
[00:14:04] Matty: I was very surprised on mine that "other" was almost 20%.
[00:14:10] Philippa: That's D2D I believe. So for me, all of my Apple sales or almost all, are coming through D2D and that filters through as other, and I'm not sure if it flips over at the end of the month. Normally, I am sure, but normally it's not the end of the year and I'm not running on four or five cups of coffee.
[00:14:32] Matty: Is there a way, if data is coming in through an aggregator, like Draft2Digital, to see how that breakout pans out among the platforms that you're distributing through D2D to?
[00:14:46] Philippa: Actually, and that's one of the things in settings, and I go back and forth on this, you can either have it show up as Draft2Digital or Smashwords, or you can shift it over in the settings to showing under the final retailer that it was sold under. For me, sometimes it's cosmetic, I really like the DTD purple so often I'll shift it over, but also, it's occasionally useful to be able to say, okay, Apple is pulling in more, instead of having it split up between my direct Apple and my D2D Apple. And you'll be able to see that on your sunburst chart. It shows whether it's coming in direct or via an aggregator.
[00:15:26] Matty: And how about the media that is included? Obviously, eBooks are in here, how about print, audio, things like that?
[00:15:33] Philippa: So audio is on the way. We're working with Findaway which is in a slight holding pattern as they were just acquired by Spotify. So there's some corporate-level changes there and we're just in a holding pattern, waiting to get clear.
[00:15:49] ACX is also on the way in. Ingram is someone we're in talks with right now for print. And then others will be coming as we can get them onboarded, so certain retailers have approached us, to work with us and then others, we will be seeking out in response to user feedback.
[00:16:10] Matty: And how about direct platforms like PayHip?
[00:16:13] Philippa: If we can find a way to integrate it, we'll be doing so. I personally have PayHip, and we've got a lot of requests for it. So audio and then IngramSpark were the top requests, and we'll go from there.
[00:16:25] Matty: Yeah, I would second that. So now we have kind of a general sense of what data people can get from ScribeCount and by extension, the kind of data that if you don't have ScribeCount, you'd want to be finding a way to track on your own. I think that the next question, and we've touched upon it a little bit, but to delve into it more, what do you do with the data once you have it? And so I got all set up on ScribeCount, I started looking through it, I got over the, oh my God, look, it's all at one place thing, but then I'm not quite sure what actions I should be taking as a result of the data I'm coming up with. Can you just give some examples of how people would want to use sales data and act on it?
[00:17:06] Philippa: Yeah, so one thing is, especially if you've got any free books, to look at the ratio of free books to sales across different retailers. So people will find vastly different returns. By and large, the smaller retailers will have a much bigger return per number of free units than Amazon will. However, you can also find series sell-through. So you can set your series up on ScribeCount and then select up at the top by the tag or by the series and see what the retailer breakdown is for that and what the sell-through is for that.
[00:17:53] Now there are a couple of different ways to calculate sell-through. That was a presentation I gave at 20 Books Vegas, and I will actually be uploading a text version of that. But what you want to do is get a sense of, are there variations between the retailers or between your series, that you can harness in terms of promotions or try to shift the tide on?
[00:18:21] So you can see that, for instance, one of your series has let's say, 15 books and it has a very good sell-through until book 10, at which point it falls off a cliff. That's very useful information to have. You might want to say, what happened in book 10, is there something I need to fix here? Is there a link broken in the back of the book that should be leading people to there?
[00:18:48] So once you can see those anomalies, you can work with them. And you can also say, for instance, I've tagged my books according to the genre that they're in, which was a recommendation I got from the Wide for the Win group. So this is great, we've got this community of people that are all sharing the different ways they look at things, and my retailer breakdown per genre group is wildly different. So when I look at epic fantasy, Apple comes out really strong, and when I look at my military sci-fi, it's Kobo. So all of a sudden, I know where to be focusing my advertising dollars.
[00:19:27] Matty: This may be delving in too much to the, how do you calculate sell-through, but if you have a series and you're seeing sales on not the first book, do you assume that it's from people reading the first in the series and moving on, or is there a way to tell that?
[00:19:45] Philippa: There is not a way to tell that, so you definitely are constrained, there's a whole bunch of reasons that you might not be able to see. So say someone was gifted a paperback of your first book, and then they buy the rest in ebook. You won't really be able to trace that through. Or they used to have a Nook and now they have a Kindle. Again, it's going to get muddled, but there's a general principle in economics that at the micro level, at an individual level, things are a little bit squirrely. It's hard to tell what an individual's doing, but in aggregate it shakes out. So if you're looking at several thousand people buying a series, you'll have a better sense that those are the correct trends that you're seeing.
[00:20:38] Matty: And you had said, I think that your military sci-fi was selling well on Kobo, but the fantasy was selling on Apple better? So let's say that you see this trend on the fantasy on Apple, what would you then do? Do you take out Facebook ads targeted to Apple users?
[00:21:00] Philippa: So you can do that, you can actually target your Facebook ads only to users that are using Apple products or Apple tablets or phones, which makes it much more likely of course, that they're using Apple books. There is actually, I've heard from several authors, a lot of good return in advertising to Apple Books users. So it's one of those places where once you have a set of readers, they are much more loyal. It's a smaller marketplace, there's a bigger chance to stand out and push upwards in the rankings.
[00:21:39] Obviously the disclaimer of course, with any advertising is, be sure to set the bounds on your advertising, so you're not going to wind up spending more than you have, and make sure that it's within your discretionary set for the month. Advertising is an iterative game. So you'll need to be tweaking things and seeing how different changes evolve. You're not going to nail it on the first try. If you're searching for a needle in the haystack, it's giving you a particular hay bale to be looking at.
[00:22:12] Matty: Another case of perhaps self-fulfilling prophecy, or maybe just great planning on my part, is that I have heard, and I believe my sales data bears out the fact that box sets do well on Kobo. So when I'd heard this from several people, my tiny amount of Kobo data at that time appeared to bear that out, and once I moved to being direct on Kobo, rather than through an aggregator, I started keeping special eye out for when they were offering promos for box sets. And so I've been applying for those, and of course my box at sales have gone up because when I'm included in a promo, that happens.
[00:22:48] If I wanted to mark that moment in my promotion calendar for the year of when I started applying for Kobo promos for box sets, what's the easiest way to have that view and then compare it to something like a person's Excel spreadsheet or ScribeCount to understand what the triggers might be?
