Today is when things REALLY started to take shape. Thank goodness I had the courage to blow things up on Day 3, and you'll see why shortly. This database is coming along SUPER nicely now, and I gained a lot of momentum today.
If you're new:
Yesterday, I finished with creating a designer subform for my book entry master form. I added some more data, including font information for one of my books where I have the Photoshop file of the cover:
Next, I refined a few things in my designer table. Here's what it finally looked like behind the scenes once I populated all of my 2014 data. I store emails too but I omitted them from this photo.
I ran into my first major problem where I had to make a philosophical decision. I had some trouble getting designer information to pass back onto the underlying tables in the way I needed it to…so I made a conscious decision to just enter in the designer's information with each book.
Yes, that means if I have a 9 books series, I have to enter the designer's info 9 times. But the right solution likely requires SQL and/or VBA and I'm not ready to explore that yet. I'll tackle it in the future.
Creating the Rest of my Forms
Next up was the editor subform.
The Editing Type is a dropdown, by the way.
Here's a fuller example to see how edits to a book might accumulate over time, or certainly how a book can have many different ones.
Not too shabby!
Next up was the most frequently updated table I use, and probably one of the more important ones: interior updates.
I covered that in Part 2 I think, so I won't belabor it here. Same concept, but I made some refinements.
Here's the other half of the table in case you're interested:
Probably my favorite table of them all, honestly. Super smooth and easy to use. Very practical and very easy to manage any updates I make to the interiors of my ebook, paperback, and even audiobook. (You might be wondering why I included “audiobook interiors” here…the reason is that once I start narrating my own nonfiction audiobooks, I may need to make changes, so I want to keep track of those!)
Next it was time for book descriptions, which followed the same concept:
Running a Query to Check My Work
To finish the night off, I figured I'd run a query that covered much of the work I did.
I wanted to know a very important question:
For my first novel, How to Be Bad, what updates did I make to the book since publication in 2014, and when?
That's a million dollar question–figuratively and literally. The whole point of this database is to help me manage my copyrights, but how can I do that if I don't know when I updated my assets like covers, book descriptions, etc?
Here's how I set up the query:
The query correctly returned some values. Some of the field names need better tweaking, but you can clearly see the book's cover designer, year the design was made, ebook interior updates, and more.
And here's the other half of the table:
Anyway, that was my work for the day. Tomorrow, I'll probably focus on getting the Unique ID form up and running, which won't take very long.
Then it's time for the next phase, which may take me a few days to work out: how to import book sales data into Access and have it automatically calculate everything for you…
Can it be done? I have no idea, but imagine what it would be like if I could just import my royalty spreadsheet data into Access, let Access do the royalty calculation, and then allow me to visualize the sales data and/or export it back into Excel in a better, easier to read format that would include all of my books?
If I can get this right, I'll improve the value of the database 100x.
Anyway, time for bed.
And don't forget to join my Fan Club. It's a pretty cool place to be these days.
