Data management is the Achilles’ heel for a lot of authors.

But if you don’t understand your numbers—where to get them, what they mean and how to use them to inform your strategy—then you’re missing a huge opportunity to help your business grow.

In today’s episode we’re tackling data for wide authors, and sharing some resources that will help you to better understand your data without getting overwhelmed by it.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 046: Making Sense of Data From a Variety of Wide Platforms

Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 46 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here as always to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.

If you find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking to the buy us a coffee button on the website and the show notes. Your contribution helps us cover our operating expenses and keeps this podcast ads free. We want to thank Natasha for contributing last week in helping us cover our operating expenses and keep this podcast ads free. So thank you very much, Natasha!

Crystal Hunt: Data management is something a lot of authors struggle with, but if you don’t understand your numbers, where to get them, what they mean and how to use them to inform your strategy, then you’re missing a huge opportunity to help your business grow. So in today’s episode, we’re tackling data for wide authors and sharing some resources that will help you to better understand your data without getting overwhelmed by it.

But first as always, we’re going to find out what’s new in the wonderful world of Michele Amitrani.

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: So Crystal in my wonderful world happened a number of things this week. I’ve been busy on prepping some work for the next few months, actually. I’ve mentioned in the past episode that I was really working on getting a bit more reviews on Soul of Stone, the first mythological fantasy of my collection.

And I’m very happy to celebrate with you and all the listeners the fact that I succeed in my objective of getting that book at least 10 reviews, we got actually 14 in the moment I’m speaking. So that’s very good it’s going to be very helpful when I’m going to plan to transform that as a leading way for people to get to my box set.

So I really needed those reviews and I’m very happy and very thankful to all the people from my newsletter and arc team that helped me reach this goal. So thank you very much for that. Really appreciate that. The other thing that I’ve been working on was a pre-order. I have put the first pre-order ever in the English world for one of my mythological fantasy novel.

So as I’m talking now, Muse of Avalon, which is the third story of my collection is live on Amazon and it has been fun seeing how fast actually Amazon was. They were like, it’s probably going to need 72 hours to be live. And after 12 or 14, it was their up in the world.

And I was like, oh wow, that’s fast. So I was very happy to learn that it was that fast, actually. And so this is going to inform my new strategy for the pre-order of this book. The book is not a pre-order yet on Kobo and all the other platforms, because I never did that before and I’m learning how to do it.

And I just need to find out if it’s possible in some of these platforms. So just an Amazon for now, but it’s out there. And it’s a few weeks away and I’m very excited to see how this, we play out. The other thing that I’ve been working on was related to writing. I have completed hopefully what I hope to be the last draft of Song of Forever, which is the fourth mythological fantasy in my collection.

I added a couple of new scenes and the brand new character to the story and this story should be released in the summer of this year. Still have a couple of people that I really want this story to be read because I want this to be a way for readers to get engaged on my second box set, because this is a story that is going to be featured in the second box set.

And I want it to be hopefully the entry point of the second box set. So I want it to be the Soul of Stone of this collection and I really need to make sure that it’s solid and is it that gives a satisfying ending. Watch out for that. I’m really looking forward to irony it out and see how it goes.

And the very last thing that happened and is that I finally managed to finish the reader magnet for my Italian newsletter and the fairy tale one, and is now in the hands of the second beta. So hopefully I can finally get this project done, that basically has been sucking 70% of my energy in the last couple of months.

And I am going to hopefully release this in March. So this is what I’ve been up to. I’m very excited to let you know a bit more next month on how these things play out. I just wanted to let you know that I’m very happy how things are going and I’m equally interested in knowing how Crystal’s week has been going.

Any news from your side, Crystal.

Crystal Hunt: Always there’s news. So our excitement this past week has been getting set up to have a couple of our Strategic Series Author book and the Scrappy Rough Draft book from our Creative Academy, guides for writers series are going to be part of an info stack bundle.

And if you’ve never heard of info stack before I had purchased a couple of them in the past, and it’s basically a giant collection of resources around a specific topic, and this one is around writers craft. So we have contributed a couple of books to that stack of things, and there’s going to be a week at the beginning of March when you can buy that stack at a crazy good discount.

So we will make sure that we send out a link in our newsletter if you’re not yet subscribed to our newsletter, get on the list and you can do that by going to strategicauthortrepreneur.com and click on the weekly tips tab. There’s a link there. Put in your email and each week we send out just one thing that will help you to level up your writing and publishing stuff.

So if you’re interested in any of what we send out, but also the info stack bundle and you don’t want to miss out because they really only come around once a year and I heard a rumor this might be the last one with this particular topic focus. So you definitely want to get in on that. The other thing we’ve been doing on the writing side is to forge ahead with the Create with Co-authors book.