[00:23:07] Philippa: So you can use the historic view right now. You would have to know what you're looking for. We are working on actually a very cohesive calendar application that will allow you to mark promos, so you can much more easily determine when the promo was, how much it was for, and you can look at the return on each advertising dollar. That will come in with our, we're working on ad tracking right now, so automatic ad tracking for Facebook, Amazon, and BookBub.
[00:23:39] And that will give you a better idea. Right now, that's still something that each person needs to be tracking manually, which is of course annoying, very annoying. The more you do manually is the more chances you have to put something in the wrong column or mistype the date or any of those things. We're all human, right?
[00:24:02] Matty: I've realized, and a good example of that and the pitfalls of doing it manually, is that I used to track my Facebook ads, the spend, every day against the sales every day. And after I've been doing it for a year and I finally thought, okay, that's kind of overboard, I look at my ad reporting every day, but I only capture all the data once a week. But I know when I was doing it daily, there was this period of time where I had discounted a book, but I forgot to change the royalties that I was earning on that book during the discounted periods, so things like that are just, they're killers.
[00:24:35] Philippa: Yep, they absolutely are, and that is one of the reasons that I also recommend scanning your sales for the past month or so every day, but then also looking at your month-by-month view without any calendar indicators, because that's a very good way also to pick up on anomalies that you might not have seen if you were looking for something else specific. So that you can look at something and say, wow, my read-through of this one series shot through the roof! I do not know why, but let's try to get to the bottom of that, because whenever we see a good anomaly, we want to make it replicable, right?
[00:25:16] Matty: And how would you try to investigate that perhaps outside ScribeCount?
[00:25:22] Philippa: Okay. So say I'm looking through a couple of metrics and I see that series read-through for one book has gone up. First, I'll try to figure out if it's on just one retailer or all of the retailers, because if it's just one retailer, I'll wonder, did they do an in-house promo, what else went on here? Is it like Amazon, where they decide to discount it all on their own, and you only find out about it later? What happened?
[00:25:50] Once you know that, it's worth scanning social media and blogs and seeing if someone mentioned you. Every once in a while, some bigger author will say something like, hey, I'm looking for books to read this year and I want military sci-fi that's grim, dark, and does X, Y, Z, and people will weigh in and you might find your book or another book that has cross-sales with yours or something like that. You may never know, right? It could be that Amazon shifted their also bought algorithm; it could be any number of things.
[00:26:28] It could be that you just hit a market perfectly on an ad. But then you'd also want to look at what ads you've been running during that time. And say, okay, for some reason, this group and this targeting seems to have not only gotten a lot of first book copies moving, but a lot of the following book copies moving. So you may never know. You may not, and that is a little bit infuriating, right? But you just start poking at things and thinking creatively about it and every once in a while, you'll have a thought and run back to your computer and start doing some searching online, and hopefully you find out what it was.
[00:27:13] Matty: Well, that's a great lead into the question about how people choose to spend their time. So ScribeCount is such that you could sit down in the morning with your cup of coffee, you could spend all day drilling into numbers, and then at the end of the day, you'd have a really good sense of what your stats were and had not done any writing. So are there like red flags that you see where people are going overboard? It's great to keep on top of your data, but at some point, enough is enough. What is your guidance there?
[00:27:42] Philippa: Yeah so, that was one of the things that we've gone back and forth about the sound effects. The sound effect that Book Report has the little cha-ching that tells you that you made a sale.
[00:27:55] Matty: Didn't know about that.
[00:27:57] Philippa: Oh yes, so Book Report has that, and it can be very useful, right? Especially when you're starting out and it's this sort of like flush of warm energy, but for me it also distracts me.
[00:28:09] Matty: And Book Report is KDP, Amazon only, is that correct?
[00:28:13] Philippa: Yes, Amazon only. And I believe at one point had been thinking about expanding and then did not. And so there's all sorts of things. I try to tell people, you're going to start ScribeCount and probably for the first couple of days, you're going to be going back to it much more frequently than you will otherwise.
[00:28:33] I recommend not having it up in the background in an open tab because it will refresh every 15 minutes, and so it will draw your eye to it. But to have it open in a tab during the day so that you can click back over to it, and it will have been refreshing.
[00:28:51] But that's an interesting question, when are you going overboard? Because I've had to make my own rules for that with my editing. It's when I get to the stage of editing that I've removed a comma and then put the same comma back in, that's when I say it's over, I'm done with my editing, I'm not getting anything constructive done. But I haven't actually come up with a similar one for data. And I think generally, we're not all that worried about it because so many authors have a belief that I truly think is erroneous, that they can't do data, and so they dip a toe in rather than really getting swamped and pulled into it.
[00:30:07] Matty: Do you have any advice about, what do people look for so that they recognize a trend and not just a coincidental spike or a coincidental dip?
[00:30:17] Philippa: So the very quick statistics version is, two is aligned, three is a trend. But that spins out, of course, the more often you see something, the better a chance it is that it's real. So if I were, for instance, to go back over the last 90 days, and I'm seeing that about every fourth or fifth week, there's a week that spikes up.
[00:30:48] It tells you where to drill down, and so then I might say, okay, I'll look at those spike weeks, and it looks like most of my spikes are actually driven by one book, which is a box set. So I'm going to go just to that book over the last 90 days. Interestingly, 62% of my royalties on this one book are coming solely from Kobo. Again, this is my military sci-fi series, so Kobo really is driving that in a huge proportion. That's helping me drill down there.
[00:31:25] It's something that I'm going to want to look at and say, wow, this is a lot of Kobo. If I look at 60 days instead of 30 days, it's even more percentage in terms of Kobo. So it's this bizarre number, it's something that I'm not normally seeing, and I'm just going to want to keep poking at that with a stick until I find something.
[00:31:49] Matty: I liked that idea of zooming in and pulling out, because I know what I do is I tend to think, oh, daily reporting or weekly reporting or monthly reporting. And then that's how I look at it, and I never think that I might see something different if I zoom in or pull out. So that idea to very easily be able to do that, I think is a great feature of ScribeCount.
[00:32:11] Philippa: Yeah, it's very helpful. There are very few people for whom seeing a spreadsheet of data is actually comparable to seeing a graphical representation. It's almost a hundred percent that you're not going to be one of those people, so always try to look at different graphical representations and move the magnifying glass around, and that will help a lot.
