[Mark Fassett]

DriveThruFiction.com is another ebook store. Easy to get set up and all, but you have to make your ePub, mobi and pdf files yourself. They don't sell a lot for me, and I haven't heard of anyone selling a lot through them, but they exist and since I sold books there, I added the ability to import them.

The biggest reason that TrackerBox is $60 is that you get it once, and you don't have to pay for it again, yet I have to update it every time one of the vendors modifies their reports (which happens a few times a year). I'd rather write books than support software, so it has to pay for my time. I DO support it, though, usually turning around new/changed reports in a couple days or less.

I'll add new vendors on request, too, if you can provide me with a couple of their reports.

And, you actually get more than a month to try it out. It's got a 45 day trial, and you can dump all of your reports into it (even ones from Amazon in 2009) to see where you're at.

 

[Mark Fassett]

Hey Mark, more screenshots would be great. I TOTALLY think $60 is worth it.... but I guess I'm not sure what it does still. When it tracks, do you see daily? Just monthly? What of my info am I giving you?

Like this: Group and sort reports by any column -- I don't know what that means bc I don't know what the columns are. OR maybe I missed something on there?

I'm not your customer right now, but I will be in 6 months. And, as a visual person, more explinations would be great.
I wish had a "free for a week" thing to play with it. As a non-tech person, I'm always more comfortable if I get to "touch" something before buying it. I'm afraid I'm making assumptions of what this does.

Basically, you import your monthly reports (not daily) from the supported vendors, and it combines them in a database. You can then view several different reports, like Net Sales by title, or by month, etc... In those reports, you get a chart, but you also get a grid (like excel) with the data, and you can take each column in that grid and sort by them, or group by them so that you can adjust the view to see things pretty much however you wish. You can refine the reports by Date, title, vendor, author (if you're using pen names), formats, and currency.

I get how you want to "touch" it before buying, that's why there's a 45 day free trial. I'd just wait until you have some data to put into it before you run it for the first time.

Hope that helps.

 

[Mark Fassett]

You can download it for a free trial period of 45 days (which I did last fall, played around, and decided I didn't want it, since it didn't have iBookstore. Now that it does, I'm thinking this is totally the way to go!).

I wish you had said something about it then. I absolutely would have added iBoostore for you. I just didn't have any reports to work with, since I wasn't going direct to Apple, then. I am now, but still don't have my own reports. But in the same week, one current customer, and one potential customer asked me about them and I added them. PM me if you want to give it another try.

 

[Mark Fassett]

Like what? I want to make Mark add them to Trackerbox for me.

Sorry Mark.

Don't be sorry. I'm interested, too. I'll add what you need.

 

[Mark Fassett]

Okay, I've run into a problem. I can't seem to figure out how to import my ibookstore figures. Anyone?

There are two different types (from what I know - I just started with them, so I haven't got any of my own to look at). One is a "monthly" report and one is a weekly report.

The monthly ones, you can get from the itunesconnect site under payments and financial reports and download the txt files by month and market (you'll need to download each separately since they don't combine them like Amazon).

The weekly reports come from the "Sales and Trends" screen. These, I understand, are only available for the past 12 weeks.

Either one should work, but once you choose one of them, you will not be able to switch to the other (without starting the whole database over).

If this doesn't help, send me an email (to the support address) and I'll help you figure it out. I've only tested with a limited set of reports that customers sent me, so it's possible if yours aren't working, you've got something in them that I couldn't see from those reports.

They "should" just work. If they don't, I'll make them "just work".

 

[Mark Fassett]

I'm going to send you an email. The monthly files have to be converted to xls from txt. I'll send both and what Apple tells us to do. Then we can go from there. I've got all my other vendors in there with no problem what-so-ever. Smashwords, B&N, Amz, Kobo, Lightning Source. Apple just gives us weird reports.

Actually, you only need to convert to xls if you want to view it in excel. TrackerBox imports directly from the .txt files to save you the hassle of having to do any conversion by hand. It's the same way for all the vendors. Whatever they send, that's what TrackerBox imports.

