What I’m going to do is a quick video if you have a book report; or, you could do this manually. Enter this data into a database. This goes into my system, which you won’t have, but it’ll give you an idea of what you can do. I guess you could do it with an Excel spreadsheet, but it gets crazy. Too many rows and it’s too hard to work with after a long time.
What I do is go to Book Report and at the bottom, download my data, click that button and it will end up BookReportDatablahblahblah.csv. Like I say, it’s not a big deal. You can also just grab the daily data the next day and throw it in there. If you got $100 you really should have Book Report. If you’ve only got a couple, then you might as well just- You can enter and buy in if you want to. It’s not that big a deal. Take it 3 minutes every day.
What it is, is an Excel spreadsheet and what it’ll do is just click on that, it will pull it up. We’ve got all these crazy things. I don’t care about today, because it’s not over yet. I basically go down here, I hit right click and delete. If you’re on a Mac, obviously, it will be different. I don’t care about freeze. Delete that. All I really care about is the ASIN and pages. I get rid of all these columns that I really don’t care about. They don’t make any sense with my system anyway. If you don’t have a hard core database system, which I will release at some point, it’s just not ready for prime time because I have a lot of shortcuts. I don’t need this stuff, so I delete it as well. I already know it’s ASIN and pages.
Since I’m using MySQL since most people are using that, I’ll put the dates here 2015-07-29 and I just control C to copy that. Put it in here, control V. I’ve already got the other dates. The first time you do to it, you probably want to go back to July 1st, since that was the start. July 1st of 2015. If you come in later, that’s when the first Kindle Unlimited page counting started. I just go down to the bottom here because I don’t care about all these extra data. Got my shift on and just click shift there and then just hit delete with the right click. Now I’m really only with 2015-07-29. This is after you’ve got everything going. This is your daily routine if you want it or weekly. However you want to do it.
I’ve got the ASIN, the page count. I don’t need the zero because I don’t care about that. This will give you the date. What I do at that point is I save it again, I will import it into MySQL. I do that- I’ll show you in a sec. I have a little table called, Page Reads, right here. You can call it whatever you want. You could just make your own. I’ve got everything linked like a real database. My ASIN, when you see the reports, it will actually show the title. What it has is just simple columns. ASIN, the pages read, which we’re importing on the date. We’re basically just importing that into MySQL database. I would suggest having a project or a product that links to ASIN to the actual title and author in all. Whatever you want.
Like I said, I’ll release mine at some point. Probably in the next couple of months. Unless someone really bugs me and wants it. It’s really for my back office use right now, but it does have a lot of stuff. The good thing about this is, I have a reporting interface which allows me to look this stuff up. What I’ve done is, under the product, because you could have a book versus a Kindle. Project is an actual big- The big ideas, so then the title of the book. A product is a specific format. You can have Kindle, you can have CreateSpace, you can have Audiobook. You can keep track of things like ASIN, ISBN, and all that, which I don’t want to get into because it’s irrelevant for this point. I’m mainly showing you how you can use page reads to get some idea of what you are going to be tracking, so you can see what books are going where and that kind of thing.
This is page reads by date. I haven’t added the date field yet, since it’s only July, it doesn’t matter. This will be the whole month of July, I hit go, it picks all the books that I have that have any page reads sorted by title and this will tell you. I’ve got the date, which doesn’t matter, that needs to go out, that was a bug. Not a bug, but it’s really irrelevant. That’s the last one that was read, I believe. You got the book equivalent to the pages read. 52 64, pages equals 12, page reads for this actual book. Which will be blanked out when you see it, because I don’t give away my author names unless you know me really well.
Anyway, we got 117,000 page reads, which is 570. I’ll just tell you that that was book 2 of the series, this is book 1, and this is book 3. I’ve got 383 books read that converted into 570 readers of book 2 and 530 of book 3. I realize this is up to yesterday. People that have read 1 or 2 may not have gotten the 3 yet, so I wouldn’t panic on that. I look at it on a monthly basis. The reality is it’s probably about 90 percent. This is all actually just a data point. It’s good for making plans. I can’t guarantee you that 570 books were read. Some people may have read the whole thing and some people may not. This is all just a data point. Remember, stop clocks right twice, but you only want one of those data points. It’s all about just comparing month over month and which book are selling and all that.
This will tell you that one. 12 read, 328 202, 172, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can do, with that information, what you want, but that’s just how you can use it and why it’s important to know how many pages are read. Hopefully in the future, this report will be relevant, because Amazon’s going to say average pages of book read or some other thing we can use, but for the mean time, this is what I’m using and you can obviously make something similar. It’s just 1 or 2 tables in MySQL or any other database that you want to use. Like I say, I would not do it as a Excel spreadsheet because you got to download it everyday. It’s much easier. This is database stuff. I hope that helps. If you want to, please sign up for the email list. I’ve sent out 0 emails yet. Mainly, at one point I may start to say that I’ve got some new stuff out, but I’ve been lazy. Anyway, sign up so you’ll know I’ve got new things out. If you’re interested, it should be on the right.
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