[00:32:35] Matty: I also like on ScribeCount that you can see Amazon against the other platforms. And I actually just interviewed Erin Wright from Wide for the Win, so we talked a lot about this, but one of my goals, I have two areas that I'm very dependent on. One is that I sell a lot of my books on Amazon, and I do a lot of my reader outreach on Facebook. And I'm uncomfortable with the fact that I do pretty much all of my reader outreach on Facebook, so that's a problem, but I'm gradually chipping away, I'm looking at this, 76% of my sales in the last month is on Amazon, about 24% on other platforms. I'm not happy with that percentage, but it's going in the right direction at least. And so it would be nice month after month to be able to see that. And my goal would be that the numbers are overall going up, but the percentage that's represented by Amazon is getting smaller and smaller. But I think even if people can just look at that super-macro level, it's still helpful.
[00:33:35] Philippa: Oh, it absolutely is. And it also, ScribeCount can take a bit of the panic edge off of going wide, because you're not just watching the Amazon numbers go down and down, you're watching all of the other numbers climb. Oh, okay, things aren't as bad as they might seem if I just go to the Amazon dashboard, which I think we've all been guilty of from time to time, and we're like, I'll just look at Amazon. That'll give me a good enough view of how my sales are going.
[00:34:01] Matty: Exactly. One of the things also that I think is a fairly new feature of ScribeCount is the idea of showing KU data.
[00:34:12] Philippa: Yes.
[00:34:13] Matty: So what is the benefit if someone is, let's say they're only distributing to Amazon, what is the benefit of them seeing their Amazon data via ScribeCount?
[00:34:22] Philippa: Well, there's a couple. One is that we're cheaper than all the alternatives. So there's that, but then also when you factor in audio and print, which are coming in, and then also Amazon print, one of the things we like to say is, even KU authors are wide. They've got different formats, they've got sales via their own site, they've got income coming in from all sorts of different places. And not only are the graphical and tagging series options better, because we might just have stalked forums of our competitors to see what people were asking for and made sure we had all those features, but you can be seeing the historic trends, the pre-orders, things like that coming in.
[00:35:14] And then if you have a hybrid approach, it's particularly easy to time your exit from KU, because we have several people that use at least one 90-day stretch in KU and after their page reads drop a specific amount, they switch out.
[00:35:35] And so, not only can you judge that better and then have a good idea of the whole cohesive state of your catalog, you can also use one of the things we have that tells you your KU status.
[00:35:50] So if you're like me, you've had a couple of times that you tried to switch out of KU and somehow it got checked again. Hard to say. Kind of weird that that is just one of the things that messes it up all the time over at Amazon, but here we find ourselves. So that's good to have at a glance as well.
[00:36:11] Matty: Is there an ability or anything on the horizon that would flag when retailers make pricing changes?
[00:36:19] Philippa: Yes, there is. In fact, there is right now. So on your bookshelf, there is a price tracker feature, and right now it's only working with Amazon because where it's pulling from is Author Central, which is still in beta, but it will tell you the previous price, the current price, and other prices stretching back for different formats as well. And you can set it to only display changed prices, so if you just want to do a quick scan each day and be like, did Amazon do anything weird? You can know that.
[00:36:58] Matty: Yeah. One of the things that I would really like is that, after agonizing about it for an embarrassingly long amount of time, I switched the price of my ebooks, my post first-in-series ebooks from $4.99 to $5.99, and I'm trying to compare what the result was, if I got a drop in sales as a result of putting up the price a little bit, and it's difficult to do. Because at the moment, I'm looking across multiple sources to try to find out where that line happened, and then seeing if there's a result.
[00:37:28] And I think one of the things, and this is the thing that always frustrates me about any kind of analysis like this, is it so hard to isolate it. So I might have changed the price and then coincidentally, gotten a promo on Kobo or hit a Facebook ad that was great. And I think it's just not possible for indy authors to isolate the levers they pull so carefully that you can see a change, and then feel confident that it's as a result of the lever you were trying to move to make that change. Any advice on that front?
[00:38:00] Philippa: Not a clear-cut answer that will make you feel warm and fuzzy, sorry about that. It's a lot like the rest of life. So statistics, the numbers that you see aren't the truth. They're the closest approximation of the truth that we can come up with. So you're seeing these numbers come in, you will not always be able to isolate things. Sometimes, for all you know, it could be the phase of the moon, no idea, Mercury in retrograde, who can say?
[00:38:31] And so it's more about that critical thinking and getting you into this stage where you can say, I've noticed an anomaly, either in the past or right now, I am thinking critically about what's going on right now. If I've got a Kobo promo, if I've got a Facebook ad running, if I've got whatever that might be, I just switched my cover, things like that. And then being able to say, okay, we'll never know for certain, but these two or three things are a good idea of what might be happening here, and now I can play around with them in the future and see if I can replicate this. It narrows down the search, is really what it is.
[00:39:21] Matty: Yeah, a couple of months ago I had done an interview with Dave Chesson about keywords. And then I did an inbetweenisode after that, about me changing my keywords based on the advice that David provided, and I promised to report back to listeners about the change there. But I look back and I'm like, I don't know, it could be keywords, who knows? It could be the three other things that I tried doing about the same time, so you just have to absorb as much data as you can and then take your best educated decision about how to approach it.
[00:39:50] Philippa: I do the same thing you do. I'll say, I'm going to revise this and then do three things at once, and of course I've now hopelessly muddled my data. But on the other hand, the best time to make a good change in your catalog, is right now, so you got to balance this.
[00:40:06] Matty: Yeah, I think artificially postponing things that you think will be helpful just so you'll have clean data to assess that one lever that you've pulled is probably not advisable either.
[00:40:15] Philippa: No, no. It could be interesting if you don't need any of that income and you have infinite time to study it. On the other hand, you're never going to be able to control for everything.
[00:40:26] Matty: And those people are probably not listening to this podcast anyway. Can you describe the ScribeCount pricing model?
[00:40:35] Philippa: Oh yes. So, if you're making under a thousand dollars a month in royalties, it is free. If you ever flip up over that line, so what it does is it pulls the royalties from two months back, which is what we've found is a good amount of time to even things out in terms of exchange rates and returns and make sure we're not charging you more than we should. So if you flip over for one month and you're paying for one month, you may go back down the next month, if it was just a fluke. And then, above that thousand dollars a month in royalties line, there are two tiers from $1 to $2,000 is $15 a month, and then from $2,000 and up is $20 a month.
[00:41:20] There's also a yearly option, which is $185, and that shakes out to $15.44 a month. So if you're oscillating between the top two, it makes more sense to do annual, and if you're oscillating between the bottom two, it probably makes more sense to pay monthly.
[00:41:37] We've revised it downward. We used to have three paying tiers and one free tier, and the free tier went up to $500 a month instead of $1,000. And we looked at the data and where people were switching in and out of tiers, which obviously we want you to have a roughly stable experience using ScribeCount, so we were able to revise where the tiers sat and offer an annual option.
