For those of you not using PubShare, this may or may not be of interest, so I apologize in advance. If you want to know more about extracting sales data from KDP, hop on over to Old NFO (Jim Curtis) this morning for his tutorial.

However, if you are contemplating that very useful accounting service, this may be pertinent to your decision-making. I’ve been using it as a publisher, with Sanderley Studios, for collaborative projects like the PTSD anthologies, as an author for anthologies I’m participating in, and an artist for the Raconteur Press projects where I take a royalty share rather than payment up front for my work. Keep that in mind for the screenshots where I leave any numbers, I’m involved in nearly 30 projects and that number is growing constantly.

One thing that Pubshare offers is full transparency on sales of various projects. This pulls directly from the retailer for the book – most of what you’ll see from me is Amazon, but Pubshare distributes widely as well – and it is updated in some cases hourly. Royalty payments lag two months, but that’s how Amazon pays out, so no surprises there. If you opt in for Paypal payments, you’ll receive a royalty payment monthly from Pubshare, and if you opt for paper checks (because many people prefer not to work with Paypal) you’ll get that quarterly. And you will be able to access your tax information at any time you need it, through the Pubshare dashboard.

Once you log in to Pubshare (and the screenshots for this post are done on desktop, not mobile) you’ll see your menu of options. For this, you’ll want reports and statements, which you can see is a dropdown to select more options (note that Purchases is where you’ll set up your royalty payment options, you don’t need it to track book sales and royalties themselves).

I’ll break down what the first three look like, once you are involved in projects that are selling and paying out. The last two cover what you’ll need to get your tax paperwork, and show you which projects you are involved with and are active.

Once in book reports, the top selection, you have even more options to explore. The book sales report tracks sales of ebook, paper, and hardcover books. Pages read tracks the titles (you’ll see I’m involved in 17 such) that are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. And finally, the royalties earned tracks actual royalties, not just the projected earnings (which means this lags by a couple of months). All of these numbers are lifetime, following you from the time you set up the account and become involved in active projects.

If you go into the Book Sales Report, you have more options, again (this is so much fun, by the way, once you’re involved in a lot of projects, because you can play around and get really granular with data). I’ve chosen to show just one day’s report, so you can see the x-axis is showing hourly trends in sales. Not surprisingly, they drop off when people are sleeping.

Below this is your daily sales detail, which tracks country, units (you’ll see the retailer sorts ebook from paper, and the book I’ve chosen for this is in KU, so I can’t show you what wide distribution would look like). You’ll note that you can export this so you can track the data and break it down in ways you might need, and could make pretty graphs, too! The far column is ‘est.’ as this is estimated, actual royalties are reported elsewhere. My example is from a few months ago, but if you are looking at the past week, say, returns are still possible, and that can affect the income column. Oh, and income here isn’t royalties. This is what the books bring in with a sale, which is then broken out across the participants in a project.

You can look at a specific project (book, usually, but Pubshare uses project) or all of them at once. I’m doing this early in the morning so there is nothing to report for July just yet, hence the zeroes. I highly encourage you to get into these dashboards and play around, see what you can choose and change to see trends for the books you are involved in. Get hands-on!

If you wanted to compare similar books (say, the linked anthologies of my PTSD works, or one of the series anthologies) you can download reports and set up a spiffy excel spreadsheet to do that. This reporting system gives you, even if you aren’t the publisher, a lot of options and resources to get involved in the success of a shared projects, which is fantastic.

You can also track how many pages readers are consuming, with the Daily Pages Read Report. This enables you to see if there are trends, decide when or if you should take a book out of Kindle exclusivity and distribute it widely, or just get an idea of how a project is doing. Not all projects will be in KU, and that’s fine.

Finally, you can see the actual royalties paid (or upcoming) once they are finalized. Again, this can enable you to look at one specific project, or all of them at once. You can set it up to show you a single month, or a full year, or a quarter, whatever you need here. At the bottom of the report you’ll get a total, which I didn’t include in my screenshot.

The last section relevant to the royalties shows you the payouts and whether they have been paid (did you set your payment preferences? If not, you can’t be paid, so you could have unpaid royalties sitting there! Yes, more than one author has had this happen. Check your settings!). It will also tell you the date, method, and a Payment ID number in case there are issues. if you click into the ‘details’ you can get a downloadable statement for each royalty period that reflects what you were paid, for what, which book it was for, which retailer, and so on and so forth.

I started using Pubshare initially as an author invited to a group project. I quickly realized the utility to a small publisher, who doesn’t have the time, ability, or resources to track all of this on their own. It does cost 10% of a project, but if you price bookkeeping you will know that is cheap. And it is a small business run by a guy who works very hard and still manages superb customer service. He doesn’t know I’m writing this, or likely the other posts I’ve done about his service. Which is fine, I’m not writing them for him, I’m writing them for authors and small presses. There is a way to handle the accounting in a fully transparent manner. There is an option that doesn’t mean you have to figure out how to pay royalties, or cut off payment when they drop below a certain level because it’s not worth paying out a few dollars a month. And for authors, you now have the ability to know what’s going on with your work, and to feel like any promotion efforts really are paying off. I can tell you that it’s great fun to run an ad, or push promote a book, and watch that little sales spike develop and grow.

Any questions?