Continuing on through the list on my favorites post on softwares and websites, I'm going to talk about why I love Booktrakr.
You'll notice that Word and Excel are on the list too, but I think most people know how to use them. I use Word to clean up my first draft that I always write in Scrivener (see last week's post), setting up chapter headings and checking for typos before sending off to my editor and ultimately preparing it for formatting in Vellum (which I'll talk about later).
I use Excel to track sales, expenses, advertising sites (every time I run a promotion I track how well it did, which helps me decide if I'll use that ad agency again or not- Booktrakr helps with this), Bookbub (what books have been promoted and when, and when the next time a book qualifies for resubmission), tracking Facebook ad results, etc.
Booktrakr has been around for a few years and is still in Beta testing stage. That means that it's still free (yay!), but not yet 100% accurate and there's still the occasional glitch, so use it as a general guide.
What's great about Booktrakr is that it collects all the sales information from all of your books from every vendor and emails you every day with a neat little summary report.
It also breaks it down by book (how many of each book sold), countries sold in, and top 100 genre listing.
They give you a nice colorful dashboard to gather the same day and all time sales by book (with book cover), but the best feature is how they calculate all books per day next to ALL TIME, from when you started publishing.
This saves me a lot of time checking all the vendor sites for sales numbers each day and gives me a good gauge on how I'm doing and if I need to put some muscle behind promoting.
I use an EXCEL sheet to track my sales and number of books sold so I can see at a glance how I did each month and which sales promotions have worked.
So, big thanks to the folks at Booktrakr!