[00:42:06] Matty: I loved that when you made that change, that was good for me.
[00:42:10] Philippa: Well, I think with that we've run through all the questions. I know that as soon as we get off, I'll go back to my ScribeCount and think of 14 other questions that I should have asked, but I appreciate you walking us through that, and please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you, your work, and ScribeCount online.
[00:42:27] Ah, okay. So you can go to ScribeCount.com, where you'll be able to sign up for a free trial. We've got a 14-day free trial. And then you can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. And Randall and I are both pretty active in the Wide for the Win community as well. You can also find my work at moirakatson.com. I started writing back when I was in finance and so I'm not writing under my legal name, and yes, I've got all sorts of things coming out next year, so definitely give a look if you're in the sci-fi fantasy realm.
[00:43:01] Matty: Very cool. And for those Facebook or the social media posts, are there any of those that are user community specific, if you have a question, you can go on and ask that, or do you think Wide for the Win is where people would be best suited to do that?
[00:43:16] Philippa: You could send a message to our support team, and you can use that with the little Support tab in ScribeCount or just support@scribecount.com or you can send a message to our Facebook group or Twitter account, and we'll be able to get back to you because we all have access to that.
[00:43:31] Matty: Great. And I am a ScribeCount affiliate so I will also include a link to my affiliate link in the show notes. So, Philippa, thank you again so much, this was so interesting.
[00:43:42] Philippa: Thank you, it's great to see you.
[00:00:06] Philippa: Good, thank you. It's so good to be here.
[00:00:09] Matty: I am pleased to have you here. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Philippa is the public face of ScribeCount, overseeing the customer interaction content and overall service side of the company. She's also Bachelor of Arts in Economics and a Minor in Mathematics, and she brings analytical skills and creative abilities to her work at ScribeCount. She has 19 novels to her name, including two USA Today bestsellers and Philippa speaks the complicated language of indy author very well, which will be handy for us. And she's a native of Minnesota where she can often be found shoveling snow, watching science fiction movies, arguing thermostat settings, or getting socks on a fleeing toddler, and especially this time of year. We're recording this at the end of December so, socks on the toddler, especially important and thermostat settings.
[00:00:55] So I had invited Philippa on the podcast because I am a happy user of ScribeCount. And we're going to be talking about ScribeCount a bit specifically, but I also wanted to tap into Philippa's background as a data person, and how the data side works for indy authors. But whenever I talk to someone who has an author service like ScribeCount, I always like to ask, what did you see in the author community that led you to be part of the founding of ScribeCount and development of it?
[00:01:25] Philippa: Well, that's actually an easy answer. So the reason Randall developed it, to start with was that he wanted to use it and he kept waiting for someone else to develop it, and no one did. And that was very similar reason that I signed on, was when he said, okay hey, we're working on this, we're assembling a team, would you like to be part of it? Yeah, I would like that to be a lot easier for me to do. And so he and I both had this idea that we were going to develop ScribeCount. It would make our data collection a lot easier and then we'd have more time for writing. And of course it's been a year and a half now, and we're still pretty much full-time on ScribeCount, but the ScribeCount aspect turned out very well.
[00:02:07] Matty: Yeah, and it's working out well for the rest of us too, because I have to say, I almost cried with joy the first time I loaded my stuff into ScribeCount and saw the numbers because, and I'm sure this is like what your brochure says, I had been spending a lot of time collecting inaccurate data. One of the errors I always found myself falling into is I would get notifications of royalty payments and I get notifications of anticipated royalty payments, and I wasn't always careful about distinguishing those, and in some cases I was double counting earnings or I'm sure missing some earnings.
[00:02:39] So let's talk a little bit first independent of ScribeCount, if you're an indy author and you want to be reasonable about monitoring your business, what are the key pieces of data that an indy author should be collecting and tracking?
[00:02:54] Philippa: Well, I think you made a very good point with anticipated earnings versus actual earnings. Towards the dates that you start to get your earnings confirmations and payment confirmations, you can go to each retailer and download the final amounts for that relevant month. So it's usually a couple of months behind, or I believe Smashwords is still early. And that's important because, not only is that accounting for a whole bunch of returns, but you also have your different exchange rates going on there. So the anticipated payments will often deal with inexact exchange rates, and then once you have the payment confirmation, you can go to the reports, and you'll know exactly what you made in your currency.
[00:03:41] Matty: Returns is something, honestly, I've never looked at, except insofar as I have the sad story of having the in-person book event where the bookstore bought like 50 copies of my book and a lot of those 50 went back to Ingram. But generally speaking, I'm selling 97% of my books in ebook. I know people sometimes return ebooks, but I don't think I'm having that problem. Does ScribeCount reflect returns data?
[00:04:05] Philippa: Yes, it does. So it always reflects the most up-to-date data that are in the spreadsheet reports. So not what you're seeing on the dashboard, but what's reflected in the backend reports that have been pushed to users, which has occasionally given us the appearance of being able to see forward through time, which is hilarious. Because you will say, things are showing up here that aren't on my other dashboard and then they come true.
[00:04:32] Matty: That's totally worth $15 a month.
[00:04:35] Philippa: Yes, come on, we're seeing the future for you. But yes, it'll be updated. It won't tell you how many returns there were. You'll need to go to the actual platform if they're tracking returns to see that there. This is one of those things that generally isn't an issue but is occasionally indicative of a problem. So there was the glitch in Audible, for instance, ACX reporting, it must have been two years ago now, that showed people how many returns were happening. And that is what's led us to this point where it looks like Amazon's going to be making some changes there.
[00:05:20] Every once in a while, someone will say, out of nowhere, I got a huge number of returns for this book, or there are people going through and reading my entire series and then returning each one. What is that about? Generally, it's just one jerk and there's just kind of nothing to be done about it. It's like book piracy. I advise not thinking about it as much as possible because there's not much you can do, and it just makes you angry.
[00:05:51] Matty: I second that.
[00:05:52] Philippa: But if something really big comes up, then you have an idea of, okay, can I go contact this retailer and say, what the crap is going on? They don't want that either, right? Cause they've been paying to host and provide that data, so you all have a vested interest in figuring it out.
[00:06:10] Matty: if people are doing this themselves, is there a period of time that you should wait after the close of some reporting period in order to go to a platform and know that the numbers you're getting are reasonably final, or does it vary so much from platform to platform, that there's not a general guideline?
