ScribeCount: An Indie Author's Best Friend

ScribeCount bills itself as an indie author’s best friend—and if you’re looking for a platform that provides deep insight into your aggregate sales data, then its claim may be true. With the ability to collect data from multiple sales platforms, customize your own reports, and a pricing structure that flexes with your monthly sales, ScribeCount has the potential to become a valuable addition to your indie author toolbox.

The folks behind ScribeCount, Randall Wood and Phillipa Werner, are authors themselves and set out to create a product that would become the preeminent author service platform on the internet. A quick glance at the program’s testimonial reel shows that they’ve won over more than a few bestselling authors, so it may be well worth your time to spend a few minutes checking out what ScribeCount has to offer.

How Does It Work?

The ScribeCount browser extension allows you to gather your sales data from multiple platforms and display them in a single reporting session. It currently supports the following sales platforms and plans to add more in the near future:

  • Amazon
  • Google Play
  • Apple
  • Barnes & Noble
  • Kobo
  • Draft2Digital
  • Smashwords
  • Ingram Spark (coming soon)
  • Audible (coming soon)
  • Findaway Voices (coming soon)

The extension is optimized for use with most common browsers, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. The website lists Safari as an option that will be coming soon. The processing and storage of your data is done in the cloud and protected with the same type of encryption used to protect government data. An in-depth technical explanation of ScribeCount's Privacy Policy regarding your personal data, storage, and encryption capabilities can be found on its website.

Once you’ve installed the ScribeCount extension to your browser, all you need to do is open the extension, log in to ScribeCount, and visit each of your sales pages to establish the connection between ScribeCount and the sales page.

Once you initiate a reporting session, ScribeCount pulls the following data elements from your sales pages every fifteen minutes and displays them in a convenient and customizable dashboard format:

  • sales numbers
  • ENP data
  • book IDs
  • book ranks
  • book reviews
  • book prices
  • KU enrollment dates
  • geographical sales data, both current and historical

As seen below, the ScribeCount dashboard contains a combination of interactive charts and graphs that let you slice and dice your report data as needed. This is great for tracking sales promo results, ad performance, read-through rates, and more.

Colorfulness Light Product Font Slope

https://www.kboards.com/threads/scribecount-now-with-a-ku-dashboard.335556/ Retrieved 6/9/2022

Subscribers can remove their data from ScribeCount’s servers at any time by doing one of the following as stated in the program’s FAQs:

  • “Disable all the connections to the platforms and then log out. If you choose this option, ScribeCount stops asking for data, your doorman shuts the door, your settings are deleted, and your data is purged from our servers. Logging out in this fashion means the purged data will need to be reloaded to start another session, requiring a longer wait time.”
  • “Keep connections enabled and use the ‘Delete my Data’ button to purge your data without losing your settings.”

If you’re a strictly KU author, don't feel left out. ScribeCount’s custom KU dashboard works just as well for you as it does for wide or hybrid authors.

What Features Are Available?

The extension was built with Bootstrap open source, which means it will work just as well on your table or mobile devices as it does on your computer. The extension is designed to run only while your session is active, which means it will not run in the background and chew up your processing capacity or battery life.

Authors who have both wide and KU sales data have the option to switch between separate dashboards for each sales channel.

One of the nicer features this product offers is full access to the product’s functionality for every subscriber, regardless of the pricing tier. This is quite the deviation from most of its competitors. The ScribeCount site lists the following report-focused features available to all subscribers:

  • customized dashboards to fit the wide or KU author
  • dynamic reporting from all the major platforms
  • a worldwide sales map showing the countries where your books are selling
  • a news feed that is updated regularly, keeping you informed of what’s happening in the world of indie publishing
  • downloadable spreadsheets in Excel format so you can easily customize your income and expenditures
  • current and historical data updated every fifteen minutes

ScribeCount plans to add more sales and advertising platforms each month and to expand its product offerings to include production, marketing, and translation tools.

Additional features include

  • the ability to choose from three different KU Page Read rates
  • the ability to manually add KU Bonuses to earnings reports
  • the ability to choose your preferred time zone and currency display
  • twenty-four-hour customer service (phone, chat, and email)
  • an affiliate program that pays you 10 percent of each person’s tier amount for those who sign up through your link
  • access to the ScribeCount blog, which features articles, advice, and platform information of interest to indie authors
  • the ability to filter or drill down into specific markets, pen names, titles, and more via the dashboard

How Much Does It Cost?

Pricing is based on your monthly sales income and will adjust based on your earnings. As with any other business-related subscription, ScribeCount is tax deductible, and the company provides subscribers with a yearly payment report.

ScribeCount currently offers a fourteen-day free subscription, no credit card needed, after which the following pricing tiers are available:

  • Tier 1: $0/month for Authors earning less than $1000/month
  • Tier 2: $15/month for Authors earning between $1001 and $2000/month
  • Tier 3: $20/month for Authors earning $2001 or more
  • $185 Flat Rate Yearly Subscription

At the end of the 14-day free trial, subscribers are sent a sign-up form and asked to choose a payment method. ScribeCount currently accepts the following payment methods:

  • PayPal
  • Via Stripe:
    • Visa
    • MasterCard
    • American Express
    • ACH (direct debit from your bank account)

Once they receive the payment method, ScribeCount will verify your previous month’s sale income and charge your preferred payment method for the appropriate service tier. Similar to KU’s payment structure, your sales total for the previous month will determine your pricing tier for two months forward. For example, your sales total in June 2022 will determine the amount you’re billed August 1.

Subscribers are free to cancel at any time by clicking the Cancel My Subscription button. Cancellations will be processed within forty-eight hours, and any charges made in error will be refunded.

Considering everything that the platform currently offers and the company’s focus on continued development, ScribeCount seems to be an affordable, robust, user-friendly service that would make a powerful addition to any indie author’s toolbox.

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