So the first draft is actually just about finished. All three of us have been working on it simultaneously, which moves things forward very quickly, which I have to say is extremely satisfying. When you can divide up a book and conquer each section on your own and then mix them all back up again and then we will have much editing to be done. There’s always several more rounds of rewrites and edits that go with each of those. But we are going through all the survey responses. We had sent out a survey that was asking for people to contribute their own experiences with co-authoring. And so we got all kinds of interesting things back from all over the place.

So very excited about that. On the entertainment side of things, I’m working my way back into my fiction stuff. And one of the ways that historically I have done that is by really deep diving into either a book series or a TV series or movies that really engage the character side of my brain and pull the focus back around two characters and Deadwood is a series that was done.

It was only ever three seasons and then there was a feature length film to wrap things up at the end. But Yeah, Deadwood is fantastic. I think it’s a streaming on crave cause it’s an HBO original, but it is just so interesting with the characters that are created. And it’s a bit like Shakespeare with this elevated language, but it’s set in Deadwood, which is the Wild West gold panning kind of a scenario.

And so it is just really fascinating of people removed from polite society and what happens and how their personalities develop and everyone is such extremes, but there’s equal parts good and bad in people. It’s just, it’s really an interesting experiment in terms of seeing how you feel about characters and seeing that good versus evil play and is anybody really bad or is it just bad circumstances or whatever so interesting stuff, if you haven’t yet seen it, I would be very curious to hear what you all think about it, but it is one of my favorites. I think this is the fifth or sixth time we’ve watched the whole series through since 2006, maybe around then is when it actually aired live. So it’s been around for quite a while.

Backgrounds with data

Okay, so onto today’s important topic, we are talking today about data, but first I wanted to give you a little bit of background about why I harp on data so much, and why I have an interest in this is partially because of my background. So I am a health psychologist by training, and I did a lot of research in that area as part of getting my master’s.

And I’ve always been fascinated with numbers and how all of that works. And we’re going to talk a little bit about some qualitative data and a bit about quantitative data. And I just wanted to start off making that distinction for anybody who was not forced to take as many stats classes as I was and dive into all of that stuff in school.

Qualitative is talking about the quality of things. And so that is usually open-ended research questions. So stuff that can’t be answered by a yes or no, or a number. Let’s say, what is the most challenging thing about indie publishing might be a qualitative question. We’re looking for an expansive kind of an answer.

Quantitative information is usually something that can be answered with a yes or no. You could tick a box on a form. The questions are set up as what we call closed questions. So that is really something that, that you were picking from a set of accepted responses. It’s not that you can just answer with anything you’d like to answer with.

And so that is I think, an important distinction to make. We deal mostly in publishing we deal with quantitative information. We are looking at how many books sold in which countries we’re looking at, what is your average star rating? That kind of thing. But in the book world, our qualitative piece of data might be what is in the actual reviews? What did the reviews say? What did the readers enjoy about those books? How did that work? How did you enjoy the experience of publishing it? What were some of the challenges you came across? All that kind of data? That information is qualitative. So there you go.

There is your research question, open-ended questions, close ended questions, qualitative versus quantitative discussion to kick things off. And now Michele what is your background with data?

Michele Amitrani: So I just wanted to let out there that I’m the opposite of Crystal. I’m very messy and I’m learning a lot as of now.

I would say I’m learning from scratch. I have been learning how to deal with my data for now a year and a half, I would say seriously, because till a year ago, I didn’t really know what kind of even question to ask myself, before Crystal mentioned some of this, the difference between qualitative and quantitative.

Even a year ago. I wouldn’t have had a clear answer to that question. I just didn’t know. And one of the reasons I think is because one thing like the vocabulary that self-publishing has, but also a discipline like this takes time to familiarize yourself with. And I think that gathering statistics and stuff like that-especially for a person that is just, I want to write, I’m just a writer. It’s difficult to get along with that. So please bear in mind that the difference that I have with Crystal in this regard is that I’m really at the beginning.

So I’ll try to do what I can here to provide with my value. And I’ll try to be as transparent as possible to get you in my journey as a person that is starting out with learning how to gather the data that he needs for his business.

There is one of the first things that you will have to do is to figure out what question you need answered. The very first thing to do is that what kind of question you want your data to answer. So for example, a bunch of this question would be: which platforms are your biggest sellers? Which books or series are your biggest sellers in term of volumes in a specific market? Which products are your biggest source of revenue and which countries are the best for sales? These are just some of the questions. It doesn’t mean that they are the right question for you. But I find it all of these four to be very useful for me.

And the reason is the following. If I don’t have something like a bedrock I can base my analysis, I don’t go anywhere. So I’ll give you an example. I am most active as of now in the Italian market. Up to March, 2020 I didn’t have a system to keep in place the royalties and the expenditures that I got from that market.

