Gather around, people. I’ve got some news to share: The App Annie ebook stats tool has launched. This is a huge development for authors and publishers who use sales and ranking metrics. PaidContent has the story:
App Annie plans to announce Tuesday that it’s expanding into ebook analytics. It will provide publishers with two free products: An Analytics tool that lets publishers track sales and download data from the Kindle Store and the iBookstore into one dashboard, and a “Store Stats” tool that lets them view ebook market trends across a database of about a million titles.
The link to sign up is on the App Annie blog.
I’ve used App Annie in the past to track sales and ranking of an app that my old company developed, and it was a huge time-saver. It also let me compare the app against other apps, which was a big deal, as we were going head to head with other app developers.
So I was very happy to see App Annie has expanded to ebooks. Until today, I have tracked ranking and sales manually through two giant spreadsheets (one for sales, one for KDP and Createspace rankings), so a free tool that aggregates data and lets me easily check the ranking of competitors is huge. While not every author cares about competing titles, it’s a big deal for any publisher of guidebooks or reference titles.
The signup is easy and you can get insights into your books right away. I signed up about an hour ago, and within 5 minutes was able to search for my titles and get downloads (by country), revenue, and other data points:
Sales data is private to you, and anyone else you share the reports with. Ranking is public information, so besides your own ranking you can check on the competition, and see trends over time (for instance, related to new releases or price changes).
I have to add that the iTunes tracking is WAY superior to Apple’s own tracking tools on iTunes Connect.
The cons?
- It’s only KDP and iTunes. No Kobo, B&N, LSI, etc.
- Rankings only show up if you reach the top 100 in a category.
- Paranoid authors and publishers may not want to let a tool like App Annie have access to the data. They claim the data is encrypted and they will “never, ever” share data, but as we all know from news related to credit card companies, banks, phone companies, and the NSA, security can be breached.
These concerns aside, I think App Annie is a great tool. If you are an author or publisher, it’s well worth trying out, if only to get your head around iTunes sales.