How Book Report Understands Your Catalog
What is a book? There are two ways of looking at it.
- First is the book that you write. It's a story, a novel, a novella, maybe a collection. It takes work to create a new book of this kind. This is what Book Report refers to as a book.
- Second is the book that you sell. You can’t sell a story in the abstract - you sell a specific product, like the eBook version of the story that you uploaded to KDP. Once you've written the words, it takes relatively little work to create new books of this kind. Often it just involves uploading the manuscript to a new distribution service. This is what Book Report refers to as an edition.
Book Report needs both of these perspectives to let authors fully understand their sales data.
It makes sense to think of author businesses in terms of books. Most of the time and effort authors expend is spent on creating new books, not new editions. You put in all the work to write a book, and you want to know how well that book is selling. Whether it’s the ebook edition or the paperback edition that’s selling more units could be interesting, but as long as the book overall is making enough sales, the effort it took to create is paying off.
But, as noted above, you cannot sell a book. You can only sell an edition. There’s no all-access pass that a reader can buy that gives them access to your book in all formats, across all distributors. In practical terms, this means all the sales reports that Book Report gathers and organizes have activity for editions.
Book Report takes in data about editions, and presents data about books. Bridging this discrepancy - that authors think about books, while readers buy editions - is a big part of what makes Book Report a valuable tool to many authors.
Book Attributes, Edition Attributes
Some attributes of a book remain the same, regardless of which edition you’re considering. The author and title, for instance - those don’t change between the KDP and D2D edition of a book. But some attributes do vary within a single book. If one edition is an audiobook, it may have a narrator - that does not imply that all editions of that book share that narrator. Format itself is also an edition attribute.
Book Report keeps all of this in mind when presenting your data. If you make a sale for a certain edition, we categorize it both by edition-specific attributes and by book-wide attributes. A single sale can show up grouped with other editions when you group your sales numbers by book or by author, and then separately when you group the same data by narrator or format.
As a user, you need to understand this distinction when you add a Custom Attribute. This is the feature that lets you add a column to the Books Tab, and then generate reports based on the data you enter. The crux is this: Will this attribute always have the same value for all editions within each book; or will there be cases where within a single book, different editions will have different values? For example, genre is probably a book-wide attribute, whereas cover style would be edition-specific.
There is an art to this classification of attributes. Language is an interesting example. Should language be allowed to vary within a book, allowing sales of multiple translations to all count as sales of the original book? Or should language be a book-wide attribute, separating sales for each translation into their own separate books? We’ve decided to allow multiple languages to exist within a single book, but by default we don’t automatically merge translated titles into one book.
The Books Tab
The Books Tab exists to let you adjust and correct how Book Report understands your catalog. After reading this page, I hope you have a better sense of the shape of that understanding. Sales come in attached to editions; editions are grouped into books; attributes can be set at both levels.