Now, still, as of now the Italian market get something like 70 to 75% or my sales. So it’s critical for me to know how much I’m making in the Italian market and how much I’m spending with ads in this case. So a question like the one that I previously told you, like which platforms are your biggest sellers?

It’s of fundamental importance for me. In this case, in my case, would be Amazon because that’s where I’m making the most of my money. With page reads and with the selling of my series. The second question that I mentioned before was which book series are your biggest sellers in terms of volume?

And in this case will be a box set science fiction still in Italian. So you see the answer you’re going to give is different because you are maybe a different kind of writer. You write in a different kind of genera. The volume of your sales will be different from mine. But in my case, this is where everything starts from me.

To build up from this example now is been 11 months that have got to this new gathering of data for my Italian market. I can answer the question that I was giving to myself way better than before, because I didn’t know exactly what was happening. So I think Crystal this is important because it changes with the time with the books that you’re writing with the market you’re dealing with and with yourself as a writer. So I’m sure that the difference there is going to be with you, especially because you are also writing not only fiction, but also non-fiction is going to be very different from mine.

I just gave you what I thought was most meaningful for you. If I had to turn the question to you, what would you say it’s important for the listener to be aware of when it comes to the first thing, which is asking the right question to get from the data the answer we want.

What do you want your data to tell you?

Crystal Hunt: I think there’s two pieces that you highlighted a lot of really good questions to ask.

If you don’t know which books are selling the best or which series are selling the best, you don’t know where to put your energy for the next releases. So those are really important to know. Knowing which countries are the best for sales helps you decide which ad market you’re going to focus on and maybe where it needs more attention.

If you can look at, is it the ads that are driving sales. How’s that working that is all really helpful in terms of deciding if you’re seeing money come back. If you’re not seeing money, come back, how that is all going to work. I think the thing is you need to make a list of all of the questions that you would like answers to.

So some of the ones we suggested, you might also add some things like how much of your revenue as a result of your mailing list. That would be a good question to know, because how much time and energy to put into your mailing list. If you can justify a paid service or if you need to choose something that’s free.

You should know how much of your revenue is a result of your advertising, right? And if you’re putting a ton of time and energy into your advertising, but all your sales are coming from your mailing list, then that’s going to inform that maybe you spend a little more time and energy on growing the mailing list instead of dumping it into advertising if it’s really not working for you.

You need to know what is your return on investment when it comes to your advertising and paid promotions? And I think the biggest thing is when you’re setting up a system to track your data, you need to think about what questions is future you going to want to know the answers to? It’s really easy to set up a system that works for us today, right now, exactly where we’re at in this moment.

But if you take a little bit of extra time and you talk to some of the authors who are maybe a step ahead of you down the journey, and you ask some questions of the people in your writing group, and you say, okay, what data do you wish you had when it came time to scale up, that’s going to give you a huge advantage.

So your mission for step one of this data analysis process is for you to figure out what questions does now you want answered, present to you and what questions might future you want answers to as well? Because we always want to design systems that are going to grow and scale with us so that we don’t have to start over again when things get successful in you hit that tipping point and you’re ready to level up to the next level. You do not want to have to take the time out to redesign all the systems that you’re using. There’ll be a little bit of that. You’re going to need to adjust and level things up as you go but you really want to make as much as possible anything you design now and put into place scalable, so you can just adjust it, not scrap it and start over because that’s going to interfere with your momentum and your growth. So being as thorough as possible in your brainstorming list about what you might want the data to answer now and down the road.

Couple more questions to throw out for you things like which formats are selling the best. If most of your revenue is coming from audio books or it’s coming from eBooks, or it’s coming from your paperback books that will inform how quickly you put those different versions out and how much attention you put on them and where you feature them on your website might even be impacted by how much those are selling.

So all good things. You also want to think about, can the data tell you why some are doing better than others? So you want to make sure that you’re not just collecting an output measures. So something like how many downloads did I get when I did a FreeBooksy promo is useful? But you also want to make sure that you collect some of the conditions that were in place when that promo happened.

So tracking things like how many reviews did you have on your books? What was your average star rating? Anything about the conditions under which that promo happened are going to help you interpret that later because you don’t necessarily know, was it just that FreeBooksy books was amazing and it didn’t have anything to do with your book listing?

There’s probably some other factors at play here if you know that the first time I did a free book, see, I had 20 reviews and the second time I had 50 reviews and your downloads were five times higher the second one, then you might know for future books. Okay, I’m going to hold off on doing a paid promo until I get more reviews.

And then, that’s a smart way to use your money, but without tracking it you wouldn’t be able to know that you can’t go back and reclaim some of that data. It’s not always there to be got. So you need to make sure that you are tracking it as you go, because you won’t necessarily be able to find out how many reviews did I have as of X date is not data that I’ve been able to find anywhere you have to record it in the moment.

