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Tech Desk
From the Tech Desk
Free Software Streamlines Sales Tracking, Rankings, Reviews, and More for Your Published eBooks
When you self-publish an eBook, you might get sporadic emails about sales numbers and rankings. You also might not, though, or you might receive them so infrequently and so irregularly that it becomes difficult to know whether your eBook is selling any copies at all. If you don’t know how well your book is selling, how can you track revenues, or see how readers are engaging with your work? These questions are ones that the team behind BookCore is hoping to answer.
BookCore is a brand new software program designed to help independent authors or publishers track eBook sales data. It pulls together data from all sales platforms, to give users a comprehensive view of how well their titles are performing. It doesn’t just track sales figures, either. The program also monitors the ratings and reviews your book is receiving from readers across different eBook marketplaces. Best of all, the software is completely free to download and use in its full version—at least for now.
BookCore was founded by Petr Hrachovec and Václav Soukup, two cousins who hail from Prague, Czech Republic. Hrachovec got the idea for the program when we was self-publishing his own books through digital platforms. His eBooks were selling well, but he found it virtually impossible to know how well based on the sales reporting systems that different eBook marketplaces had to offer. Frustrated, he developed a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel where he could collect and analyze sales data. The spreadsheet allowed Hrachovec to keep an eye on his sales numbers, but at a cost. The data-pulling process was manually-driven, work-intensive, and incredibly dull. It was not a sustainable solution.
Luckily, Hrachovec knew someone who could help. His cousin, Václav Soukup, just so happened to be the owner of a software development company. Hrachovec approached Soukup with the basic idea for BookCore, and the two spent the next couple years bringing the idea to fruition.
The BookCore website touts the software as “a handy tool that takes the guesswork out of self-publishing.” Authors or publishers start by entering their various shop or marketplace logins into BookCore. Through an automated process, BookCore pulls and aggregates data from all your various accounts. Once the system has downloaded all your data, you can view all pertinent information from one master dashboard. Never again will you need to run around the internet checking your book’s status at half a dozen different stores.
You can view a demo of BookCore by clicking here. The “Dashboard” view shows you a few different things. It provides a full list of the eBook titles you’ve published, with sales data for each. You can see sales rank information, the number of units you’ve sold, where your book is selling, and how much you’ve earned from each title. In the “Analyze” view, you can break the information down into different time periods (days, weeks, months, the year so far), just by using a handy slider tool. You can even use BookCore to tell you how your book is doing based on KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Page), a metric that has become extremely important for eBook creators thanks to the way Amazon handles its Kindle Unlimited subscription platform.
Previously, it hasn’t necessarily been impossible to find all this data, but it has been difficult to use it. Amazon, Apple, Google, Smashwords, and other stores all have their own interfaces for authors, as do any third-party services that you might use to publish your eBook. Getting used to these interfaces, pulling data from each, and pooling that data to get a widescreen view of your book’s performance is inefficient at best and a waste of time at worst. BookCore removes the barriers to eBook data and does it for free.
If you publish eBooks regularly—or have published eBooks in the past—it’s at least worth trying out BookCore to see if you like it. Perhaps you want to test out price points for your book on different platforms to see what the optimal pricing strategy is. With BookCore, you can get quick side-by-side comparisons for how your book is performing at different online stores, making it a lot easier to figure out smart pricing. Alternatively, maybe you want to test the effect that a social media discount or promotion has on your book’s sales. Or maybe you just want to see what readers are saying about your books without jumping around to three or four different review pages. With the data from BookCore, it’s possible to do these things and much more.
Are you interested in giving BookCore a try? To register for the service and get your free access link, visit the BookCore website today.
Craig Manning is currently studying English and Music at Western Michigan University. In addition to writing for IndependentPublisher.com, he maintains a pair of entertainment blogs, interns at the Traverse City Business News, and writes for Rockfreaks.net and his college newspaper. He welcomes comments or questions concerning his articles via email, at manningcr953@gmail.com.