Too much data

For those of you who just read Kindle ebooks, you might not know how much data those of us who wrote those ebooks get.  Every month we get a report.  This shows how many of our ebooks were bought, how many we gave away in free promotions, and how many pages were read.  (If you don’t know, if you grab an ebook with Kindle Unlimited but only read part of it, the author still gets paid something based on how much you actually read.  There’s a formula and stuff for it all.)  The report shows this for each market, like the US, UK, India, etc.  These reports can be downloaded as Excel documents, and when I first started publishing my ebooks that’s what I did.  The problem was trying to look at all that information into some coherent organization.

I forget how many ways I tried to organize this data, but the system I ended up using for several years was one big Excel Sheet.  For each book I had sections for each market, which had columns for each type of sale: bought, free, KU.  And each month was a row.  So if someone in France bought one of my books in June, I’d put a “1” in the appropriate spot.  I then added everything up in such a way so that I had the grand total of how many of these books I’d sold in France.

I forget exactly when I first set up this system, but I filled it out to the year 2020.  All I had to do was add in new books whenever I published them, but I don’t publish that often so I had time to set stuff up.  And I usually could just copy everything over from the last book.

Then came 2020.  I knew I had to update it for 2021 and beyond, but it wasn’t until July or August I finally got around to it.  And that’s when I realized my system wasn’t that easy to add on to.  To get my Grand Totals, I just summed up a dozen or so numbers.  Which isn’t so bad.  But when you have a Grand Total of Book A sold in the US, Grand Total of Book A sold in the UK, and so on and so on for every book, for every manner of sale, for every market, just to update my system for 2021 meant going into over a hundred cells to add in a number.  I started working on it, but soon realized it was a massive hassle.  I plugged away at it for a while, but soon decided I needed to redo everything.

My new system – which I set up to go through 2030, and should actually be easy to extend – solves my main issue by doing in two or three steps what I had done in one.  Now instead of one big sheet, I have individual sheets for each book where I enter all the raw data.  Then, instead of adding everything together, I have a Subtotals sheet where I have yearly totals for each book.  Before I could only see that I had sold 6 copies of a book in France, but if I wanted to see when I sold them I had to go look at the raw numbers.  Now I can easily see that I haven’t sold any there in two years.  From the Subtotals sheet, I then add everything up for the Grand Totals, which I show in my Totals sheet. 

I’m sure that all sounds … boring.  So why am I writing this post?  Well, in my old system, I would scroll through the raw data trying to find trends.  Occasionally, I might see something, but that was as far as it went.  Now, even though it’s still all the same data, since I’m not just adding it all together in one go, I have more things to look at and play with.  Which means, that throughout the first half of 2021, I’ve been doing all sorts of odd things.  Like I had wondered if I could see any relationship between how many copies of a book I’d sold, or given away, and how many reviews it had gotten.  Which is something I could have done in my old system, but now I can look at how this changes over the years.

There are other things I’ve looked at, but the reviews is probably the easiest to explain.  And in all of these investigations, the results are … inconclusive.  Because I haven’t sold enough books, or gotten enough reviews for anything to really stand out.  But the reason I keep playing with these numbers is that there’s a feeling that if I can just find the right formula to mine all this old data, I’ll somehow be able to turn that into a way to sell more books.  I haven’t found anything, but I keep looking.  Even though I think the best thing to do would just be to write more.