Built by @kschaeper, KDPulse aims at helping authors on Amazon to visualize how their books are doing.
@kschaeper can you give us the background story behind this product?
@gregoiregilbert thanks for asking.
After self-publishing several Kindle books, I found it frustrating to track my Sales Rank on any book along with actual sales, downloads, borrow, - or even how many reviews/stars it currently has. Sales rank is how the book is doing compared to all other books on Amazon. And then when I would do a book promo (market one of my books) the numbers would change quickly, and it was even more work to keep track of the changes, especially as other of my books were affected.
Amazon doesn't give you all your books stats on one page ANYWHERE - not even for one book at a time. So it seemed like there was just a huge gap here that I personally needed. Now I can see all stats for every book with a click in the browser. And no extra places to login, no bouncing between 3-4 screens to just copy paste my stats.
I have no idea WHY amazon makes that so difficult, but it drove me to build this.
This sounds very promising. I used to use TitleZ to keep track of sales of authors and compare public data, but that seems to have died. Any other tools for folks who cover the industry?
@sree good question. There have been a few attempts here and there. The problems I encountered were 4 main ones:
1) subscription based - popular, and good monetization, but eats an emerging Kindle author's budget,
2) stores your data somewhere else - not always a big problem, but can feel a bit creepy,
3) limited stats - I've seen one bookmarklet product that overlays better graphs of your kindle sales stats and allows better comparisons, but doesn't track anything else.
4) requiring a login - I hate having to log into yet another site.
KDPulse.com is not subscription, does not share or store your data elsewhere - as a plugin, it's acts like a tab in your browser and keeps all your data local, it gives ALL your kindle stats as a snapshot where you can see sales for today, yesterday, last 7 & last 30 days, requires NO additional login.
So, I have seen one other dashboard that requires you to login and is subscription, but I haven't tried it. I have tried the bookmarklet - it's free if your Kindle income is lower, but I have to be careful, if I make a certain income, it becomes subscription based.
But that's about all I've seen that are active.
Let me know if anyone knows of others...
thanks
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