Vook moves to add more value to authors with their new free book sales tracker. From the release:
Leading ebook technology company Vook today launched Author Control, a daily market intelligence dashboard that allows authors to track the sales and unit downloads of their books in Amazon, Amazon KDP, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Nook Press, Kobo Writing Life, CreateSpace, Smashwords, Google, and Samsung, and display their results in a secure, easy-to-use online and mobile-accessible dashboard. Learn more about the new service at http://vook.com.
The service allows free tracking of up to 10 books, and I signed up to check it out.
Signing up is dead easy. Create an account with Vook. Link it to your author accounts on the available services, and presto! You’ve got data.
It’s not perfect. Two of my books are listed twice. Apparently I have something odd in the metadata because the Amazon versions are shown as different than the Nook Press and Smashwords versions. So instead of tracking three books, Vook thinks they are tracking five. That’s not an entirely bad thing because now I know there’s a problem I need to track down.
Vook is tracking current sales plus one year’s past sales. However, for some reason, my Amazon February sales are missing from the report. I don’t know if March sales are missing because they only track Amazon on weekly basis. (The other stores are tracked daily.)
It does track all sales from Amazon, including foreign sales, which is nice. On the KDP dashboard, you have to check each country separately. Vook combines them, which is much faster and easier to read.
It’s a nice tool, and there are enough ways to slice and dice your data that it will make all but the fussiest of analysts happy.
Update: Vook reached out to me after I published this post and said they’d look into the issues I mentioned with multiple versions of a book and February sales data. As I suspected, the multiple versions problem was a title/unique ID mismatch. They said they plan to add a “Merge books” button to allow users to fix those problems themselves. No release date on the feature, but it’ll be welcome when they introduce it.
Here’s what they said about February sales data:
Our system attempted to collect the Feb 2014 monthly sales report for your Amazon KDP account just like it did for prior months but it wasn’t available yet. Today our system will not actually try again, but we have plans to introduce a “monthly reconciliation” feature which will not only retry to collect monthly reports until they’re available but also reconcile any discrepancies between the unaudited weekly (or daily) sales data collected throughout the month and the audited monthly sales report. We do not yet have a release date for this new feature.
I like companies that listen to their users and fix problems.
