The Publishing Performance Show

Liam Gray - How Book Report Helps Authors Track Their Publishing Success (Live at Author Nation 2024)

• Teddy Smith • Episode 38

Share episode

[RECORDED LIVE AT AUTHOR NATION 2024 - LAS VEGAS]  

Liam Gray from Book Report shares insights into the company's analytics platform and his first major conference experience. As founder of Book Report, Liam discusses how authors can effectively track their sales data across multiple platforms and make data-driven decisions for their publishing business.

In this episode:

  • Book Report's browser extension functionality
  • Top use cases for sales tracking
  • Wide publishing analytics
  • Conference networking experiences
  • Sales data visualization features
  • Future platform developments


Connect with Book Report:


Book Report supports:


Connect with Teddy Smith:


Join our Facebook Community - https://www.facebook.com/groups/publishingperformance/

Support the show

Teddy Smith (00:01.934)
Welcome back to author nations today. I'm here with Liam Gray who's from Book Report and he's been doing talks He's had a stand on Monday. He's been all over the shop. So yeah, I've been all over this thing. Yeah, welcome Liam Thank you very much. Good to be here. Have you found the show so far? I've really enjoyed it. Yeah, it's great Just to meet everyone in the community everyone that I can right meeting lots of people who use Book Report lots of people who I've never heard of Book Report right and and people at all the different stages of their author journey and it's also been lovely to people like you who are

You know also building companies in the space right the we all have the same goal want to help authors sell more books Yeah, right and Yeah, and we all come at it from our own different angles, but yeah, it's a great. It's a great community It has been nice even people who slightly competitive with each other. It's not been like 100 % No, I just got out of author helper suites talk right and the other helper sweet people came to my talk Okay, and then and totally yeah, and they're they're a book for competitor We compete I guess for business, but in real life were friendly

Yeah, totally. And is this your first time at Orsonation? This is. yeah, no, I don't know. I ran Book Report almost incognito for a long time. People would know who I was, but I never really went to any conferences until I found it quite hard to get your name before I came to the show. I'm not sure who Book Report is. No, but I'm trying to put myself out there more. I went to a conference in Toronto, Toronto Indian Author Conference earlier this year. And then this is sort of my first big, big Vegas conference.

Yeah, it's been great. Good. Yeah, and now I'm more around than I used to be. Yeah, exactly. Here's my face. I run Bookreport. And so you did a talk yesterday, was it? Yes, yeah, I did. So why don't you tell us a bit about what your talk was about and how it went down. Yeah, so the talk was basically I collected a bunch of use cases that people have written to me about, you know, what are they using Bookreport for? What are they finding the most value from? And I ran down just the top five of those and then I touched on three power user features.

that I don't have as specific a use case for, but sometimes it just sparks something for someone. So let's go through these use cases. Yeah, let's do it. Let's see if I can remember them all without my slides. Validating your paid marketing was the top one people... Sorry, say that one again. Validating your paid marketing. It's like you're spending all this money on ads. You need to make sure you're making more money than you're spending. Amazon ads or all ads? So Book Report is just the revenue side. So people use it...

Teddy Smith (02:31.124)
Like they pull up, you know, wherever they're spending their money and they pull up Book of Court next to it and compare it that way. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of Amazon ads. That's where you're operating. Amazon ads is my thing. Yeah. Cool. We'll talk more off mic. Yeah. We'll talk more off mic. I mean, other things like answering questions from your team. Yeah. A lot of times, one of the things that's been touched on throughout the conference is sort of building a community around you. Finding your group of people, Make such a difference. Accountability thing. Mastermind groups. All of that. A lot of the time, for those people to help you, they need to know...

how your books are doing. You put out a launch and they want to know how was your last launch, right? Bookreport makes it really easy to sort of pull up.

you know, whatever question you're asked, you can probably find the answer in Book Report. And yeah, I think the sessions were all recorded. So if you want to the other three, I guess go find that. you, I guess, got a ticket to author. There's a digital version, I think. Yeah, totally. I'm not affiliated with organization, so I don't know the details. No, neither. I'll put a link to it in the description. Yeah, it's right here somewhere. The power user features, let's see, custom book attributes. So anything Book Report can't detect automatically, you can put

put it in yourself, right? Like your sub genre or, you know, bundles versus novels, that sort of thing. Spreadsheet export. A lot of people think Book Report's all about getting away from the spreadsheet, but we can adjust all the complicated spreadsheets and they output a very simple final result with all the currencies converted and borrow estimates and all that nice stuff on top. yeah, that was my talk in three minutes. Perfect, yeah. So what is Book Report? I know it gives you a report about all your

So what it is technically is a browser extension works on Chrome Firefox Microsoft Edge and Oprah You install it on your browser and then it goes off. You don't have to touch a single spreadsheet It goes off and finds all of your sales reports from now. We support the ten big distributors imports all that data Organizes all that data and then it has a nice web app user interface where you go and browse that data Yeah, and it's all organized,

Teddy Smith (04:40.592)
we detect what country sales happen in the authors, the marketplaces, all sorts of very fine detail. So say for example I'm on Amazon and I click on Book Reports, the Chrome extension, what happens then? Our Chrome extension is a bit weird in that way. It's only used to sort of, so you can grant us access to your account. So you don't have to interact with it at all, you just go to app.gitbookbookport.com and that loads the user interface and that starts up the crawling process.

