1. BookTrakr. This service tracks your ebook sales across all the major distributors. Everyday, a message arrives in my inbox telling me how many copies of each book I sold yesterday, which stores sold them, and my Amazon rankings for each. This service is GOLD. And it’s still in beta, so it’s free. Granted, they’re working out a few bugs, but getting a daily snapshot of my ebook sales is something I’d gladly pay for.
2. Gumroad. For a small fee, this service sells PDF copies of your book for you. All you have to do is upload the file. Customers buy your book, Gumroad sends them their copy, and they notify you of the sale. Then they send you a check every other week. Done. For someone who, for a year and a half, manually sent out every PDF copy of our first book that was purchased, I can’t sing Gumroad’s praises enough.
2 1/2. Muso. This service searches the Internet for illegal copies of your books and contacts them on your behalf, making sure the files are removed. Again, there’s a small fee for this. I’m only giving Muso a 1/2 because we’ve just started using it. Time will tell if it’s worth the investment, but it does look promising.
So there you go. If you’re an author looking for a little help, check these out. And please share your go-to resources in the comments. Because we all need as much help as we can get :).
Becca Puglisi is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others. This is one of her reasons for writing The Emotion Thesaurus, The Positive Trait Thesaurus, and The Negative Trait Thesaurus. A member of SCBWI, she leads workshops at regional conferences, teaches webinars through WANA International, and can be found online at Writers Helping Writers (formerly known as The Bookshelf Muse).
Gumroad sounds like a great idea!
I am so thankful for this site. Honestly, I was freaking out, thinking about having to send out files for 3 separate books. Gumroad has been a Godsend :).
I looked up BookTrakr and got a warning message that the connection was untrusted. Has this happened to anyone else?
This is interesting. I haven't gotten any warning messages since we started using it 8 months ago. Do you use Firefox, Kathryn? I've read that Firefox users often get an error message like this even for secure sites. No clue if that's true or how it works; I'm so not a techie ;).
This was a very helpful post. Thanks! Also, thanks for the info about Firefox.
Thanks for stopping by, Elizabeth!
Ooooh! Booktrakr! I just signed up. Thanks for the great tip. I signed on to something similar (can't remember the name) but it doesn't send an email. I have to log on to get data. Well, I never sign on (obviously since I can't remember the name)
*waves to Susan and Becca*
Well, I will certainly be checking some of these out. Thanks Becca!