Moderately OK day today. I’m surviving and that’s what matters.
For reading, I continued Vol. 5 of IDW’s TMNT. About halfway through it. Very excited to read my next book on African Mythology.
For data analysis, there are two things on my mind right now. The next 500 words or so will be very technical and dry, so if you don’t want to look at that, skip to the section break with asterisks. You’ve been warned LOL
The first is Google Play’s dashboard update. Man, you’d think Google Play was trying to compete with Amazon or something. Their new updates are very, very good. Google has also now given all of us an amazing estate planning tool. In one click, Google lets you download an Excel file with ALL of the metadata for ALL of your books. Seriously, everything. Your title, subtitle, price, book description, BISAC categories, links, you name it. In one click, your heirs can get everything they’d want to know about all your books. In the next edition of The Author Estate and Heir Handbooks, I’m going to call this out. I think you could do this before on Google, but now it’s much easier.
The Google file can become the basis for your master publishing file, something I have been talking about since I learned it from fellow author M.L. Buchman. If you want more info, read my book Keep Your Books Selling. https://www.authorlevelup.com/selling
The reason Google offers this feature is so that you can batch multiple changes for multiple books at the same time, (I don’t know, like changing your book prices, which a lot of people on GP STILL haven’t done since they migrated to agency pricing). This kind of feature is really helpful for authors (and publishers) like me who have lots of books.
The second data analysis item on my mind is the Euro. A lot of you are aware that the euro is now 1:1 with the dollar, which is crazy. This means that collectively, a book sale in a euro country goes less than it did two years ago if you’re an American like me. I historically have benefited when Europeans bought my books because of strong exchange rates.
I’ve talked many times about how I created sales macros that slice and dice my sales reports into a nice database that I can run reports from.
Every retailer except Amazon does currency conversions for you, and you don’t even have to think about it when you look at their sales reports.
Amazon is a pain in this regard because their details sales reports don’t tell you what you actually got paid in your home currency when you sell books in foreign stores. For example, if I sell a €4.99 book in Germany, the report will tell me that I made approx €3.45, not what I made in dollars. To get the dollar amount, I need to look at a separate monthly payment report which includes a DE exchange rate factor, then I must multiply the commission by that factor to get the actual amount I got paid. And even then, because of rounding, it’ll never be 100%, but it will be close.
Also, Amazon’s bank uses different exchange rates than any other bank I’ve tracked, so you can’t do this math with publicly available exchange rates. If you do, your math will be way, way off.
Amazon could solve this problem once and forever by simply including the exchange rates on the detailed royalty report and then do the math for you. But alas…I have to do it with an Excel macro instead.
If you don’t account for exchange rates on Amazon, then you will never have accurate sales figures. There is one very prominent sales tracker on the market that, last I tested, did NOT do this math. It doesn’t even convert the currencies. It’s headshakingly bad. But I digress.
Anyway, my Amazon sales report macro does this math by estimating the past 6-year average of the Amazon bank’s exchange rate between 2014 and 2020 for every month I got paid during that period, and then it applies that factor to my foreign royalty amount to get an accurate conversion and estimate of what I made in any given month. Because exchange rates fluctuate over time, you’re better to use an average. In my tests, I was within 90-95% of what I actually made, and just as accurate if not more than Book Report.
Anyway, maybe you don’t care about that. Maybe you never thought about it. But I do because I want my database of sales to always be accurate and up to date. I know to the penny of what I made for every book in every country in every format, and I can get those numbers in less than 3 minutes. Very, very powerful, and unlike some people who use sales trackers with browser extensions, my data is private.
With the falling euro exchange rates, I think it’s time for me to go in and re-do the math on my euro factors. They’re current through 2020. For Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain, the average exchange rate was about 1.12. This means that a 4.99 euro book at a 70% royalty would net me about $3.86 (3.45 x 1.12). In France, the historical exchange rate has been a little better at 1.68, which would be a $5.79 royalty.
With current exchange rates, if it’s true that the euro and dollar are close to 1:1, then that means that the same sale would now be $3.45 (everywhere but France), which is objectively worse in all euro countries. But again, I need to review Amazon’s exchange rates to see just how bad it is.
Honestly, I probably need to do this exercise for all my currencies again by adding the last 24 months into my current average. It would strengthen my factors from 60 months to 84-months and therefore lead to better and more accurate conversions when I slice and dice my reports into my database.
I think the wrong thing to do right now is to raise your euro prices. I’ll probably wait until the war in Ukraine ends, assuming it ends soon. Otherwise, if you raise your prices and the exchange rates rally, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot. Plus, people raising their prices is what leads to more inflation. That’s ultimately bad for readers. I still think the best thing to do is to wait and find ways to expand your European sales. But I would love for any economics-minded folks to weigh in on this.
Sorry if I made your eyes bleed LOL…but this sort of thing is critically important to me because capturing my sales data comprehensively and accurately helps me spot opportunities in my portfolio. If a book starts doing really well, I’ll spot it. If a particular country or retailer starts dipping, I can figure out why.
If you don’t have all your sales in one place, maybe start thinking about that.
TECHNICAL STUFF IS OVER NOW
For marketing, I booked another speaking engagement in 2023.