Second thing: once you know what questions you want answered, you need to look at what tools are available to help you track the data so that you can answer those questions. So what are some things that when you’re looking for a tool Michele, to help you do this stuff, when you are first getting started, what were some of the things you were looking for in a tool?

What kind of tools you need to get started and what to look for

Michele Amitrani: We’re getting to the part where you will see the most differences between my approach, and I think Crystal’s approach because my approach is very basic and it’s very undeveloped. And I want to explain you why because when you want one to this very good question, which tools will help you keep track of your statistic the better? Usually my answer at this point of my authorpreneur journey is: which one is the cheapest? Which is completely not a very good authorpreneur answer. But at this stage of my process, what I’m trying to do is trying to keep as much my process simple and as much as possible not to spend too much money.

And the reason is because I do not have a lot of revenue coming in and I know myself ,if I see for too many weeks in a row or months in a row and minus and then I’m going to get the beat upset with myself. What I really like is to play with my strengths. One of the thing that I know is that I really like, noticing numbers go up.

And then I’m going to tell you in a moment why this is important to answer this question. If I see those numbers going up, they motivate me into doing the things that I really think matters. For example writing more books. The question that we want to submit to you though, is: considering the point in the, your authorpreneur career and considering the resources that you have when … we say resources though, you shouldn’t think only to money. And that’s one of my biggest problem because the second most important … I would say the most important resource is time. And this is the thing that I really need to get better. When Crystal said before setting up the system really helps you and you want to make sure to build the system as possible, that grows with you. That’s something that I totally subscribe, but part of my brain doesn’t.

So you have to be aware of this. Many people that I also know in the business, they’re afraid of spending money, if they don’t see a result in the meantime, and what I’m talking about now is an investment.

So you have to have the mindset of the investor, who might not see the money back in weeks, months, sometimes years. So going back to the point. What tools are you going to decide based on the system that you built or the system that you want to build? I think the most important answer is try to find a system that again can grow with you and try not to be too cheap about that.

Now I’m talking to myself, I’m not talking to other listeners because this is, and I’ve very serious, I think very important, but it’s something that I see many people, many writers stopping because we’re not accountant. But I think it’s one of the most important things that we can with time familiarize with and it can become one of our best skill.

So which system slash tool is going to be sustainable in terms of price for you? Something like what is the system that can help you get the most information that are useful to you in one place? What is easy to use for you? I’ll give you my system. As of now, the system that I use is a Google spreadsheet.

It’s super basic and it’s free. So it really suits me at this point, but I do know of people that use way more complex system, because they have way more complex business. And that’s the best answer for them at that time. Once again, I think it’s important for you to consider the moment you’re at in your authorpreneur journey and the resources that you can use, but also try to see a bit more over the horizon and ask yourself if I’m wide, wouldn’t be a bit better for me to design a system that can help me get. All the sales and royalties, not only from Amazon, but from Kobo, from Apple, from Barnes and Nobles, from Drafts to Digital, whatever you’re using. If you decided you were going to be wide for the long run, that’s a very good reason to decide that system, even if it’s going to cost a bit more.

The other thing that I mentioned was spreadsheets. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in using them. One of the problems that also have is that I do not know very well how to use them. I don’t know very well how to use formulas, but I’m learning because I know in the long run that can be an investment and this is an example of how I’m using the resource time to figure out a system that works for me now, and that I can bring with me in the future. So I’m allocating some time investing in order to learn how to handle that resource, because I know that I’m going to use that in the future. I see Crystal and she said completely different point than mine. She’s still using that up to this point.

So that speaks to me volumes and it says to me it works. You just need the better understanding of that system. Now, since we’re talking about Crystal let’s continue on that venue when she has a system in place that is much more advanced than me because she’s been in the game for longer. So for example she used … and Crystal help me out is that system called Publish Wide that you use to keep all of the resources of the books and stuff?

Which one is it?

Crystal Hunt: Okay, so let me do a little breakdown for you of the different pieces that I use. First though I’m going to do a quick overview of what the different tools are, that will help you. If you’re wanting something more than a simple spreadsheet, and you’re ready to automate some of this stuff, then there are a few different things you can use.

So there’s one called Tracker Box, which does let you import your information from all different platforms, it’s a one-time fee. You purchase it and put it on your computer, which is fantastic so no monthly charges, but the downside is it is for PC only. If you are a Mac user, you need to use a virtual PC or something like that in the cloud in order to let you run it.

Or if you have a second machine, like I have a PC laptop because some of our software only runs on a PC and so you can use that one. It’s not as fancy in the interface as some of the others, but it does the job and it’s super comprehensive in terms of what it lets you import and the reports that it spits out and stuff.