[00:06:30] Philippa: Well, it varies, and unfortunately, you're probably not likely to see those final numbers until around the payment date, because that's when they set all the various exchange rates that they will be using. So there's stuff built into the contract that states that they can use whichever exchange rate they see fit at the time. It'll usually be right around what the exchange rate is, but because those rates fluctuate so much, they'll choose one right around at the payment date, and that's when you'll know exactly how much you're making.
[00:07:02] Matty: And I think another tricky thing about doing this manually is that you would think that everybody would track things on a monthly basis, but no. Apple maybe, I forget one of them it's like ...
[00:07:14] Philippa: Five days off. Yeah.
[00:07:17] Matty: So like using the Aztec calendar or something like that.
[00:07:20] Philippa: Yeah, exactly. If we moved to a 13-month schedule and you're like, okay cool, whatever.
[00:07:27] Matty: I guess these are just some great illustrations of why, if you can find a way not to do this yourself and have an expert do it for you, it is a good thing to do. And so, number of books is something that I think people like to know. There's the whole bank over rank, so maybe the money that's coming into your account is more important than the number of books you sold. Can you talk a little bit about how ScribeCount has decided to weight what it shows and what it goes after in the reporting it provides?
[00:07:57] Philippa: Yes, absolutely. Our main feature is the sunburst graphics. So the idea was that you could take a look in the morning and have at a glance, half-second to a second-and-a-half idea of where you stand for the month, the week, or whatever time period you've set up your dashboard to show. And so that's front and center on the dashboard. And then there are these little mini sunbursts across the top that show the weighting of Amazon versus all of the other retailers. There's a KU specific one if you have books in KU. Free versus paid units and then the percentages from different formats, so audio, paperback, ebook, KU pages.
[00:08:43] Matty: I realize I should have asked first of all, for you to just describe a little bit for people who haven't seen ScribeCount, what data it's showing, where it's pulling from, what platforms and media it's covering.
[00:08:54] Philippa: Okay. So, we'll start out right at the top. There's a big pie chart that shows you how much money is coming in from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google, Apple, Draft2Digital, Smashwords, and Kobo. And you can also add in your own income, so if you're making income from selling books out of the trunk of your car or whatever it might be, shark training, you can put that in there if you want. There are some people that like to put in their day jobs so they can see their royalties measured against their day job and get a sense of when might be a good time to switch over to full-time writing, things like that.
[00:09:37] As you scroll down, it will show you a list, what looks like an Excel spreadsheet but small and manageable, of your top books and the total royalties, the units that are being sold. And you can modify that to show which columns are useful to you. Then there's a day-by-day or month-by-month bar chart that shows you which books are selling and what the overall amount is for each day.
[00:10:07] And from there, it'll go down to a redux of the pie chart, but with unit breakdowns. So you can see, okay, I'm earning, so right now I can say, I'm earning 67% of my royalties on Amazon for the month, but 61% of my free units are coming from Amazon. So it's slightly outperforming in terms of free units to paid sales. And that's one of the ways I like to look at it. And below that there are the maps, you can see where your sales are coming from, which I really like.
[00:10:43] Matty: I'll just throw out some examples of ways that I found this very useful is that I have created my author strategic plan based on the fact that I'm favoring ebook sales, not print sales, and favoring online sales over bookstore sales, for example. I'm just looking at my dashboard, and I would not have guessed that it's almost 97% ebook, a little more than 3% paperback. I wouldn't have guessed that it was that big a spread, but I felt like it was a good confirmation, either that I was pursuing the right strategy or that my strategy was resulting in the numbers that I'm seeing.
[00:11:21] Philippa: That is one of the things that is so useful about those pie chart graphics is, that I can log in, and right now I just had a BookBub, and so it's very heavily weighted to Amazon, which is what happens for me every time I do BookBub. But normally when I come in in a month, Kobo and/or Apple are giving Amazon a run for their money in terms of how much they're selling.
[00:11:46] And that's a very good reminder. It is so easy for us to forget how much of our income is coming in from other places. And so to be able to see that, have the incentive to grow it, and then also remember, oh, I've got a lot there, I can push some promos there. It really does intuitively shape your approach to each month.
[00:12:10] Matty: And as someone who is both a data scientist and an indy author, do you have a sense of how you're balancing for your own business? Like I said, what comes first? What came first for me, the fact that I had a strategy of favoring eBooks and it's paying off or that coincidentally, that's happening. How do you assess that difference between balancing your strategy and balancing and assessment of your data?
[00:12:39] Philippa: Interesting. So obviously, the standard disclaimer, right, is that past performance is not an indicator of future performance. But you do get an idea of how different things affect the various ecosystem of your books. When I look at different events, so for instance, I have looked at a calendar of a few months, day-by-day, and I've done that every day, you start to pick out little patterns and you start to look at how promoting one book can change sales to other books. You just start to develop a familiarity with that data.
[00:13:23] And so it otherwise gets you used to seeing it. I mean, obviously we all have eyes, we're all looking at this data, but getting used to all of the different fluctuations makes it much more likely that you'll scroll down to your day-by-day calendar one day and you'll say, that's a really interesting spike of this one book. I'm going to see what I can do with that. And so it makes you more nimble and responsive, is really what it is. You get a sense of how things have gone in the past and you get more used to seeing anomalies.
[00:14:04] Matty: I was very surprised on mine that "other" was almost 20%.
[00:14:10] Philippa: That's D2D I believe. So for me, all of my Apple sales or almost all, are coming through D2D and that filters through as other, and I'm not sure if it flips over at the end of the month. Normally, I am sure, but normally it's not the end of the year and I'm not running on four or five cups of coffee.
[00:14:32] Matty: Is there a way, if data is coming in through an aggregator, like Draft2Digital, to see how that breakout pans out among the platforms that you're distributing through D2D to?
[00:14:46] Philippa: Actually, and that's one of the things in settings, and I go back and forth on this, you can either have it show up as Draft2Digital or Smashwords, or you can shift it over in the settings to showing under the final retailer that it was sold under. For me, sometimes it's cosmetic, I really like the DTD purple so often I'll shift it over, but also, it's occasionally useful to be able to say, okay, Apple is pulling in more, instead of having it split up between my direct Apple and my D2D Apple. And you'll be able to see that on your sunburst chart. It shows whether it's coming in direct or via an aggregator.
[00:15:26] Matty: And how about the media that is included? Obviously, eBooks are in here, how about print, audio, things like that?
[00:15:33] Philippa: So audio is on the way. We're working with Findaway which is in a slight holding pattern as they were just acquired by Spotify. So there's some corporate-level changes there and we're just in a holding pattern, waiting to get clear.
