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App Annie ebook tracking tool launches

By Blog, Industry

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:

App Annie ebooks tracking tool

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.

How to remove a book from sale in iTunes Connect

By Blog

I just took iPod Touch In 30 Minutes off sale in iTunes Connect. The reason: The guide was written for iOS 6, but Apple is updating the iOS operating system to version 7 this week. I haven’t had a chance to do a proper test or get new screenshots that are required for a new version of the guide, so I decided to remove it until I or another editor has a chance to tackle this task. But the focus of this post is the process for how to remove a book from iTunes Connect. It’s easy to do and does not involve iTunes Producer, the clunky software that Apple currently requires for uploading new titles to iTunes.

How to remove a book from sale in iTunes Connect: Step-by-step

Here’s how to use iTunes Connect to take a book off sale in a specific market (for instance, Canada and the U.K., but not the U.S.) or all territories.

  1. Log into iTunes for authors (iTunes Connect)
  2. Select Manage Books. You will see your books listed. Click on the one that you want to take off sale.
  3. Click the Rights and Pricing button. You will see a list of all of the countries that the book is sold in.
  4. Click Edit Existing Territories.
  5. On the drop-down menu that says “Cleared For Sale” change the default “No Change” to “No
  6. Select the territories you want to remove the book from sale by clicking the checkbox next to the country name(s). If you want to remove it from sale everywhere, click the Select All button.
  7. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the button that says Continue.
  8. You will be asked to confirm your selection for each of the territories. You don’t need to do anything on this page except click the Confirm button. This is a strange screen, because it doesn’t clearly state that the book is being removed from sale … but the next screen will show that it is.
  9. You will be brought back to the Rights and Pricing screen. The countries which you selected to remove the book from sale will have a red circle next to it and the text “Not on Store” (see screenshot, below). Press the Done button at the bottom of the screen.
  10. You will be brought back to the main page for that book, and “Status” will show a red circle and the message “Not on n Stores” where n is the number of countries that no longer carry the book. A green circle will show the number of territories where the book is still available, if you left them on sale anywhere else.

REQUEST: If this post helped you, please consider sharing it on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, a blog or forum, etc. Thanks!

Screenshot of iTunes Connect with titles removed from sale:

How to remove a book from sale in iTunes Connect

How to remove a book from sale in iTunes Connect

 

Bowker ripoff: A 12,500% ISBN markup for new authors

By Blog, Industry

If you’re an American author or publisher, and you want to publish a print edition of your book, you’ll eventually have to get an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) assigned to the title. ISBN records contain author, publisher, size, format, topic-related information, pricing, and other data needed by retailers, libraries, and book distribution systems. Some authors leave it up to their publishers or distributors such as CreateSpace and Smashwords. But others opt for the DIY route, which gives them more control over the ISBN data as well as a slight marketing edge (a self-purchased ISBN will reflect the name of the author’s publishing company or imprint). Purchasing an ISBN involves going through Bowker, an old-school publishing services company that is the sole issuer of ISBNs in the United States. Bowker was founded in the 1870s, is listed as an affiliate of ProQuest, and offers a myriad of services targeting the publishing industry. Sadly, and perhaps not surprisingly, Bowker has leveraged its monopoly power to rip off independent authors and publishers, using mercenary pricing for ISBNs and other services. The Bowker ripoff is a racket that targets new authors who are trying to get their first books in print.

How bad is the Bowker ripoff? If you’re a publisher needing lots of ISBNs, the price is $1 per ISBN — but you need to order 1,000. If, on the other hand, you only have one book and plan on releasing only one version (such as a single print-on-demand title) Bowker demands $125 — a 12,500% markup. The screenshot below from the Bowker website (I am citing Fair Use to illustrate) shows Bowker’s current pricing plans:

Bowker ripoff report

Actually, the markup is a lot more than 12,500%, if you consider the cost of the service. After all, it costs practically nothing when an author uses Bowker’s Web-based forms to create and store a new ISBN record. The cost structure is so inexpensive that Canada even gives away ISBNs to Canadian authors for free.

How much is Bowker making off ISBN sales to new and independent authors? The company did not respond to my March 5 email about ISBN pricing. Bowker LLC is not a public company, so there is no public annual report. However, Bowker made this claim last year:

Small presses, a category that is defined as publishers who have produced 10 or fewer books, accounted for 34,107 self-published titles — 21,256 print and 12,851 e-books — in 2011.

The number of self-published authors/small press titles probably grew in 2012, in line with growing tablet/e-reader demand, and the expansion of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program for independent authors. While not every author purchased ISBNs at $125 a pop (Bowker’s pricing scale includes more “cost effective” plans for self publishers, including 10 ISBNs for $250), Bowker nevertheless enjoyed multi-million dollar profits on the backs of new and independent authors and small publishers.

Other Bowker ripoff services

Hold on. Surely Bowker offers additional services to new authors that make it worth their while to pay $125 for a 13-digit number. Right?

Not that I can see. In fact, once an author has bought an ISBN, Bowker layers on even more mercenary upsells, like $25 barcodes and the “View Inside” widget ($120 for the first year, $60/year thereafter). Bowker claims this widget, which can be embedded on blogs or author websites, lets authors go “viral” through sharing on social networks and connecting with affiliate programs, such as Amazon Associates. Never mind that there are hundreds of free social media widgets available, and Amazon Associates has a fine selection of free widgets that authors can embed on their blogs and websites.

The Bowker ripoff aside, I could complain about other aspects of Bowker’s ISBN services, including the terrible user interface for assigning ISBNs and the bizarre request that authors upload PDFs of their books to Bowker so they can resell keyword data to their corporate customers (naturally, authors don’t get a cut). But I’ll have to leave that rant for another day.

Bottom line: Bowker is (in my humble opinion) an old-school publishing services monopoly that rips off new and naïve authors with massively overpriced digital services. I would love to see the company investigated on antitrust or unfair pricing grounds, but until that happens I can offer only a few pieces of advice to new authors:

  1. For your first print book, consider using free ISBNs offered by CreateSpace or Smashwords. It’s not ideal, but if sales take off you can always reissue the book using an ISBN that you purchase yourself or one that your publishing company buys.
  2. Self-published e-books do not require ISBNs! Amazon, iTunes, Pubit, Kobo, as well as digital content seller platforms like e-junkie and Gumroad, do not require authors to use ISBNs.

I unfortunately learned the last lesson the hard way, after using up a half-dozen overpriced ISBNs for early ebook versions of Dropbox In 30 Minutes and Google Drive & Docs In 30 Minutes. But for the latest In 30 Minutes title, Derek Slater’s Online Content Marketing In 30 Minutes, I only assigned an ISBN to the paperback edition. The Kindle, iPad, Nook, and PDF versions do not have ISBNs. As far as I can tell, ISBN-less ebooks are treated the same by Amazon and the other sales channels.

UPDATE: As of December 2015, the Bowker ripoff has gotten even worse has jacked up the price of the package specifically targeting indie authors by nearly 20%. The price of the ten ISBN package is now $295, compared to $250 in 2013.