[Product] SalesScanner for PC (and MacOS - soon!)

[Simon Haynes]

Thought I'd mention this here, as we all use KDP and other online bookstores when we publish. Apart from one notable exception (looking at you, Kobo), these stores allow you to download up-to-date reports containing unit sales and royalties.

Unfortunately it can take a bit of work to get the data out of these reports and display it in a meaningful fashion.

Salescanner is a PC program which imports the sales spreadsheets you can download from various sites, merge all the figures, and display daily and monthly totals.

I use it daily, and I'm always tweaking it to do more.

At the moment it's useful for Smashwords, Kobo (those once-a-month invoices they do), KDP, Google Play and Authors' Republic (audiobooks).

It shows freebies, unit sales, paperbacks and KENP.

You can also set and update the currency exchange rate. Everything displays in USD, this just means the 'foreign' income is added correctly.

Anyway, it's free to download and use: http://www.spacejock.com/SalesScanner.html

And a truly useful pic with no data showing:

[guest14]

I did try this Simon, but couldn't make it read the files. I didn't have time to pester you so just dropped it, then all this kerfuffle came up and I forgot. I might try again, but I need to reinstall it.

[Simon Haynes]

It should be (almost) automatic.  When you first download a report in your browser, note where it goes and copy the path. Paste that path into Salesscanner's settings, and it will look in that folder for current and new spreadsheets.

It scans the folder every five seconds, and imports anything matching the filters. (The filters are set to the beginning of the filename for each store's spreadsheet, as they are right now.)

It will always use the latest file it finds for each store, except:

previous months for amazon (starts with the month before the current month and loads them all until there's a missing date.)
IF last month's file (ie. 2018-08) exists, then the regular file you import from the KDP dashboard will only load (eg) september data. This, so it doesn't double up.

Loads all the files for kobo since they don't do anything but monthly figures.

Loads the year-to-date smashwords file, then adds in any unit sales from the daily smashwords report, and guesses at the royalties using sales for those dates from (first) smashwords, and (then) other stores.

It's not perfect, but honestly all I want it for is to see what those 7 sales I just made in the KDP dash were. There's no other way to find out, not quickly at least.

[guest14]

I understand I didn't think it was you or Salescanner specifically, but I didn't have time to sort it out. I'm going to give it another go and will report back when I do.

[Simon Haynes]

Oh, don't worry. I'm guessing it was something I left out of the program, like an import routine or something.

[Simon Haynes]

I'm about to release an alpha-test version of SalesScanner for MacOS, if anyone's interested in giving it a run. (See the PC details above for what this software does)

The important thing to note is that it uses reports you download manually from the bookseller in question, so there's no gathering of login details, and it will always work as long as you can download those reports.

Anyway, I'll be looking for people to let me know that it installs and runs, shows data, that kind of thing. I'll post a link here when I have something to download.