The Books Tab
Your books are a core aspect of your sales data. You can use the Books tab to align how you see your catalog with how Book Report sees it. This is accomplished through four core actions you can take from the Books tab:
- Managing duplicates
- Editing book info
- Archiving books
- Adding custom columns
The core thing to understand is that the Books tab is not separate from the Historical and Today reports. When you make a change on the Books tab, it will reflect on both of those reports. That's the point: the Books tab is used to make your reports more useful.
Video Walkthrough
The video below walks through all the main features of the Books tab.
Core Actions
1. Manage Duplicates
If a book is showing up twice in your reports, you can fix that by using the “Manage Duplicates” button. Once you click that button, there will be a "drag handle" added to the left side of each row. You can pick the book up by clicking and dragging that handle - if you drop the book ontop of another, those two books will become one.
2. Edit Book Info
Book Report automatically detects much about your books. If you'd ever like to change something that has been automatically detected, or to manually set something that has been missed, you can use the “Edit Book Info“ button. This adds a small pencil icon next to each entry in the table - you can click it and type in any value you’d like. Hit the enter or return key to save, or the escape key to exit without saving.
3. Archiving Books
If you have titles that you no longer want to see the details of within Book Report, you can archive them. All archived books will show up as a single row in your reports, simply labelled "Archived". The earnings and units from these books still count towards your totals.
To archive a book, click the “Bulk Actions...” button, then select the books you'd like to archive and click the “Archive X titles” button.
You can see your archived books by scrolling to the bottom of the Books tab and clicking “Show archived books”.
4. Add a Custom Column
You can add a custom column by clicking “Select Columns...” and then clicking “+ Add a column”. You can then choose a name for your new column, and edit it using the same process outlined in the section above (2. Edit Book Info).
Once set up, custom columns will appear throughout your reports. You can set charts and tables to use them, as well as filter the Historical report with them.
Example custom columns would be “Length” (to separate your novels from novellas and short stories), “Genre”, or even “Universe” if your books exist in various shared universes.
Other Useful Things
Filters
Every column can be filtered using the filter icon at the top of the column.
You can also type into the box labelled “Type here to filter your books...” to filter your books. This filter includes rows only if they contain matching text, within the columns that you have selected.
The filter options work great with the “Bulk actions...” options, saving time by letting you filter how you need and then using “Select all”.
Bulk Edit Book Info
Instead of editing book info one piece at a time, you can also edit values in bulk.
Click "Bulk Actions..." and then use the checkboxes to select all the books you'd like to update. Then click "Set value..." and choose which column you want to overwrite, and what you'd like to override that column with.
Select Columns
You can choose which columns you'd like to see and edit using the “Select Columns...” button. Your selected columns are also the ones that the text-based filter will work on.
Everything Book Report uses to build your reports is available here.
Undo
After you drag-and-drop, edit an individual book, or bulk edit your books, you will see an option to undo your action. This button will stay in place for 10 seconds.
Reset to Defaults
At the bottom of the Books tab is a button labelled “Reset to defaults”. Clicking this button undoes all of the manual changes you made to your books from this tab.
It will not make Book Report forget your books, it will just forget everything that it did not detect automatically.