So that is really handy. ReaderLinks is one that lets you import a lot of things, but not everything. And it does a whole lot more than just data gathering and breakdowns for you. So it’s an all in one author tool that does all kinds of things. You can manage your arc team. You can do your Amazon descriptions.

You can do series breakdowns of all kinds of stuff. There’s a ton of different functionality in there. So all of these ones, we’re putting links to these in the show notes. Folks, if you’re listening and wondering what the heck was that they just said, there’s going to be a list of all these in the show notes.

So go and check strategicauthorpreneur.com Check out episode 46, and you’ll find all of the information in the show notes for each of these. ReaderLinks is a monthly paid or annual page, depending on your preference you can do either. And that’s a one that I’ve been using for quite a long time actually, even though it doesn’t do everything we need in one place, I actually really like using it to make sense of all of the Amazon data and because I’ve been using it for a long time, I just keep using it. And I really liked some of the other features it has It’s not required for sure, but it gives really clear breakdowns about different formats and you can import your advertising.

So for managing all of our Amazon stuff and looking at return on investment for ads and promos and all that kind of stuff, it’s really nice to have all of that in one place. And it’s really visual. And it also lets me have multiple pen names in the same account. So I can manage my non-fiction business and my fiction business from the same dashboard.

So for me, that’s one of the pieces that I’ve chosen is ReaderLinks. PublishWide is lot newer on the scene. They just came out of their beta phase this past year. And so they’re just now really hitting their full stride and they’re adding new platforms all the time. And you can bring in your sales data and your ads data, all of that into one place, which is great.

So it is similar to Tracker Box in that way, I think, but it’s in the cloud. So it works anywhere. You don’t have to have a certain type of computer. Book Report is another one that you may have heard of and that one is an Amazon only tool. So it’s not great for wide the same with Data Sprout is the folks who do Book Sprout same people, but they have a little add on tool that basically makes your KDP dashboard into something you can actually understand.

And a lot of these tools originated when the Amazon dashboard, you could not click on the little beta thing that Amazon now has and get all the pretty graphs and the reports and everything. You just used to get giant spreadsheets of information that you could not interpret if your life depended on it.

So that’s where all of these tools came out of was not being able to understand anything from your Amazon dashboard, but now you actually have in your KDP dashboard a pretty great breakdown of a lot of that information. So first source of information for this stuff should always be the actual dashboards of the tools that you’re using to publish your books, whether you’re going direct to different wide stores, maybe you’re using KDP, maybe you’re using Draft to Digital, maybe you’re using Publish Drive.

So those are your first stop is the ones that you already get in whatever accounts that you have with these companies. So start there. Then, if you need to, you’re going to look at where are you going to aggregate the data from all these other sources? It does make sense to start off with a spreadsheet.

If you don’t have all that many books and you don’t have all that many formats of your books, and you’re not dealing with complicated business arrangements than a spreadsheet is a great way to go. And actually for some aspects of our business, on our non-fiction business our summary document is a spreadsheet that I made and it shows us exactly what we’ve sold in all of the places and it adds them all up for us.

It doesn’t break it out by format. It doesn’t break it out by country. None of that stuff, that’s all done at the platform level. We can see that for our wide stuff through our Publish Drive dashboard and through our Amazon specific dashboard in the KDP dashboard that’s set up there. So for the really granular information, we check our two publishing accounts for that. But for our information about overall ad spend versus revenue and all of that and it calculates the breakdowns of royalties for the business partners as well.

So I really, I did take some time and I learned a lot about how that works and I set it all up so that it could scale as we added new books and new royalty arrangements and all of that stuff and new ads platforms. So it’s all built to be able to scale. And then we are leveling that up as we go.

So really it’s a combination of things and some of it is some of it is really, it’s just this way, because it’s what I know how to do. So I’m sure there’s people out there who have much better knowledge of spreadsheets than I do, and could custom create whatever you want, but you’re always weighing how much time will it take to make it and to maintain it because the most important part of choosing a tool is: will you use it all of the time? How easy is it to use? Because any system that you don’t use a hundred percent of the time is no longer dependable. It’s no longer useful, and it’s no longer doing its job. If it doesn’t have all of the information it needs to have, and if you don’t keep it up to date, then it is no longer helping you.

It actually becomes a liability. Because I know everybody doesn’t have access to the same spreadsheet skills or the same tools I made something called the Strategic Authorpreneur Business plan template. It’s what I use for tracking a lot of my own fiction stuff. And it does some pretty high level analysis.

It doesn’t dig into countries and all that kind of stuff, but it will maybe help you as a summary sheet kind of arrangement where you can put the numbers in. You can pull them from your different platforms that you’re using and then you’ll have a clear picture of how much your revenue is each month and where your expense money is going and all of those things.

