One of the things I love about Smashwords distributing my ebooks is that they give me great statistics, and they even let me get daily download numbers for my ebooks on days when I’m not able to get online thanks to their graphs that show the stats for each day. But Smashwords isn’t my biggest online partner in terms of sales, that’s Amazon and their Kindle Direct Publishing Program (KDP). The only problem is that if I can’t get online on a particular day I have no way of seeing how many downloads I got from day to day on Amazon.
But as of yesterday evening that’s all changed.
This morning when I got online I saw an email waiting for me from KDP telling me that they have a new sales dashboard that gives me a way to see the downloads for all of my ebooks or each one, and I can see the numbers across all of Amazon’s worldwide or each store individually. Compare the screenshot of Smashword’s stats for He’s With the Band over the last 90 days (above) with the new graph that Amazon showed me this morning.
What this screenshot doesn’t show is that when I hover my mouse it shows me how many copies were downloaded that day. That’s actually easier than Smashwords’ charts because with Smashwords’ charts I have to either look (come times carefully) and see where it hits the numbers of the left or pull the image into Gimp and draw horizontal and vertical lines to see where each day’s point intersects the numbers. The only problem with the new charts is that they only go back to 15 January but I hope they’ll be bringing in older data to the mix.
While I’m showing information for HWTB I’ll give a quick update. The rewrite is coming along, slowly since I can’t do much when I’m not online, but there’s a new scene for the time between the service Sunday night and the gig at the coffeehouse at the end of the story. What’s happening in the new scene? As River Song would say, “Spoilers!” But as the rewrite gets farther along I’ll be looking for folks to give me feedback on how the story is going in the new version. Watch for me to ask for beta readers and who knows, you may get to read the new scene before anyone else does.