Most authors have no idea whether their marketing is working. They spend money on ads, see some sales come in, and feel like things are okay.
But when I ask authors what their net profit per book is, most of them have no idea. They can tell me their royalties, how much money is coming in, and maybe their ACOS, but they typically can’t tell me which marketing activities are profitable and which are a waste of money.
The Amazon royalty dashboard is nice, but it’s designed to sell you more Amazon ads. It uses sits ales data to sell you those ads, not to help you make marketing decisions. It’s fast and it’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t account for the fact that you might be running ads on both Facebook and Amazon at the same time.
What if you want to track marketing beyond Amazon ads?
Amazon’s dashboard can track your email newsletter’s effectiveness if you use Amazon attribution tags, but what if you want to track sales from a podcast tour or a book tour in Topeka?
Most indie authors today have more data available to them than ever. Sadly, they’re ignoring most of it, and therefore can’t make good marketing decisions, which leads to wasted time, wasted money, and much frustration.
To help us fix that, I interivewed Eiri Theodorou. He has built an analytics platform used by over 25,000 authors. It pulls together royalties, ad spend, and sales data from 16 different platforms into a single dashboard, so you can finally see the real numbers behind your publishing business.
Can’t authors just write and ignore the numbers?
Thomas: A lot of authors think, “I’m a words person. Can’t I just write my book and ignore the numbers?”
Eiri: That would be great, but part of your writing job is to advertise and make sure it sells. To do that successfully, you need to know your numbers. Knowing your numbers lets you leave emotion out and act on data. You can work toward improving your advertising or your books, which yields a lot more royalties than glancing at the Amazon dashboard and saying, ‘I’m making enough money,’ when you don’t really know the bottom line.”
Thomas: The more you spend on promotion, the more important it is to track your marketing and sales. If you’re running three promotional activities simultaneously and you’re profitable, you may not be able to see that one activity is making all of the money while the other two are losing massively.
I used to be the marketing director for a firm that did high-end work for big companies. One of the services we offered was phone number tracking, where we attached a different phone number to different magazine ads.
One of our clients was advertising in 12 different magazines. We set them up with a different 1-800 number in each magazine. They all rang to the same person who would take the order, but the client could see in a dashboard how many sales came from each magazine. In the end, we discovered that all of their sales came from just one magazine. The other 11 magazines were only generating calls from people trying to sell them additional advertising.
Once they realized only one magazine was driving customers, they cut their spending on the other 11 and increased their spending on the one that worked. The change had a massive impact on their bottom line.
Authors don’t need to track 1-800 numbers, but the numbers they do track from multiple dashboards are almost impossible to decipher. KDP gives you a pretty good dashboard, but Audible gives you garbage, especially the downloadable reports.
How does a growing catalog make tracking harder?
Eiri: If you have one book and you’re advertising with a couple of campaigns, it’s very easy because you have a one-to-one relationship to track.
The minute you have multiple books, it gets exponentially harder to keep track of what’s working.
Often one successful book can mask the unsuccessful ones. If one book sells more than the others and you’re doubling down on campaigns across all books, your revenue, spending, and net profit still increases. You may feel like things are working, but behind the one successful book, some of your books may not be selling at all.
Amazon KDP has a decent, updated dashboard, but ACX has no way of knowing which country you made those sales in, what kind of books sold, or which pen name is more profitable for which time period.
It gets hard to keep tabs on everything, from Amazon spending, Facebook spending, Amazon royalties, ACX royalties, and any other platform you might be using.
That’s why we created Publisher Champ as an analytics platform that does all this for you. You don’t have to do it yourself. You just focus on whether your book makes money, whether your month was profitable, and how you can improve.
Why is Amazon’s ACOS a misleading metric?
Thomas: ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales) numbers can be a trap in that the reporting is designed to make you buy more advertising. It doesn’t calculate your cost for book production or your royalty to Amazon. It only tells you how many dollars you spent to make a dollar. You think, “I spent $0.75 in advertising to make $1.00 in sales, so that’s profitable.”
Actually, it’s not, because Amazon takes 30%, so you’re actually losing $0.05 per dollar, not gaining $0.15.
The Amazon dashboard highlights ACOS prominently. It’s the first and most prominent number, because ACOS makes your advertising look profitable.
The Amazon dashboard also doesn’t capture sales coming from other channels or organically. If you’re sophisticated, you can learn to interpret those numbers, but it’s not the whole picture.
Teasing out cost from actual profitability is really important, especially if you want to grow into spending tens of thousands of dollars to make hundreds of thousands. You’ve got to get these numbers figured out if you want to get into the big leagues.
Does Publisher Champ take into account Amazon’s 30% cut?
Eiri: Hundreds of authors contact us through support or our live chat and say, “I just onboarded on your platform, and I know I made $10,000 from ads this month, but your tool says $7,000. What’s the issue?”