[00:15:49] ACX is also on the way in. Ingram is someone we're in talks with right now for print. And then others will be coming as we can get them onboarded, so certain retailers have approached us, to work with us and then others, we will be seeking out in response to user feedback.
[00:16:10] Matty: And how about direct platforms like PayHip?
[00:16:13] Philippa: If we can find a way to integrate it, we'll be doing so. I personally have PayHip, and we've got a lot of requests for it. So audio and then IngramSpark were the top requests, and we'll go from there.
[00:16:25] Matty: Yeah, I would second that. So now we have kind of a general sense of what data people can get from ScribeCount and by extension, the kind of data that if you don't have ScribeCount, you'd want to be finding a way to track on your own. I think that the next question, and we've touched upon it a little bit, but to delve into it more, what do you do with the data once you have it? And so I got all set up on ScribeCount, I started looking through it, I got over the, oh my God, look, it's all at one place thing, but then I'm not quite sure what actions I should be taking as a result of the data I'm coming up with. Can you just give some examples of how people would want to use sales data and act on it?
[00:17:06] Philippa: Yeah, so one thing is, especially if you've got any free books, to look at the ratio of free books to sales across different retailers. So people will find vastly different returns. By and large, the smaller retailers will have a much bigger return per number of free units than Amazon will. However, you can also find series sell-through. So you can set your series up on ScribeCount and then select up at the top by the tag or by the series and see what the retailer breakdown is for that and what the sell-through is for that.
[00:17:53] Now there are a couple of different ways to calculate sell-through. That was a presentation I gave at 20 Books Vegas, and I will actually be uploading a text version of that. But what you want to do is get a sense of, are there variations between the retailers or between your series, that you can harness in terms of promotions or try to shift the tide on?
[00:18:21] So you can see that, for instance, one of your series has let's say, 15 books and it has a very good sell-through until book 10, at which point it falls off a cliff. That's very useful information to have. You might want to say, what happened in book 10, is there something I need to fix here? Is there a link broken in the back of the book that should be leading people to there?
[00:18:48] So once you can see those anomalies, you can work with them. And you can also say, for instance, I've tagged my books according to the genre that they're in, which was a recommendation I got from the Wide for the Win group. So this is great, we've got this community of people that are all sharing the different ways they look at things, and my retailer breakdown per genre group is wildly different. So when I look at epic fantasy, Apple comes out really strong, and when I look at my military sci-fi, it's Kobo. So all of a sudden, I know where to be focusing my advertising dollars.
[00:19:27] Matty: This may be delving in too much to the, how do you calculate sell-through, but if you have a series and you're seeing sales on not the first book, do you assume that it's from people reading the first in the series and moving on, or is there a way to tell that?
[00:19:45] Philippa: There is not a way to tell that, so you definitely are constrained, there's a whole bunch of reasons that you might not be able to see. So say someone was gifted a paperback of your first book, and then they buy the rest in ebook. You won't really be able to trace that through. Or they used to have a Nook and now they have a Kindle. Again, it's going to get muddled, but there's a general principle in economics that at the micro level, at an individual level, things are a little bit squirrely. It's hard to tell what an individual's doing, but in aggregate it shakes out. So if you're looking at several thousand people buying a series, you'll have a better sense that those are the correct trends that you're seeing.
[00:20:38] Matty: And you had said, I think that your military sci-fi was selling well on Kobo, but the fantasy was selling on Apple better? So let's say that you see this trend on the fantasy on Apple, what would you then do? Do you take out Facebook ads targeted to Apple users?
[00:21:00] Philippa: So you can do that, you can actually target your Facebook ads only to users that are using Apple products or Apple tablets or phones, which makes it much more likely of course, that they're using Apple books. There is actually, I've heard from several authors, a lot of good return in advertising to Apple Books users. So it's one of those places where once you have a set of readers, they are much more loyal. It's a smaller marketplace, there's a bigger chance to stand out and push upwards in the rankings.
[00:21:39] Obviously the disclaimer of course, with any advertising is, be sure to set the bounds on your advertising, so you're not going to wind up spending more than you have, and make sure that it's within your discretionary set for the month. Advertising is an iterative game. So you'll need to be tweaking things and seeing how different changes evolve. You're not going to nail it on the first try. If you're searching for a needle in the haystack, it's giving you a particular hay bale to be looking at.
[00:22:12] Matty: Another case of perhaps self-fulfilling prophecy, or maybe just great planning on my part, is that I have heard, and I believe my sales data bears out the fact that box sets do well on Kobo. So when I'd heard this from several people, my tiny amount of Kobo data at that time appeared to bear that out, and once I moved to being direct on Kobo, rather than through an aggregator, I started keeping special eye out for when they were offering promos for box sets. And so I've been applying for those, and of course my box at sales have gone up because when I'm included in a promo, that happens.
[00:22:48] If I wanted to mark that moment in my promotion calendar for the year of when I started applying for Kobo promos for box sets, what's the easiest way to have that view and then compare it to something like a person's Excel spreadsheet or ScribeCount to understand what the triggers might be?
[00:23:07] Philippa: So you can use the historic view right now. You would have to know what you're looking for. We are working on actually a very cohesive calendar application that will allow you to mark promos, so you can much more easily determine when the promo was, how much it was for, and you can look at the return on each advertising dollar. That will come in with our, we're working on ad tracking right now, so automatic ad tracking for Facebook, Amazon, and BookBub.
[00:23:39] And that will give you a better idea. Right now, that's still something that each person needs to be tracking manually, which is of course annoying, very annoying. The more you do manually is the more chances you have to put something in the wrong column or mistype the date or any of those things. We're all human, right?
[00:24:02] Matty: I've realized, and a good example of that and the pitfalls of doing it manually, is that I used to track my Facebook ads, the spend, every day against the sales every day. And after I've been doing it for a year and I finally thought, okay, that's kind of overboard, I look at my ad reporting every day, but I only capture all the data once a week. But I know when I was doing it daily, there was this period of time where I had discounted a book, but I forgot to change the royalties that I was earning on that book during the discounted periods, so things like that are just, they're killers.
[00:24:35] Philippa: Yep, they absolutely are, and that is one of the reasons that I also recommend scanning your sales for the past month or so every day, but then also looking at your month-by-month view without any calendar indicators, because that's a very good way also to pick up on anomalies that you might not have seen if you were looking for something else specific. So that you can look at something and say, wow, my read-through of this one series shot through the roof! I do not know why, but let's try to get to the bottom of that, because whenever we see a good anomaly, we want to make it replicable, right?
[00:25:16] Matty: And how would you try to investigate that perhaps outside ScribeCount?
