Chart Those Book Sales


As I am an engineer, an analytical guy, and someone who loves lists and numbers, the easiest and most effective way for me to keep track of my progress towards my goals of selling 200 copies of my children’s book Frankenstein’s Science Project, is by creating spreadsheets. Monitoring your progress in the 2nd M in the DREAMS Cycle ™ 
For the selling of Frankenstein’s Science Project, I actually created four spreadsheets. You can follow the link to actual information I captured. 

This spreadsheet captures the money I spend on selling the book and the revenues I make. Capturing this information is not only an indication of the progress on the sales, but it will be very useful come tax time. This spreadsheet has two tabs, one for expenses and one for revenues. Every time I have an expense, I write the date, the expense, the vendor and an explanation. I do the same for the “revenues” tab but instead of a vendor, I capture the source of the revenue, e.g. Chapters, or the event where I sold the copies. I also record the number of copies sold. 

2) Activities  
This spreadsheet is to keep track of everything I have done to sell my book. It includes giving copies to friends and families, to sending emails to libraries, to book signings. I include a column for impact to capture the results of each activity. 

This spreadsheet started as a list to identify where every copy was distributed. It also has a date column, and a column to identify if the book was actually sold as opposed to given away. I subsequently modified the spreadsheet to capture separately the copies sold. This Paid tab is critical so that at any one time, I know the progress I have made towards my goal of selling 200 books in two years. I need to sell 8 books per month to reach my goal. 

To be a best-selling author, you have to end up on a list. Ending up on the New York Times Best Sellers list is a dream, but before then, I can follow a few other lists. My book publishing platform Lulu manages many sites including in the US and Canada. They also have a ranking system that ranks the books published through Lulu by overall rank, as well as top weekly and monthly ranks in different categories. My book is categorized in the Children’s section. I thus started a spreadsheet that shows the date, the number of copies obtained from Lulu and the five different possible ranks. Every time I order a copy or a copy is sold online, the ranking numbers change. When I obtained my first copy from Lulu as a proof, my rank became 18836. A week later it had dropped to 18925 as other people sold copies on Lulu. 
I also started keeping track of my Amazon ranking. You can get one for Amazon.ca and Amazon.com, as well as other Amazon sites. Books are also ranked in different categories and sub-categories. Frankenstein’s Science Project is in the Teen Books category. The Amazon ranking is fairly obvious on the book’s Amazon webpage and only starts appearing once a copy is sold. It changes every hour and keeps dropping until another book is sold. Every time I climb in the ranking, I know I have sold one or more copies. When the first two copies of the book were sold on Amazon.ca, my ranking went from nothing to 15,100 overall and 1,282 in Teen Books. Within four days it had dropped to 86,122 and 6,714 respectively. Within a month it had dropped to 357,561 overall and 32,506 in the Teen Books category. After another two books were sold, the ranking went up to 11,360 and 940.  

With all these spreadsheets, my progress towards my goal is obvious. They motivate me and prompt me to actions. 

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