Most of the time, it’s that sales number that’s misleading. Amazon’s report is designed to show that for every $100 you spend, you made $120 in sales. But sales are not royalties.
Amazon KDP and Amazon Ads are decoupled. They are not running on the same dashboard for a reason.
The ads dashboard shows you how much you sold at the unit price, but it doesn’t include shipping, production cost, the royalty percentage, or refunds. ACOS isn’t inaccurate per se, but it leaves out everything that would adjust the figure. When you look at your actual royalties, the bottom line is very different.
Does ACOS capture Kindle Unlimited page reads?
Eiri: The Amazon ads dashboard has an estimated Kindle Unlimited number. It can be inaccurate at times, but for the most part they track and include it. The sales number has a combination of both KU and unit price sales.
Even then, the KU number is based on the all-star bonus and the KU bonus pool that they give every month. The sales you’re looking at, depending on your percentage, refunds, and production costs, are way less than the sales number you see.
Thomas: Teasing out that data gets complicated. As an author, you get money from your ebook, paperback, and audiobook, each with a different dashboard, and that’s just from Amazon.
You may also be selling on Barnes & Noble, Apple, or direct. The more ways you sell, the more PDFs, Excel files, and CSVs you get from each company every month. You think, ‘I need to do something with this tomorrow,’ and then you never do.
Those other companies never get added into your calculations, and you miss opportunities.
Sometimes authors find they’re popping off on some platform and need to double down. Other times they realize they sold one copy on Kobo in six months. Being able to quickly gather that information is really important.
How does Publisher Champ get data from these different platforms?
Eiri: We have more than 15 platforms that integrate with Publisher Champ. Some are direct integrations, some are from well-known platforms like KDP, Draft2Digital, and Barnes & Noble. We have Amazon Ads and Facebook Ads, and we’re now working on BookBub Ads as a beta.
When you onboard, you select from the list of platforms the ones you want to synchronize.
If the platform has an official API, like Amazon Ads or Facebook Ads, you just authorize our app with a click. For platforms without a direct open API, like Draft2Digital and Barnes & Noble, we pull the data through your browser. It downloads those Excel files you’d normally have to open and figure out yourself, encrypts the data, and sends it to your dashboard.
If you log out of any platform, Publisher Champ just gets locked out, so you have full control of when you want to synchronize the data.
In our early days, KDP didn’t know who we were, but now we know reps within KDP and they help us stay updated. Because we have thousands of authors, the platforms have been more than happy to make data available.
When you onboard, Publisher Champ pulls all your titles and data from the first date you published on each platform. If you’ve been publishing for 10 years, it pulls 10 years of data. Within a few minutes, you can start figuring out which market, platform, book, format, or pen name is popping off.
How does Publisher Champ handle currency conversions?
Eiri: Apple Books pays you in dollars, but KDP pays in each country’s local currency. If you want to see everything in dollars, you need exchange rates, and this month’s rate is not the same as three or four months ago. With a lot of sales, using the wrong rate throws your numbers off. Publisher Champ handles all those conversions automatically.
Thomas: I remember an author 10 or 15 years ago who published a popular book with a co-author independently. He was bemoaning how difficult it was to pay an accurate commission off international sales. Each sale hits at a different exchange rate depending on when the money shifts over. Calculating that took him an entire Saturday every month.
Do you have a mechanism for co-authors to see what the royalty should be?
Eiri: We have two ways. First, you can share access. You share a dashboard with your co-author, give them access to selected pen names, and set a royalty percentage. Money that comes through gets calculated based on that percentage, and they see it in real time.
If you want to do it without sharing access, you can filter by pen name on our author stats page, see the numbers for the last month, quarter, or six months, and multiply by the royalty percentage. You can export any of our tables in Excel.
We have big agencies that previously spent a whole week on bookkeeping with a lot of back and forth because mistakes kept happening. When it’s automated, you don’t have to worry about that.
Can Publisher Champ track direct sales?
Thomas: Your website shows support for WooCommerce and Shopify, the two most popular direct sales tools. You can pull in direct sales, but the more interesting thing is you’re also pulling in advertising data. If I’m running Facebook ads, are you collating Meta’s data with Amazon’s reports so I can know to the dollar how profitable my Facebook ads are?
Eiri: Yes. It pulls all the data from Meta. With a few clicks, you assign a campaign to a book at the campaign, ad group, or ad level, and all the spend is allocated to that book. You can change it at any point.
Once you do that, you can assign it to your Shopify product and see that the product brought in $100 but you spent $200. A lot of authors who sell direct haven’t had this ability before. With Publisher Champ, you get that automated out of the box.
You can also ghost campaigns unrelated to your books, exclude them from calculations, or add tax percentages. If a feature isn’t there, you can raise a request on our roadmap, and the team jumps on it.
How does Amazon attribution integration work?