[00:25:22] Philippa: Okay. So say I'm looking through a couple of metrics and I see that series read-through for one book has gone up. First, I'll try to figure out if it's on just one retailer or all of the retailers, because if it's just one retailer, I'll wonder, did they do an in-house promo, what else went on here? Is it like Amazon, where they decide to discount it all on their own, and you only find out about it later? What happened?
[00:25:50] Once you know that, it's worth scanning social media and blogs and seeing if someone mentioned you. Every once in a while, some bigger author will say something like, hey, I'm looking for books to read this year and I want military sci-fi that's grim, dark, and does X, Y, Z, and people will weigh in and you might find your book or another book that has cross-sales with yours or something like that. You may never know, right? It could be that Amazon shifted their also bought algorithm; it could be any number of things.
[00:26:28] It could be that you just hit a market perfectly on an ad. But then you'd also want to look at what ads you've been running during that time. And say, okay, for some reason, this group and this targeting seems to have not only gotten a lot of first book copies moving, but a lot of the following book copies moving. So you may never know. You may not, and that is a little bit infuriating, right? But you just start poking at things and thinking creatively about it and every once in a while, you'll have a thought and run back to your computer and start doing some searching online, and hopefully you find out what it was.
[00:27:13] Matty: Well, that's a great lead into the question about how people choose to spend their time. So ScribeCount is such that you could sit down in the morning with your cup of coffee, you could spend all day drilling into numbers, and then at the end of the day, you'd have a really good sense of what your stats were and had not done any writing. So are there like red flags that you see where people are going overboard? It's great to keep on top of your data, but at some point, enough is enough. What is your guidance there?
[00:27:42] Philippa: Yeah so, that was one of the things that we've gone back and forth about the sound effects. The sound effect that Book Report has the little cha-ching that tells you that you made a sale.
[00:27:55] Matty: Didn't know about that.
[00:27:57] Philippa: Oh yes, so Book Report has that, and it can be very useful, right? Especially when you're starting out and it's this sort of like flush of warm energy, but for me it also distracts me.
[00:28:09] Matty: And Book Report is KDP, Amazon only, is that correct?
[00:28:13] Philippa: Yes, Amazon only. And I believe at one point had been thinking about expanding and then did not. And so there's all sorts of things. I try to tell people, you're going to start ScribeCount and probably for the first couple of days, you're going to be going back to it much more frequently than you will otherwise.
[00:28:33] I recommend not having it up in the background in an open tab because it will refresh every 15 minutes, and so it will draw your eye to it. But to have it open in a tab during the day so that you can click back over to it, and it will have been refreshing.
[00:28:51] But that's an interesting question, when are you going overboard? Because I've had to make my own rules for that with my editing. It's when I get to the stage of editing that I've removed a comma and then put the same comma back in, that's when I say it's over, I'm done with my editing, I'm not getting anything constructive done. But I haven't actually come up with a similar one for data. And I think generally, we're not all that worried about it because so many authors have a belief that I truly think is erroneous, that they can't do data, and so they dip a toe in rather than really getting swamped and pulled into it.
[00:30:07] Matty: Do you have any advice about, what do people look for so that they recognize a trend and not just a coincidental spike or a coincidental dip?
[00:30:17] Philippa: So the very quick statistics version is, two is aligned, three is a trend. But that spins out, of course, the more often you see something, the better a chance it is that it's real. So if I were, for instance, to go back over the last 90 days, and I'm seeing that about every fourth or fifth week, there's a week that spikes up.
[00:30:48] It tells you where to drill down, and so then I might say, okay, I'll look at those spike weeks, and it looks like most of my spikes are actually driven by one book, which is a box set. So I'm going to go just to that book over the last 90 days. Interestingly, 62% of my royalties on this one book are coming solely from Kobo. Again, this is my military sci-fi series, so Kobo really is driving that in a huge proportion. That's helping me drill down there.
[00:31:25] It's something that I'm going to want to look at and say, wow, this is a lot of Kobo. If I look at 60 days instead of 30 days, it's even more percentage in terms of Kobo. So it's this bizarre number, it's something that I'm not normally seeing, and I'm just going to want to keep poking at that with a stick until I find something.
[00:31:49] Matty: I liked that idea of zooming in and pulling out, because I know what I do is I tend to think, oh, daily reporting or weekly reporting or monthly reporting. And then that's how I look at it, and I never think that I might see something different if I zoom in or pull out. So that idea to very easily be able to do that, I think is a great feature of ScribeCount.
[00:32:11] Philippa: Yeah, it's very helpful. There are very few people for whom seeing a spreadsheet of data is actually comparable to seeing a graphical representation. It's almost a hundred percent that you're not going to be one of those people, so always try to look at different graphical representations and move the magnifying glass around, and that will help a lot.
[00:32:35] Matty: I also like on ScribeCount that you can see Amazon against the other platforms. And I actually just interviewed Erin Wright from Wide for the Win, so we talked a lot about this, but one of my goals, I have two areas that I'm very dependent on. One is that I sell a lot of my books on Amazon, and I do a lot of my reader outreach on Facebook. And I'm uncomfortable with the fact that I do pretty much all of my reader outreach on Facebook, so that's a problem, but I'm gradually chipping away, I'm looking at this, 76% of my sales in the last month is on Amazon, about 24% on other platforms. I'm not happy with that percentage, but it's going in the right direction at least. And so it would be nice month after month to be able to see that. And my goal would be that the numbers are overall going up, but the percentage that's represented by Amazon is getting smaller and smaller. But I think even if people can just look at that super-macro level, it's still helpful.
[00:33:35] Philippa: Oh, it absolutely is. And it also, ScribeCount can take a bit of the panic edge off of going wide, because you're not just watching the Amazon numbers go down and down, you're watching all of the other numbers climb. Oh, okay, things aren't as bad as they might seem if I just go to the Amazon dashboard, which I think we've all been guilty of from time to time, and we're like, I'll just look at Amazon. That'll give me a good enough view of how my sales are going.
[00:34:01] Matty: Exactly. One of the things also that I think is a fairly new feature of ScribeCount is the idea of showing KU data.
[00:34:12] Philippa: Yes.
[00:34:13] Matty: So what is the benefit if someone is, let's say they're only distributing to Amazon, what is the benefit of them seeing their Amazon data via ScribeCount?
[00:34:22] Philippa: Well, there's a couple. One is that we're cheaper than all the alternatives. So there's that, but then also when you factor in audio and print, which are coming in, and then also Amazon print, one of the things we like to say is, even KU authors are wide. They've got different formats, they've got sales via their own site, they've got income coming in from all sorts of different places. And not only are the graphical and tagging series options better, because we might just have stalked forums of our competitors to see what people were asking for and made sure we had all those features, but you can be seeing the historic trends, the pre-orders, things like that coming in.
