[Kia Zi Shiru]

Now with 3 books and a 4th one coming out in just less than 2 months, I'm finally bringing in a bit of sales. My only problem, I have no idea to keep track of them.

I feel like I need some sort of 3D mechanic to keep track of both money and sales from each book and from all the retailers... And I'm sort of lost.

How do you guys keep track of it all?

 

[Kia Zi Shiru]

Yeah, my problem is that I sell through multiple places (kobo, Amazon, Smashwords, CS), have multiple books and want to know both the money I make but also the sales I have for each book.

With a simple excel sheet this would mean that I would have to fill out my sales for a book on the page where I track sales per month per book, where I keep track of overall sales per month per vendor and overall sales per book over all vendors. It would mean a LOT of work.

My boyfriend came up with the idea of using MySQL, though that hasn't got an interface so I was wondering if someone had a better idea

 

[Kia Zi Shiru]

You're welcome.

Thanks, though $60 is very much out of my budget right now, but it does look really awesome.

I found a free SQL front end that easily deals with queries and stuff, but it needs a database and I don't have one. I can make one, no problem, I've done that before myself, but I'll need to find the time to create one.

 

[Kia Zi Shiru]

It's up to you Kia, but isn't a MySQL database a rather complex way to track some sales numbers?

Wouldn't an OpenOffice/LibreOffice spreadsheet be much easier for entering data and quickly generating sales graphs?

The problem with a spreadsheet is that I'll have to fill out a lot of data multiple times to get all the different things I'm interested in. SQL would allow me to run specific queries over data I want with only a minimal of extra work when I fill in the data in the first place.