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Book Report adds Ranks and Reviews by connecting to Author Central

45K views 474 replies 111 participants last post by  AltMe 
#1 ·
Hey there! This is the thread where I post when Book Report receives major updates. Click here to go to the latest announcement.

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Everything below in this post is about the first update I created a thread for. The link above will take you to the latest announcement, and the discussion around it.

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Hey there! I've just updated Book Report, and I thought I'd start the thread about the update for once. Here's a link to the blog post, and I've also posted the full text below. If you don't use Book Report yet, here's a link to the homepage where you can learn more.

The Book Report crawler now finds marketplace data along with every piece of sales data. It knows which Amazon marketplace (e.g. Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.in) every sale, page read, and giveaway happened on. This data makes estimates more accurate, and there are a few new ways to customize your sales reports. The new crawler is also faster and more efficient.

Breakdown by Marketplace

Both the pie chart and the details table in Book Report are customizable. By default, they both break things down by individual book. But if you click where it says "Book" in the phrase "Earnings by Book", it switches to "Earnings by Author". In the latest version, you can also break both the pie chart and the details table down by marketplace.

Whether you're hoping to get an All-Star bonus in a certain marketplace, seeing if you can grow certain marketplace faster than others, or just fascinated to be selling books all around the world, this is definitely something to check out.

Marketplace Filtering

For those of you who really want to go deep with their marketplace data, we've added an option to generate reports for specific sets of marketplaces. It adds another dropdown to the top of the Historical report, which lists all the marketplaces. The report will be filtered to only include data from the marketplaces you have selected.

For example, you can check how you're doing outside of the US by selecting everything but Amazon.com. You can learn all sorts of things by messing around with this -- maybe a book that has never been a best seller for you actually is a bestseller, in a certain marketplace.

This feature is turned off by default. You can turn it on by going to Settings and setting "Show marketplace filter dropdown?" to "Yes". It's off by default just to keep the interface clean -- if you need it you can get it easily, but if you don't it's not cluttering things up.

Better Page Read Estimates

On the 15th of every month, the Prior Months' Royalty report comes out and announces how much each page read was worth during the previous month. The tricky part is before that: You had 1000 page reads today -- how much money is that worth?

Different marketplaces also pay out different amounts per page. In March of 2017, Amazon.com page reads were worth $0.0046 USD but Amazon.de page reads were only worth $0.0034 USD. Since Book Report is now fully aware of the marketplaces, it can be smarter about that complexity.

There are now three settings for How should Book Report estimate KU earnings?

  • With the most recent rates. This option assumes that every marketplace will pay as much per page as it did last month.
  • Assume a drop is coming. This option assumes that every marketplace will pay less than it did last month. How much less? It finds the biggest drop for each marketplace that occured in the last 12 months, and assumes a drop slightly bigger than that one.
  • With a custom rate. If you want to keep things simple, you can still set a single custom rate that applies to all marketplaces.

That's all for today. Thanks for using Book Report!
 
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#377 ·
BookReport said:
Just stopping in to let people know that Book Report should be working again, and to apologize for the downtime. The KDP crawler broke in an unexpected way that my alert system didn't catch. I'll be online today making sure everything continues working, and I'll be rewriting some tests to ensure that my phone blows up next time this happens.
Working for me again. Thanks.

Might I suggest you put a time constraint on the crawl part, so if it takes more than say 1,000 loops of code, then a warning gets sent to you. It looked to me like an endless loop condition. Those will never alert you, unless you build in a test for how many times around the code its going.

Regarding alerts, why not change your kboards account email to a special account where the notification emails only go to your phone. That way, as soon as posts start here, you get an email notification pop up on your phone. Just a suggestion.
 
#379 ·
Not working again for me. Tried logging out and clearing caches, but can't get Book Report to work in Chrome or Firefox. I get a message that I'm not synced, and I'm forever "crawling" without finding any data.

Messed around enough with this for the last 7-10 days. Time to delete the links from my browser and try another app.
 
#384 ·
I'm finding it stops updating after a few hours.
 
#385 ·
Finally tried the new Author Central addon.
Not working.
I select Amazon.com, it highlights, and does exactly nothing. Only way out is to hit the cross top right.
The blog entry says select it, and it asks you to confirm you're logged in. It doesn't ask.
In case this is part of the problem, logging into .com from Australia.
 
#386 ·
I get the same issue logging in from Australia. From about 11am WA time I hardly get any updates until midnight, and none at all from about 3pm. Meanwhile, Amazon KDP has already ticked over to a new day for me (e.g. it's 9pm on the 19th May as I type this, Bookreport is still showing the 18th as 'today', while KDP is correctly showing the 19th.)

I've ticked 'leading time zone' in the book report settings, but I think they need a 'leading leading timezone' for us time travellers already enjoying the future.

After midnight my time, Bookreport will tick over to the new day and I get all the updates in one go.

I think I'll polish up my old homebrew software and drop in the spreadsheets from KDP.
 