[00:35:14] And then if you have a hybrid approach, it's particularly easy to time your exit from KU, because we have several people that use at least one 90-day stretch in KU and after their page reads drop a specific amount, they switch out.
[00:35:35] And so, not only can you judge that better and then have a good idea of the whole cohesive state of your catalog, you can also use one of the things we have that tells you your KU status.
[00:35:50] So if you're like me, you've had a couple of times that you tried to switch out of KU and somehow it got checked again. Hard to say. Kind of weird that that is just one of the things that messes it up all the time over at Amazon, but here we find ourselves. So that's good to have at a glance as well.
[00:36:11] Matty: Is there an ability or anything on the horizon that would flag when retailers make pricing changes?
[00:36:19] Philippa: Yes, there is. In fact, there is right now. So on your bookshelf, there is a price tracker feature, and right now it's only working with Amazon because where it's pulling from is Author Central, which is still in beta, but it will tell you the previous price, the current price, and other prices stretching back for different formats as well. And you can set it to only display changed prices, so if you just want to do a quick scan each day and be like, did Amazon do anything weird? You can know that.
[00:36:58] Matty: Yeah. One of the things that I would really like is that, after agonizing about it for an embarrassingly long amount of time, I switched the price of my ebooks, my post first-in-series ebooks from $4.99 to $5.99, and I'm trying to compare what the result was, if I got a drop in sales as a result of putting up the price a little bit, and it's difficult to do. Because at the moment, I'm looking across multiple sources to try to find out where that line happened, and then seeing if there's a result.
[00:37:28] And I think one of the things, and this is the thing that always frustrates me about any kind of analysis like this, is it so hard to isolate it. So I might have changed the price and then coincidentally, gotten a promo on Kobo or hit a Facebook ad that was great. And I think it's just not possible for indy authors to isolate the levers they pull so carefully that you can see a change, and then feel confident that it's as a result of the lever you were trying to move to make that change. Any advice on that front?
[00:38:00] Philippa: Not a clear-cut answer that will make you feel warm and fuzzy, sorry about that. It's a lot like the rest of life. So statistics, the numbers that you see aren't the truth. They're the closest approximation of the truth that we can come up with. So you're seeing these numbers come in, you will not always be able to isolate things. Sometimes, for all you know, it could be the phase of the moon, no idea, Mercury in retrograde, who can say?
[00:38:31] And so it's more about that critical thinking and getting you into this stage where you can say, I've noticed an anomaly, either in the past or right now, I am thinking critically about what's going on right now. If I've got a Kobo promo, if I've got a Facebook ad running, if I've got whatever that might be, I just switched my cover, things like that. And then being able to say, okay, we'll never know for certain, but these two or three things are a good idea of what might be happening here, and now I can play around with them in the future and see if I can replicate this. It narrows down the search, is really what it is.
[00:39:21] Matty: Yeah, a couple of months ago I had done an interview with Dave Chesson about keywords. And then I did an inbetweenisode after that, about me changing my keywords based on the advice that David provided, and I promised to report back to listeners about the change there. But I look back and I'm like, I don't know, it could be keywords, who knows? It could be the three other things that I tried doing about the same time, so you just have to absorb as much data as you can and then take your best educated decision about how to approach it.
[00:39:50] Philippa: I do the same thing you do. I'll say, I'm going to revise this and then do three things at once, and of course I've now hopelessly muddled my data. But on the other hand, the best time to make a good change in your catalog, is right now, so you got to balance this.
[00:40:06] Matty: Yeah, I think artificially postponing things that you think will be helpful just so you'll have clean data to assess that one lever that you've pulled is probably not advisable either.
[00:40:15] Philippa: No, no. It could be interesting if you don't need any of that income and you have infinite time to study it. On the other hand, you're never going to be able to control for everything.
[00:40:26] Matty: And those people are probably not listening to this podcast anyway. Can you describe the ScribeCount pricing model?
[00:40:35] Philippa: Oh yes. So, if you're making under a thousand dollars a month in royalties, it is free. If you ever flip up over that line, so what it does is it pulls the royalties from two months back, which is what we've found is a good amount of time to even things out in terms of exchange rates and returns and make sure we're not charging you more than we should. So if you flip over for one month and you're paying for one month, you may go back down the next month, if it was just a fluke. And then, above that thousand dollars a month in royalties line, there are two tiers from $1 to $2,000 is $15 a month, and then from $2,000 and up is $20 a month.
[00:41:20] There's also a yearly option, which is $185, and that shakes out to $15.44 a month. So if you're oscillating between the top two, it makes more sense to do annual, and if you're oscillating between the bottom two, it probably makes more sense to pay monthly.
[00:41:37] We've revised it downward. We used to have three paying tiers and one free tier, and the free tier went up to $500 a month instead of $1,000. And we looked at the data and where people were switching in and out of tiers, which obviously we want you to have a roughly stable experience using ScribeCount, so we were able to revise where the tiers sat and offer an annual option.
[00:42:06] Matty: I loved that when you made that change, that was good for me.
[00:42:10] Philippa: Well, I think with that we've run through all the questions. I know that as soon as we get off, I'll go back to my ScribeCount and think of 14 other questions that I should have asked, but I appreciate you walking us through that, and please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you, your work, and ScribeCount online.
[00:42:27] Ah, okay. So you can go to ScribeCount.com, where you'll be able to sign up for a free trial. We've got a 14-day free trial. And then you can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. And Randall and I are both pretty active in the Wide for the Win community as well. You can also find my work at moirakatson.com. I started writing back when I was in finance and so I'm not writing under my legal name, and yes, I've got all sorts of things coming out next year, so definitely give a look if you're in the sci-fi fantasy realm.
[00:43:01] Matty: Very cool. And for those Facebook or the social media posts, are there any of those that are user community specific, if you have a question, you can go on and ask that, or do you think Wide for the Win is where people would be best suited to do that?
[00:43:16] Philippa: You could send a message to our support team, and you can use that with the little Support tab in ScribeCount or just support@scribecount.com or you can send a message to our Facebook group or Twitter account, and we'll be able to get back to you because we all have access to that.
[00:43:31] Matty: Great. And I am a ScribeCount affiliate so I will also include a link to my affiliate link in the show notes. So, Philippa, thank you again so much, this was so interesting.
[00:43:42] Philippa: Thank you, it's great to see you.
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