Eiri: The most revolutionary thing we’ve done in the last year is Amazon attribution integration. You allocate the attribution tag to your Meta campaign, and it shows how much your attribution link reported versus how much you spent, giving you net sales and net royalties. You know exactly which tag works and which doesn’t.
One level deeper, you can see for each attribution tag which book received each sale. Many authors don’t realize that if someone clicks an attribution link for book A but buys book B, the attribution sale lands on book B. Having that automated means you don’t have to worry about matching.
Thomas: I find that almost nobody uses Amazon attribution tags because they’re intimidating. That’s unfortunate. You could have an attribution tag just for your email newsletter. If you do that, your newsletter sales data shows up in a Publisher Champ report. You could see, “I made $5,000 from my newsletter last year, so spending $1,000 a year on Kit is a good deal.” Or the reverse, “I’m not getting many sales from my newsletter. Maybe I need to do some list cleaning.” The data may tell you good things or bad things, but either way it guides wise decisions.
Does Publisher Champ integrate with Square for in-person sales?
Thomas: I see Square on your website. If I’m at a book fair selling in person with a Square terminal, can you track those sales?
Eiri: Yes. We got Shopify and WooCommerce first, then people wanted Square and Squarespace. Wix is on the way, too. Even with one or two platforms, the numbers need to be accurate to the penny, especially when you’re using them to decide whether to advertise more or less.
Can Publisher Champ track expenses and cash sales?
Eiri: We have an external royalties and expenses page where you can add any expense or royalty, whether in person or cash. If you have subscriptions or use Fiverr for narrators, you can set those as subscriptions or one-off payments so you have one source of truth.
Thomas: Could I have overhead expenses like my email service that aren’t attached to a certain book, but also attach expenses to a specific book, like $1,000 on a book cover?
Eiri: Yes. You can have one-off or recurring expenses, daily, monthly, weekly, or annually. You basically have a bookkeeping platform on top of the automation.
A lot of authors said, “You track everything, but when I sit down to do my numbers, I always have to remember that $1,000 from the book fair.” We did an update where you can create custom platforms. Call it “Book Fairs,” assign spend, expenses, or royalties to it, and in all your reports you see “Book Fairs, $3,000” with the date. You can also track subscriptions there and catch ones you’ve stopped using.
How does Publisher Champ compare to QuickBooks for authors?
Thomas: This is turning into more than a marketing tool. If I’m at a conference selling $5,000 through Square and another $1,000 comes in cash, I could manually enter the cash in the dashboard. It’s captured for decision making and taxes. Can it connect with a bank account or credit card to pull in transaction data, like QuickBooks or Xero?
Eiri: Currently, no. If anyone wants to raise that request, you can go to feedback.publisherchamp.com.
You can set tax percentages for each country. If US sales are taxed 30%, you put that in and it drops the numbers by that amount. If you have 20% tax on US ad spending, it increases the spend to reflect the true cost. You get a true profit and loss at any point.
We released a P&L table last week for exactly that reason. Authors wanted something they could give to their accountant, with the flexibility to compare daily, monthly, weekly, quarterly, or annually.
Thomas: On a per-book basis?
Eiri: Per book, per author.
Thomas: QuickBooks won’t tell you the Blue Book did $5,000 in sales but the Red Book did $20,000. It doesn’t have that visibility.
In our Tax and Business Guide for Authors course, I recommend that as you transition into being a professional author, you have a separate bank account purely for author business.
I also recommend getting an American Express card that gives extra points for ads. I have an author friend who took her whole family to New York City for a week purely on points from ad spending.
If you could connect that bank account into this dashboard, it would potentially remove the need for QuickBooks altogether.
Your pricing page shows $16.99 or $21.99 a month, which is a fraction of what QuickBooks charges at $40 to $60. You’re already doing things QuickBooks doesn’t do.
Can authors invoice through Publisher Champ?
Eiri: No. We haven’t focused on invoicing, but we’re happy to explore it if authors want that feature. If you go to our What’s New updates page, you’ll see how many features we release. A few days ago we released the P&L feature.
If we can implement something without overcomplicating the platform, we work on it. Users can hide, remove, or favorite pages, so you have exactly what you need.
What are Smart Links on Publisher Champ?
Thomas: I’m seeing a feature called Smart Links. Is this like a Genius link, where I have a single link that goes to amazon.co.uk or amazon.com depending on where the reader is, and it inserts affiliate info?
Eiri: Yes. When someone in Italy opens the link, it goes to amazon.it. Someone in the US goes to .com. You can add affiliate tags per country and create QR codes with your book cover in the middle to put in your back matter.
If you send out a newsletter and realize the Smart Link points to the wrong book, you can change it within Publisher Champ without breaking the link.
You can do A/B testing, too. For the first week, the link goes to the reviews page. For the second week, it goes to the purchase page. You see which performs better, all without resending a newsletter, because the links are dynamic.