#387 ·
Simon Haynes said:
I get the same issue logging in from Australia. From about 11am WA time I hardly get any updates until midnight, and none at all from about 3pm. Meanwhile, Amazon KDP has already ticked over to a new day for me (e.g. it's 9pm on the 19th May as I type this, Bookreport is still showing the 18th as 'today', while KDP is correctly showing the 19th.)

I've ticked 'leading time zone' in the book report settings, but I think they need a 'leading leading timezone' for us time travellers already enjoying the future.

After midnight my time, Bookreport will tick over to the new day and I get all the updates in one go.

I think I'll polish up my old homebrew software and drop in the spreadsheets from KDP.
I have no idea why it's called Leading Time Zone, or what that's supposed to mean, but the yes setting puts you on US time. If you set it to No, you'll be on Australian time in terms of what it shows you. Of course, that means for the majority of the day it will show nothing (unless you happen to have a .com.au sale or two. So if you want to follow it throughout the day, have it set to Yes up until about 3pm as you said, then swap it to No. That way you'll be tracking with the majority of sales/page reads. (Although it's not precise as page reads swap over to the new day earlier than sales do.) Do this for long enough and you'll get used to the day 'starting' in the mid-afternoon :)
 
#388 ·
MelanieCellier said:
I have no idea why it's called Leading Time Zone, or what that's supposed to mean, but the yes setting puts you on US time. If you set it to No, you'll be on Australian time in terms of what it shows you. Of course, that means for the majority of the day it will show nothing (unless you happen to have a .com.au sale or two. So if you want to follow it throughout the day, have it set to Yes up until about 3pm as you said, then swap it to No. That way you'll be tracking with the majority of sales/page reads. (Although it's not precise as page reads swap over to the new day earlier than sales do.) Do this for long enough and you'll get used to the day 'starting' in the mid-afternoon :)
Liam, this needs tweaking.
If the setting is yes, then when Hawaii time hits midnight, it should change to no, and then when user time hits midnight, it should change back to yes. Automatically. Changing it manually every day is a pain.
Hawaii midnight is the end of the sales day, which in Queensland Australia, is 8pm. So I switch to no then in order to get the start of the US day figures, which are already well begun for the rest of the US. But 'no time' only lasts 4 hours.
 
#389 ·
TimothyEllis said:
Liam, this needs tweaking.
If the setting is yes, then when Hawaii time hits midnight, it should change to no, and then when user time hits midnight, it should change back to yes. Automatically. Changing it manually every day is a pain.
Hawaii midnight is the end of the sales day, which in Queensland Australia, is 8pm. So I switch to no then in order to get the start of the US day figures, which are already well begun for the rest of the US. But 'no time' only lasts 4 hours.
Oh, is Hawaii why the sale day ends so late? I wondered. Obviously KU operates to a mainland timezone since it switches much earlier.
 
#390 ·
MelanieCellier said:
Oh, is Hawaii why the sale day ends so late? I wondered. Obviously KU operates to a mainland timezone since it switches much earlier.
That's changed recently.
It used to be Reads started going into the next day at New York midnight. But lately, I've seen reads go into the current day as much as 2 hours later. There seems to be 1 last post of reads into the current day just after NY midnight now, then they start in the new day. But its like some delayed reads go in now, where previously they went into the new day.
Bit weird, but generally speaking KU ends at NY midnight, and sales at Hawaii midnight. (Although for practical purposes, it's rare to get a sale after LA midnight.)
 
#391 ·
MelanieCellier said:
I have no idea why it's called Leading Time Zone, or what that's supposed to mean, but the yes setting puts you on US time. If you set it to No, you'll be on Australian time in terms of what it shows you. Of course, that means for the majority of the day it will show nothing (unless you happen to have a .com.au sale or two. So if you want to follow it throughout the day, have it set to Yes up until about 3pm as you said, then swap it to No. That way you'll be tracking with the majority of sales/page reads. (Although it's not precise as page reads swap over to the new day earlier than sales do.) Do this for long enough and you'll get used to the day 'starting' in the mid-afternoon :)
Thanks for that - I figured setting it to NO would show sales from 2 days ago but it does seem to work. When I just set it to No (it's 1pm here), it's correctly showing my AU sales for the day so far.
 
#393 ·
I just went to try again, but AC is actually down.
So it could be a problem at the AC end at the moment.
 
#397 ·
Still not able to connect to Author Central.
It seems to be totally unable to recognize AC has already been logged in.
Maybe instead of spawning another tab, it should be checking using the same tab as BR is running on?
 
#398 ·
I can't get it to connect to Author Central either, since day one.

Yesterday I went to add something into Author Central and it was trying to be helpful by telling me that if I use the new Amazon Author website, changes to Author Central won't be ported over.

I have a feeling Author Central is on its way to the big webmaster in the sky…
 
#399 ·
Steve Richer said:
I have a feeling Author Central is on its way to the big webmaster in the sky…
Rumour has it AC will become a single site, instead of 1 for each store.
 
#400 ·
Lark Watson said:
Hey there, any chance of a "this month last year" option instead of going thru the calendar every time? thanks
There is a month selection toward the bottom of the drop down list. Once you select it, you can then choose the month/year combo you want to see. No idea if it's new or not, I only noticed it yesterday!
 
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