I Endorse Trackerbox!

Today I’m going to talk about a problem that I am fortunate to have – namely, recording book sales.

Because as of this writing I’ve got 82 novels published, and I’m going to publish two more in August. I’ve also got as many novellas, short stories, short story collections, and nonfiction books. I sell all these books through six different vendors – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes (via Draft2Digital and Smashwords), Kobo, Google Play, and Smashwords. Each one of those vendors records sales in a spreadsheet of its own formatting. So the task of keeping track of my book sales has gotten a little bigger and a little more complicated every month, and recently it’s become increasingly untenable, just because I have so many different titles at so many different vendors.

So I started looking for software to help keep track of book sales. There are a couple cloud-based solutions, but I have a crusty old IT guy’s innate suspicion of all things related to The Cloud.

Then I came across Trackerbox, developed by SF author Mark Fassett. It runs locally, and it smoothly and easily imports spreadsheets from all the vendors above. It does take a little time to set up since you have to establish aliases for all your individual titles, since Amazon might have a slightly different name for a book than Kobo. (In my case, this took a while since I have nearly 170 titles at this point.) Trackerbox also includes a wide variety of reports. Like, if I want to see what my top 25 bestselling books were in a month, it just takes a few clicks.

The program has a little bit of a learning curve, but if you have any experience at all with, say, MS Access, you’ll figure out everything in short order.

So, if you are a writer and you have having trouble keeping up with record keeping, I strongly recommend Trackerbox. It is well worth the $89.99!

-JM