So you can grab that it’s free. It costs you $0 and you can grab it from strategicauthorpreneur.com. There’s a link there under the episode and you can download your own copy, customize it up, however you like, and that will give you a starting place. So you don’t have to start from scratch. Now, how often should we be updating these data collection systems?

How often should we be reviewing things and making changes to our strategy? There’s a lot of different ideas that people have and different patterns, different authors have about how they approach this. Michele, how have you decided to approach this? How has your schedule looking as far as review and revise when it comes to your data collection and review system?

When to change things up/update your systems

Michele Amitrani: The approach as always is evolving, so it’s a work in progress. But I consider to have been leveling up on that side a bit more because a couple of years ago I used to do a progress report on a yearly basis, which is very bad because you have no idea what happened a week ago or a month ago.

So you can’t take any strategic decision. I open getting a bit better because now I am doing it on a monthly basis. So I’m doing it on a monthly basis the update of the two key metrics that as I said at, I think it was the past episode about our baseline report, this year the number of subscribers and the profit, the net profit are going to be important for me.

So I’ve developed a system that helps me keep track of these two metrics. So what I do is at the end of each month, I pull out all the expenditures that I have for my published business, and then in the same spreadsheet (that wasn’t made by me, I have to thank Google for that. I found it in believe it or not in the Google drive).

So I’m using that. I have adopted that to my business and now every single month I keep in different categories my expenditures. So there can be a voice that says, this is for my editing, this is for my cover, this is for a purchasing the service. And then there’s going to be another column, that it’s going to be populated with other content, which is royalty based. So for example, this is how much I made from GooglePlay, this is how much I made from KDP. So it’s a very basic approach, but this system helps me keep things simple and that it’s developed as of now to get me a bird’s eye view of what’s happening on a monthly basis to my business.

So I do this every single month so that I can take a decision on, what happened on my January, 2021? Where did I spend my money and why? And on February or March, what can I do in order to … if, for example, I spent too much on a service what can I do in order to either find something that can be replace that, keeping the quality up or still keep that expenditures, but find a way to pay for it.

So I mentioned a episode ado that my January was in red, $38 red. I know exactly why. A year and a half ago, I wouldn’t even know that I was minus was $38. I consider this to be an improvement, believe it or not. So it’s huge for me. Every single month at the end of the month, I populate this spreadsheet with my expenditures and my income with the different sources.

At the end of the year, what I do is brainstorm a very big data plan. This is what happened to me in my 2020, I did this at the end of 2020, and I was like: this is how much I spent on, for example, cover. I have to admit, I was surprised on at least 40 to 45% of my expenditures.

I didn’t see that coming. Some of the time, especially in 2020 in which I was developing the system, I really didn’t know how to keep track of it, so at the end of the year, when I got everything at the glance, I was really surprised. This is good because it informed me on what I did, and at the same time, it’s very bad because I shouldn’t be surprised. So I like 2021 as the year of no surprise or less surprised as possible.

Crystal I do this monthly and then I do one report to inform my strategy for the next year, every year. What do you do? You keep track of your income and expenditures on a daily basis on a weekly basis?

I know you might do something like that on a monthly basis. What’s your strategy when it comes to updating and reviewing?

Crystal Hunt: I think the more something is going to cost me if I screw it up, the more often I look at as a really a good way to think about it. So if we are starting a whole bunch of new Amazon ads and we’re being a little bit aggressive with our pricing, that’s going to need to be checked daily.

Whenever there’s something new or something expensive, we’re going to check it a lot more often and make sure that it’s working, that the numbers are bearing that out. When you first get started and you hit publish, it’s really easy to want to check your sales numbers like every half hour.

And that can become super addicting. But it can also be really unmotivating or de-motivating if you aren’t seeing the sales numbers that you were hoping for. And if the first thing you do every morning is check your sales numbers before you dive into your writing time, that can really pull you into the wrong frame of mind and stop you from moving forward on the creative side.

I do think it’s important to monitor some of these things, especially if you’re learning a new kind of ads or you’re diving into something unfamiliar on the sales and marketing side, you probably do want to be monitoring that stuff pretty regularly, but I’d say at the end of your day, or at the end of your week, not at the beginning of your day or Monday morning when you’re just getting started and trying to muster all your excitement to dive in, because let’s be real here the first few years even are pretty rough. Like I’m 15 years into this. It’s a little more fun to check my sales numbers now, but I can remember in the beginning it was so hard. And even now, like we’ve been focusing on our nonfiction for the last couple of years, very hard focused on the non-fiction, which means I’ve been watching my fiction numbers drop, and it’s not that fun to check that on a super regular basis.