PS. Got your email and responded.

 

[Mark Fassett]

Got the free trial of the program and I guess I'm too stupid to use it because I imported all the reports and my numbers don't match with my plain Excel spreadsheet. This is like Scrivener. Easy to use for everyone except me.

There's an option in the preferences to turn on/off the inclusion of free downloads in your numbers, which could skew the totals. This option is also available to individual report views under the options filter (left hand side of the report view). Just email me at the support at storyboxsoftware.com and I'll help you get it sorted out.

 

[Mark Fassett]

I've started playing with Draft2Digital lately, to see how it works for a few releases... Any chance of adding them to the list for supported retailer/distributors?

I'll add them as soon as I can have some actual sales reports in hand. I'll either have to contact them directly, or have one of my customers (or future customers) supply me with the reports. I'd prefer to see actual reports, because often what the developer intends doesn't actually make it into the final output.

 

[Mark Fassett]

Seems reasonable, though they're very responsive from everything I've heard, so if you do want to get in touch with them I'm willing to bet they'll hook you up with anything you might need in terms of reports. And the system was developed because of a KB author (Aaron Pogue?) in the first place, so I'm sure he has reports.

I emailed them. They haven't responded yet.

As for Apple, Deanna brought it to my attention that the reports from Apple are compressed when you download them. The next update for TrackerBox (probably Monday) will import the .gz files from Apple without the need for you to decompress them first.

 

[Mark Fassett]

Okay, since the developer is obviously listening, I would like to register my desire for a Mac version of this software

I know, I know... it's a whole order of magnitude (or two) more complicated than adding support for a new retailer. But this sounds incredibly useful, and I'd like to be able to use it!

I know a lot of Mac users who want me to port it to the Mac, but I have to protect my writing time, which is what I really want to do. Adding a Mac port is like adding another line of business with it's own set of problems and disasters waiting to suck up my time. I take supporting my customers seriously, but I want my primary business to be my writing. I just don't think there's room for me to do a Mac version and satisfy both of those other requirements (especially since I also spend time on my writing software, StoryBox).

I wish I could do it, but I can't see how I can, at the moment.

I do know if you purchase parallels and a copy of Windows, it does work on the Mac that way (expensive, I know). I don't know about other similar products, but they might work, too. You could also use bootcamp to put a small windows partition on your mac and switch between the two operating systems when you want to use TrackerBox. Kind of a pain, but it works.

 

[Mark Fassett]

Good on you. And this is off-topic by a country mile, but your covers are spectacular.

Thanks! The guy that does the paintings for the novels (the first three to the left) is an incredible artist. The others are stock art. All the text on all the covers is my work (for better or worse).

 

[Mark Fassett]

Mark, you might be interested to know that VirtualBox.org is similar to Parallels and is free.

Ah! That looks like what I was hoping existed. I'll have to try that out and make sure it works. It would be awesome to save people $80.

 

[Mark Fassett]

Mark - is there a trick to getting Pubit reports to upload - special naming convention, certain format, whatever? I've been trying to export my monthly report from Pubit but everything I try keeps getting bounced back as an error.

Are you asking about downloading them from PubIt, or importing them into TrackerBox?

If it's the import that's failing, make sure you aren't opening the .xls files in excel before saving them. Some people have spreadsheets open automatically when they click the download link, but saving them from excel changes some of the formatting, causing them not to work.

There aren't any special naming conventions, other than downloading the .xls.

 

[Mark Fassett]

To address the Draft2Digital question again, I got an email back from them. I will have support for them as soon as they solidify their reports (well, a couple days later ).

Oh, and Joe - great to hear that's all it was.

 

[Mark Fassett]

Anyone who has tried, or is trying TrackerBox, if you've got Draft2Digital reports, could you PM me? I've got a build with "experimental" support for their reports, and I'd like to have you try a test version with your reports (if you're willing).