I also put the finishing touches on my slides for my speaking engagement at The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ (SCBWI) annual conference this weekend. I’m giving a talk on self publishing and doing a social event/QA with indie children’s writers. Should be a fun weekend.
I’m also stopping by The Indy Author Podcast with Matty Dalrymple on Sunday to have a fun conversation about business. Matty and I came up with an idea for a recurring segment on her show while chatting in NYC. Should be fun.
For production, I have nothing right now but will be writing like a madman after I publish this post….Man, if I only counted these posts toward my word counts…but I don’t. 🙂
ANOTHER THOUGHT: 10 YEARS AGO…
Many of you who follow me know how I got my start in publishing. I was chatting with Hank Garner last night and realized that this is the tenth year anniversary of my near-death experience.
This month is exactly 10 years to the month that I got out of the hospital.
In July 2012, I fell ill with food poisoning after eating a nice dinner at a restaurant. My wife rushed me to the hospital…where I didn’t leave for a month. I had food poisoning but then picked up an infection in the hospital, and doctors almost didn’t catch it. The only reason I survived was because of a stroke of luck. My wife’s old roommate was in medical school at the time, and when she heard about my symptoms, she told me what to tell the doctors…and then they discovered what was really wrong.
In fact, an article came out in the USA Today newspaper about the type of infection I caught and how it was killing people across the country, mainly because of bureaucracy, lack of sanitation, and inaction on the part of hospitals. I was able to find the article here: https://www.cnbc.com/2012/08/16/far-more-could-be-done-to-stop-the-deadly-bacteria-c-diff.html
It is dated August 16, 2012, which is right around the time I got out of the hospital. It honestly might have been that exact week; I can’t remember. I used to have a paper copy of the newspaper but it’s probably long gone now. I kept it to remind me of what my life was like at the lowest point.
While I was in the hospital, I asked myself what I was doing with my life. I worked a crappy job as a claims adjuster (and got yelled at every day, all day, in English and Spanish), I had a ridiculous amount of student loan debt (loans were half my paycheck), a car payment that took up another third of my check, and I lived in a tiny studio apartment, and I had only written some short stories and poems that no one would look at. I had some novel ideas but agents wouldn’t even give me the time of day.
I swore on that hospital bed that I would become a writer and I didn’t care what I had to do to make it happen.
This month, ten years ago, I got out of the hospital, healed up, and shortly afterward, I discovered self-publishing. I’m pretty sure it was The Creative Penn first, followed shortly by The Alliance of Independent Authors. I learned what was possible, and I couldn’t wait to try it for myself. A few months later, I came up with the concept for my first novel: How to Be Bad (now Magic Souls), and I spent the entirety of 2013 learning about self-publishing, learning how to write my first book, and working with my first editor (Gary Smailes at Bubblecow, an amazing guy). I spent $40 on a premade cover from Goonwrite.com. I bought Scrivener for $35.
Honestly, I could barely afford these things. At the time, all of this was crazy expensive for me. I sold almost everything I owned to pay for my first book: my electronic saxophone (EWI) that I loved so very much, my acoustic and electric guitars, my keyboards, old books, my old video game consoles, you name it.
On January 6, 2014, How to Be Bad/Magic Souls was finally available on Amazon in KDP Select. Three people bought it: me (because I wanted to generate a sales rank for the book), my writing buddy at the time, and my mom. I made $5.79 in January 2014 and somewhere around $50 total for the book during that first year. Yikes. I made just about every tactical error you can think of, but I kept listening to podcasts, reading blogs and books, buying paid courses (if I could afford them), and asked people in the community for advice. Somehow, I survived that first year without doing anything ridiculous or stupid.
Fast forward a decade later and it’s crazy how far I’ve come. Joanna Penn was the person who got me into self-publishing; this month, I’ll be on her show for the third time. ALLi gave me a lot of confidence and helped me find good information; I’m the Outreach Manager at ALLi now and have done countless podcasts & speaking events on their behalf, and even wrote a book for them.
I work a much better job now (thank god), I have written more books than I ever dreamed of, I’m constantly amazed by my book sales, and I’m especially amazed by how many people recognize me at speaking events. I’ve been published in Writer’s Digest, spoken at countless events, and have a pretty recognizable name in the indie space. Sure, I’m not a full-time author yet, but I definitely am on a path to get there.
All of this took ten years, folks. Ten years. Put another way, I’ll be 35 this year. This took nearly a third of my life. And I’ve still got a long way to go.
In 2012, I could have never imagined that. I didn’t know how to think long-term. I couldn’t see past 2012, let alone 2015. So if you are wanting to become a mega best seller in 1 to 2 years, you might want to check your expectations. Sure, there are people out there who get to success faster, and that’s great. But I’ve said for a long time that I think my career is typical of most people. I haven’t had any lightning strikes or runaway successes. All of my progress was built one book at a time, with a few (small) lucky breaks here and there.
If you’re wondering whether the writing life is for you, keep at it. Keep writing. Keep reading. Keep learning. With every book you publish, aim to make at least one fewer mistake. Stay optimistic no matter how crappy things get. Get a mentor. Keep learning business, copyright, covers, book descriptions, etc. Dreams do come true!
Here’s to another 10 years.
Have a good night.