And it doesn’t really pull you back in, so you do need to be aware of the psychological consequences of the data. Now that does not mean that you can just throw up your hands and say, I don’t want to know what I’m spending on this author business stuff, because I know a lot of people who that’s their response.

When we talk about a business plan or we talk about a budget, they’re like: Oh, I don’t want to know. Just, I don’t even want to look. It’s just the money’s gone. It’s fine. I don’t want to know about it.

But there was a couple of reasons why I think that does you a disservice. Number one, if you’re not checking on at least a semi-regular basis, like Michele said, it might be that you thought you canceled a subscription to something, but you didn’t, and there’s money coming out of your account every month that could be buying you a new book cover or helping to pay for editing.

And if you’re not channeling that in the correct direction, it’s just a straight up loss. It’s an ignorance tax, right? You are being taxed for not paying attention. And no matter how much you might not want to know what’s going on, it’s even worse to realize later that you didn’t know what was going on.

If you’re only checking in once a year and you’re not paying attention to what’s coming out on a monthly basis you’re going to get yourself in trouble. So for me, I have three different categories of things. So there’s daily stuff that needs to be monitored. And that’s things like your ad spend campaigns if they are of high enough amount, that if something went wrong for a day, it would cost you substantially. Now, we’re at the point now where we have a helper who takes care of our ads, we have an ads manager. And so that means she monitors those on a daily basis so that we don’t have to, and we can focus on the writing part.

It’s going to take awhile to build into that. Plan to grow into that at some future date, if you like, for some people, that’s part of the fun is watching all that happen. You do you figure out what you like, but the daily or weekly monitoring of that is important. I think it is good to check in weekly on your sales, if you are not in the middle of writing a new book, if you’re in launching phase or you’re in marketing phase for something, great.

If you’re in the middle of writing a new book and looking at the sales numbers from the previous one is maybe going to be dangerous for you than just stay the heck away from it. Maybe once a month is as much as you want to do on that. Maybe you don’t even want to look for a quarter if you’re not running active ads and promotions on it and if you’re not gonna do anything with the knowledge of what it’s bringing in each of those months, if that doesn’t influence your budget for your current project, just ignore it until you’re ready to look after it. That’s totally okay. I think it’s only the ignoring it when you are making decisions that should be based on that information that it’s a problem. But first and foremost, do whatever you have to do to make sure you can keep writing because that, as we know is the only way to truly move things forward.

You should be looking at things either on a quarterly basis or on a, what I call a new release basis. So each time I’m about to release a new book, I need to know where my finances are at. I need to make decisions about what budget it’s going to get for launch and marketing. I need to know: did the last one work? And if you’re releasing pretty frequently, and you’re not looking at your numbers. You don’t know what’s working and not, you don’t know if the market’s in a weird little slump. If you’re not paying attention to what’s usual for January, and suddenly you have a low sales month in January, you don’t know if you should be panicking or changing something, or if everybody’s just having a bad month or if every January always looks like this.

If you aren’t paying attention enough to see the patterns, you don’t know when the patterns are broken. And so you’re going to miss out opportunities to course correct, or you’re going to be stressed about stuff that you don’t need to stress about because that’s just what happens every single January and it’s always fine by March, but you need to just ride out the six weeks in between, right? So that’s important, I think to remember, and then always to be doing that annual review. But I think the weekly, daily, weekly for the short term, expensive stuff, monthly for just putting in your income and expenses is a really good habit to get into.

So you have an accurate financial picture and it lets you course correct before you get too far into trouble, basically. And then a quarterly basis for bigger stuff like, okay, this is my budget for maybe doing a new format of something or maybe for the next book launch. And then doing an annual review of your business as a whole.

And if you’re putting the information in each month, then when it comes time to do the annual review, you have all the numbers in front of you. Your spreadsheet is filled in. It’s really just a matter of looking that data over and looking for patterns and understanding things. And it is extra satisfying when the numbers start to go up after they haven’t been for a while.

If you can see that steady improvement, it really does encourage you to keep going. So I think it’s really important to be able to understand. If we take the dark night of the soul, out of our characters and our books, and there is no dark night of the old and then that win in the the climax doesn’t really seem all that exciting because we weren’t there for the down parts of that ride.

So we are the characters in this journey. We can have our dark night of the financial soul. So by looking at all those numbers in black and white or red, as the case may be in front of us on occasion, but we need to know that. And then we get the win at the end, when those numbers turn around and we get into the black and we get to be making some money from our writing, which is great.

But you need to be aware to stay in the game. As Michele likes to point out, always: don’t bleed out. That’s always the goal. Is, you got to be able to stay in the game. You got to have enough money to keep playing until you get to that next milestone. So hopefully all the things we’ve shared here today will help a little bit in terms of getting you thinking about managing your data, looking at your data, making decisions based on facts.