Yeah, it's sort of a browser extension almost in name only. It's not like a... Yeah, it doesn't augment the pages or anything like that. It's just, you know, because you can give permission for amazon.com or google.com or graph2digital.com and that's sort of how we get our hooks into the system and make the requests on your behalf. And so what do the reports look like? What sort of data are we looking at on your dashboard? So they look, I think they look very nice. It's sort of a lot of the reporting systems that these companies have are very like...

a bit obtuse, they're very complicated, there's a lot of moving parts, and they're also pretty limited in a lot of ways. there's not, for instance on Amazon, there's no way for them to generate a report that breaks things down by series. A lot of people care how each series is doing. So Book Report, we have all your standard, we got your pie chart, we got your overtime chart, we have a map where you can see your sales per capita in each country in the world, a big table at the bottom, and we have

It's all very very flexible. So you have your pie chart by default It's you know your earnings by book you can switch that to you know your page reads by pen name or your borrow estimate by Marketplace, you know, it's very flexible. Every single component in there can be customized just to how you want to look at your business data Yeah, and who the source of authors you'll find they're using book of course at the moment. Is it mostly fiction, non-fiction or The main like sort of market differentiator would be people who are

the more books you publish, the more useful Book Report gets. Because if you're just selling one book, it's not that hard to keep track of things manually. unless you're wide, we also have service. We just went wide this year. that's what... What do you mean by wide? Wide being not exclusive to Amazon. So if you publish your book on 10 different platforms, suddenly that's a headache to check your sales. Book Report can do that for you. But more so the customers who find the most value in Book Report are the ones

Teddy Smith (07:09.812)
who have, you know, 10 books published, 20 books published. Some indie publishing companies use Book Report, know, thousands of books published. at that point, the data gets a lot harder to manage. And then the first party tools really start falling down at that point. So Book Report, yeah, services those, that sort of business. You know, the more time you find yourself tracking your sales manually, probably the more use Book Report will be to you. Yeah, nice. Yeah. When you set up Book Report, are there any things you need to input?

like any cost of printing or anything like that? That's sort of the original sales pitch is that it's like you add the browser extension, give it the permissions it needs and it just from there, it takes it from there. It detects everything about your books. It detects everything, every sale you've ever made. Yeah. And if you want to add the other, you know, draft to digital or whatever, that's an extra three clicks kind of thing. But yeah, we, other than the custom book attributes, which are optional. Yeah. No, no data, no forms to fill out. like that.

pull your advertising data as well. from Amazon. That's what I'd love to talk to you about later. Yeah, but that's definitely something people have brought up. That's one of the things I love about the conference is just people. I love to hear about the problems people are facing and you know, the wheels start turning. Is that something that could help with? Yeah, sounds good. So obviously we're in amazing Las Vegas. Have you managed to take advantage of any of the Las Vegas stuff? Not much. I think I've been outside this building

twice so far maybe just once I didn't see the lights at all on Tuesday yesterday I a bit more outside I outside and I'm like there's a breeze I haven't felt the breeze but now all I've done so far out of the building is I took my wife out to Gordon Ramsay's steak nice steak dinner she was here helping me with the booth yeah helping the British economy as well yeah exactly it's so funny it's in the Paris and you go you walk through the tunnel to get to Gordon Ramsay's website yeah or Gordon Ramsay restaurant yeah yeah it was yeah quite good yeah we got the beef

and then sticky toffee pudding. Delicious. Great. Well, I mean, it's been really good having you on the show. Thank you. Have you got any more plans for the rest of the show? You doing any more talks, any more networking or? No, from here on out, I'm just an attendee. Yeah, go to my favorite talks. Yeah. talks do you want to go to today? I'm intrigued by the not recorded Amazon talk. Which one's that? Yeah. So there's people from Amazon here who are giving a talk, I think in the main event space, like the biggest talk. But yeah, it has a label,

Teddy Smith (09:39.092)
recorded. So I feel like I got to go just because it's my only chance to find out what these KDP people are really like. Are they as evil as everyone says they are? I don't find them evil. I like KDP very much. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Yeah, my pleasure. Great.