Thomas: Once you start collecting data, you’ll realize how much you already have that you’re not doing anything with. You’ll also notice holes. Maybe you don’t know whether your Instagram activity is driving sales.
With a Smart Link and attribution tagging, you can post a special link on Instagram and find out. Instagram is generally a terrible platform for selling books, but you need a dashboard to tell you that. The reality is the money’s made through advertising, not through being a social media influencer.
What platform integrations are coming next?
Thomas: Do you have PayHip integration?
Eiri: Not yet, but we’re finalizing access. It’s next on the list, along with BookBub Ads and Google Ads. We release quickly. We look into a feature request, release it into closed beta where a few hundred authors test it for a week, and if it’s good, we release it to everyone.
How much does Publisher Champ cost, and who is it for?
Thomas: A platform like this is required if you’re advertising or selling direct, just so you can know if it’s working. As a bookkeeping tool alone, it’s really helpful. If you’re a hobbyist who doesn’t care about the money, you can get your answers from Amazon. But as you start to be a professional, as you want to invest money and get a return, good tracking is essential.
Eiri: About 20% of our authors are just starting out. We have native Android and iOS apps, and the most-used feature for early authors is notifications. You get real-time notifications when a pre-order sells or a book makes a sale, like the cash register sound from Shopify.
We get constant five-star reviews from people saying, “I just got a notification, and it changed my day because I thought this book I wrote for fun would never sell, and someone in Spain found it useful.”
We also have daily, weekly, and monthly reports straight to your inbox in PDF and Excel formats. Some authors don’t want to spend time on the screen. They just want to write. You receive your statement in your inbox without needing to log in. Some people want a hands-off approach but still want to know their numbers.
Can you export data for AI analysis?
Thomas: If I want to get all my data out of Publisher Champ and talk to an AI about it, do you have an Excel export?
Eiri: Yes, and two weeks ago we released an API, so you can connect it with any AI to pull data directly. If you want to do it manually, you can download any data as an Excel.
Thomas: One of the tools in the Patron Toolbox is a Royalty Analyzer. It’s experimental.
You feed it your royalty statements and a log of your marketing activities. Just keeping a marketing log is magical, because seeing “I haven’t done anything to promote my book in the last month” is so helpful.
Do you have a place to record things like, “I was on Novel Marketing talking about this topic”?
Can authors track marketing activities like podcasts or media interviews?
Eiri: Yes. We have journal events. You have a calendar where you can create events like “I did this podcast” or “I changed the budget.” You assign events to a book or account-wide, and on your graphs, you see a dotted line on that day with a tooltip that says exactly what you did.
Authors said, “I’ve been using Publisher Champ to change my ad budget, but I forgot when I started.” So, we added graph annotations. If you see a spike or a drop, you hover and see, “On this date, this happened.”
There’s a trend in our anonymous analysis. A lot of journal events happen in Q4 because authors are trying different strategies to make October, November, and December their biggest months. Next year, they come back and say, “What did I do last November that doubled my sales?” and it’s right there.
Thomas: Journal events can be things like “I redesigned my website” or “I switched from MailerLite to Kit.” If you remember when you did it, sometimes you can see it in the graph.
Is there a way to export journal events as a text document?
Eiri: Currently, no. But after this podcast, I’ll add an export button.
Thomas: Do that, because then I can tune the Patron Toolbox to take journal events and data from Publisher Champ and run an analysis.
For obvious things, having it in the chart is all you need. For more subtle patterns, having an AI dig into the numbers is really helpful.
Eiri: We hear that a lot. We never advertised our platform. We grew because once an author onboards and spends a bit of time using the platform, they realize they can turn their business around or boost it further.
Figuring out exchange rates, tax percentages, one-off expenses, automated integrations, is time consuming. It took us six years to build Publisher Champ. If you’re an author doing all that while writing books and managing a family, that data is always going to be the last thing you look at. That’s what Publisher Champ does best. All you have to do is log in and see your numbers.
What’s advice do you have for authors who want to be data-driven?
Thomas: It’s scary to increase your advertising, and it’s foolish to increase it if you don’t know it’s working. But if every $1.00 you spend brings back $2.00, you should scale up.
Connor Boyack spent over a million dollars in advertising in one year and made it back many times over, but he had to build up to that, strategic, one step at a time. You have to know you’re getting your money back.
Eiri: It can be scary, especially if you suddenly see your real numbers and they’re not good. But it’s better to know than to live in denial.
When we did a quick study, we found that four out of five authors, who saw how their numbers really looked, managed to turn things around and become profitable. Before that, they were well into debt without realizing it because they were only looking at the top line.
You need to know your numbers. It can be disheartening, but if you know them, you know what you’re up against, and you can use them to turn things around.
Watch on YouTube