And you’ll hear us talk about that lots all through the podcast. We hopefully won’t make so many episodes that are fully number focused. I know it’s not everyone’s favorite, but if you are willing to embrace it, then I think that is going to get you miles ahead of a lot of your competition who’s just blindly making decisions without understanding the numbers and you’re going to have a serious strategy incorporated into your regular business practices.

Audience question

Now we have a question to answer. So our question for the day is what are you finding to be the most challenging things so far about going wide? Michele?

Michele Amitrani: We discussed a bit about this. I’m going to try to make this very fast and hopefully painless.

The thing that I find to be the most challenging with going wide is that it really takes time to see any kind of number go up, if they go up at all in the first at least few weeks and month. Crystal spoke about psychology.

Now, I don’t know anything about that. But what I can say is when I see, and I look at my dashboard on Kobo or D2D, and I see those numbers not going up like they are on Amazon, something happens in my mind. And I believe this is something that might happen in the mind of other authors.

So I think that psychological factor is very important hence why I also have a similar strategy to what Crystal has. I do not check my numbers in the dashboard before 6:30 PM. And that’s just because I know noticed that really what Crystal mentioned happens to me and I’m trying to do as much as I can to be a good knight that protects my writing time.

So this is something that I’ve been really trying to focus very much in the last year or so. In the morning I don’t even check WhatsApp. In WhatsApp there is important stuff, like my family and things like that. Everything goes turn on at 10 in the morning. I usually wake up at 7:30 or 8.

The first two hours are sacred for me. Now that’s because I found that really looking at those dashboards really have an effect on me. So if you, listener, are feeling the same, I feel you. So definitely on the wide side I’m keeping it consistently, like I know I need to look at those numbers at least on a weekly basis.

But at the same time, I’m trying to give myself a break. Again, this is a long game. You can’t expect everything to happen at once. So I just want to say this with an open heart, if you are listening to me in this sense, and you are seeing your dashboard on the other stores not really growing, give it time.

Use what we said in this episode, definitely to keep track of every sales and I think track and treat every sale as a win. Even if it’s one, even if it’s two or three, it doesn’t really matter. It’s super-iper difficult Crystal, I don’t know what you think of that. We’ve been wild for two months basically now, so that’s another thing to keep track of, but if I had to ask the same question to you, what do you think it’s the difficult thing of being and staying even wide.

Crystal Hunt: Yeah. I was wide in the beginning when I first started with my romance stuff. And so this is actually my second go round, but the first time I dove in was wide for about six months, wasn’t seeing the speed of results that I really wanted and I knew that if I shifted my focus to all of the promotional stuff that was required for each platform to build an audience on each platform, I wasn’t going to get enough books written to get any kind of momentum.

So for me, I pulled back and I went just exclusive with Amazon for the next three years and just built up my catalog as quickly as I could. And at this point, it is super frustrating to be waiting. Cause I am not a patient person as anybody who knows me will know. I’m like, no, just get it done today is better, always better.

And so the waiting is really challenging, but also I think the most challenging thing is just managing all of the moving parts and that each platform is slightly different and does things slightly differently. And, I’m big on optimization and optimizing each platform differently is quite challenging as well.

So I’m excited about learning all of that, but I’m also, it’s fairly overwhelming when you’re just diving into it. And if only I knew what to do, I could make this work way better, except I don’t know what to do. So I have to learn what to do and everything just spirals and becomes a lot of stuff to manage.

So yeah that I think is the most challenging part is all of those moving parts and the timelines and getting a new system worked out because the old system, which we had just about perfected after, I don’t know 20 books in the last three years or whatever, is enough to be super frustrating and feeling like you’re back being a beginner, you’re waiting around the kiddie pool again, when you were used to it, swimming laps with the big kids, and now we’re back to the beginning.

So it is it’s humbling. It’s interesting. It’s challenging all of those things, which I am actually really excited about learning all those things. It’s fun to do stuff you don’t know how to do. I think, and it’s an opportunity to really level up and dig into some things. And we’re going to have a bunch of guests upcoming who are going to help us to do that, and also going to help you to do that.

So we’re really excited to dive into some interviews and a couple of episodes, and you’ll get to meet some of the players on the wide field and hear their tips and tricks and all of those good things. So stay tuned for that.

Michele Amitrani: Beside of being excited, we also hoped that you enjoyed today’s show. So as always remember to hit that subscribe button, whenever you’re listening to the podcast and also to visit us@strategicauthorpreneur.com for the show notes, the links to all the resources and the tools that we love and that we mentioned also, please feel free to buy us a coffee if you find a short handful. Until the next week. Happy writing guys!

Crystal Hunt: Happy writing!