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ReaderLinks wants to tackle authors' pet peeves. Tell us yours.

2K views 14 replies 9 participants last post by  AuthorHelper 
#1 ·
Hi everyone. This is Ben from The Author Helper. We run ReaderLinks.com. There's been a lot of discussion about online services that provide KDP reports. I just wanted to take this opportunity to clarify what ReaderLinks is, and what it isn't.

ReaderLinks was built because my biz partner, John Logsdon, and I were newly self-published authors with 16,989 balls in the air. We love writing stories and we love the business, but we're always looking for ways to see the Big Picture.

We started by making a link service that allowed authors to use their Wordpress site to craft trackable marketing links with their own domain. For example, this is a url I made that I put on my Facebook posts.

http://benzackheim.com/book/44295

That url supports affiliate ids and is geo-friendly, meaning it will go to the correct country's store if that store exists.

The toolset quickly grew because John can't sit still, or sleep ;-)

We added KDP reports, ARC/Reader Team management, Facebook and AMS ads ROI (return on investment), promo tracking and a bunch of other stuff. The point being that ReaderLinks does provide KDP Reports but that's only part of what we want to build for authors.

Please use this post to ask any questions about us or tell us what your pain points are as an author. If there's enough enough demand for your pet peeve, we'll build a solution.

Ben
http://readerlinks.com
 
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#3 ·
I doubt you can address it, but my biggest peeve with the current situation is the inability for any vendor or aggregator to do royalty splits between rights holders to a book (other than, say, ACX for audio). Seems like an easy thing to do, even if the only choice is 50/50. A little work on an algo should allow more flexibility, such as a 60/40 split or whatever.


 
#4 ·
One of my pet peeves is when I visit the site of a service and I don't really understand what exactly it offers. Another pet peeve is when there's no pricing.

In your case, there's clear pricing (Kudos!), but I have no clue exactly what you are offering. Is it a landing page with all my books? I can add that to my own website and that would cost me 0$ unless I get so much traffic that I need bigger hosting, which I wouldn't mind.

I can add the links to my own books with an affiliate code. That's good. How is it different from Booklinker? Can I do that with other stores as well? How is it different from Books2read?

I'm not criticizing the service. I assume you offer some value for 19$/month. I'm just not really sure what it is, and I don't want to spend time or effort to find out, since apparently I can get the same for free with other services. But I might be wrong.

Since you asked about pet peeves... Well, this is one.
 
#5 ·
David VanDyke said:
I doubt you can address it, but my biggest peeve with the current situation is the inability for any vendor or aggregator to do royalty splits between rights holders to a book (other than, say, ACX for audio). Seems like an easy thing to do, even if the only choice is 50/50. A little work on an algo should allow more flexibility, such as a 60/40 split or whatever.
Bundlerabbit does this.
 
#7 ·
As with others, there’s not enough detail.

I already have book pages and redirect links via my webpage. I am interested in arc team management, but I can’t figure out what that entails from your brief description, thus I can’t analyse if it would be useful for me or not.

You do offer a free trial with no credit card required, which helps, but right now I just don’t have the time to sign up to a page to get basic details about how it works.
 
#8 ·
Not a pet peeve but just to say that I'm on day 2 of the free trial and will definitely be signing up for a year up front. The videos are very helpful and the ARC team management was very interesting and I may just test it out for my next release.

I just uploaded the FB and AMS ad reports for 2018 and it's nice to see the ROI because I've been guessing the whole time. As long as I was making more than what I was spending on ads, I figured I was good but it's nice to see that calculation done for me.

 
#9 ·
Patty Jansen said:
Bundlerabbit does this.
Fascinating. Thanks! Never heard of it before. Not useful for co-authored books, as they say "box sets only", but still interesting.

***update

Okay, so it says "only box sets" they sell themselves, but it appears at second glance that they function as an aggregator (like D2D or Smashwords) for the other vendors, for co-authored books. It might be worth their standard 10% of net in order to eliminate my accounting paperwork. I'm still reading.
 
#10 ·
I did the free trial of ReaderLinks because the idea of the redirected links through my own site intrigued me. I currently manage redirects through my site but the ReaderLinks solution seemed easier to manage and has geo redirecting. When I went to setup my links, though, there was no mention of how to do it through my domain. Instead it created links on the ReaderLinks domain, which is not something I'm interested in. I figured I misunderstood what the site did, and my free trial expired.

I went back to the site the other day and realized that it is possible, but you have to dig around to find the functionality. Why isn't this posted clearly on the page that you create links on? Why not a "Want to use your own domain? Click here" button? My biggest issue with ReaderLinks was that the UI was not intuitive or visually appealing. Now that I know that I can do links through my own domain, I'm interested in giving it another try, but it shouldn't be so difficult to figure out how to use the feature, especially the main feature that started ReaderLinks.
 
#11 ·
Hi everyone! Thanks for the feedback. My apologies for the delay in responding but a book launch is slamming me upside the head, laughing and calling me Sally for some reason.

Great points across the board.

We're a new service and love to hear feedback. When we're not writing we're working on ReaderLinks.

C.F. I'm really sorry the domain tool wasn't made clear to you. You're right. We'll make this clearer. Re: your UI point, we're hearing that from other customers. We plan on rolling out a couple of new features and then will revisit UI tweaks. Please reach out to me at ben@theauthorhelper.com and I'll get you another 15 day trial.

David, we have this feature on our roadmap. We're trying to figure out the best way to implement though. I think we'd want to make the split customizable and then display gross/net in a helpful way. How's that sound?

Day, point taken. Thank you. Frankly, we've struggled with this (can you tell???) and we're going to make the homepage much more robust. You can indeed get a number of our features for free elsewhere. The value of ReaderLinks is having the big picture (links, sales, trends, marketing tasks, publishing tasks) in one place. It helps our customers get in, see progress, get out. We also offer the ARC team tool and a feature called Core Links, which automatically creates trackable links that you need for every book (i.e. back matter link to review page). The Wordpress plug-in allows you to use your domain for all of your links and works well with Google Analytics. Thanks again, great constructive criticism.

thesmallprint, thank you too. Great suggestion. We worry about too many vids on the homepage. We'll def add more but I'm thinking some short looping animations may illustrate the point. We're offering the service for $9.99 for a little while. We do not anticipate going over $19.99 anytime soon. In fact, the $9.99 promo offer is not a one year deal. If you sign up for that rate now it will remain for at least one year.

Rinelle, thank you. That makes sense.

morrighansmuse, welcome aboard! Let us know if you have any questions here https://www.facebook.com/groups/readerlinks/

Please keep posting your pet peeves about ReaderLinks or your author life here!
 
#14 ·
Hi all

Just an update to let you know that we added some bug fixes and the following features:

Ability to sort your revenue and ROI by series
Ability to see revenue and ROI for today, yesterday and this month.

Bug fixes include a fix to allow KDP reports with a huge number of books to be imported & support for old page reads report format.

Thanks!

Ben

 
#15 ·
Hi all

We've just pushed Audible support to production. You can now upload MONTHLY Audible reports. We don't provide daily at this time due to limitations in the Audible reports.

The process is a manual one at this time.

Step 1. Download each monthly report from https://www.acx.com/sales/dashboard

Step 2. Upload each report by clicking on "Upload Income Report" button on the homepage.

Step 3. Assign the audiobooks to their respective books in the Audiobooks menu at the top of the page.

Step 4. Enjoy your new data!

Let me know if you have any questions.

Ben
 
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