Ingram Update I.
First. Yes, those are books from my own bookshelves. Most of them were made by Ingram.
Second: The Ingram launch went well, but not 100% well, so I thought I would update.
We’ve had only a few glitches related to Ingram being added to the platform list. I'll touch on them here and then answer a few questions that people had.
Some of you reported that your sales were not showing. This was traced to the Books data that had a publish date of “0” (or null in nerd speak). This resulted in the books not loading, so the sales didn’t appear in the dashboard. We added a fix to compensate for this and it should be working now but we are still going through the tickets on a case-by-case basis to confirm.
Some of you took my comment about the Book Covers not showing as Ingram had removed them from the reports. This was not the case, the covers are there but they are A) Tiny, and B) Blocked, as in Ingram is not allowing us to scrape them. It's not a huge problem, more of a minor inconvenience. If you merge your Ingram books with your existing books on the other platforms your covers should show. If not, there’s always the Edit Cover option below the cover art space on your Book Details page.
Others asked what kind of data we are pulling and from where. To answer that I need a visual:
This is the Publisher Compensation page you see at Ingram. We pull the reports using the criteria you see checked here. We then travel to the next page:
As you can see here there’s a lot of information, but we focus on the three columns you see highlighted in Yellow, with the last one, Net Pub Comp, being the amount you would normally call “Profit”. This is what should appear in your charts.
For some of you, it was showing the first highlighted column, Net Sales, which, while being a more smile-inducing figure, is wrong. We had to code a fix for that as well. Sorry-not sorry?
What about the source of those sales?
Good question. There are A LOT of sources available through Ingram and if we were to include them all we feared that the chart would get cluttered to the point that it was unreadable, so we held off in favor of seeing how bad that would be and are now considering ways to display that data so you can actually see it.
Formats. I addressed this in the original post so you know that “Case Laminate” is converted by us to “Hardcover” and so on. We know that many of you are doing Large Print additions so we will be looking for a way to differentiate the two in the formats chart and in the outer ring of the sunburst chart. We’ll need some time on that one so please be patient.
All in all, we had a good feature launch without too many bugs. What we’ll be doing now is not so much debugging but rather “How best to improve”. So give us a week or two to research that and write some more code and we’ll have Ingram fine-tuned.
All I have right now, but if you have a question that I didn’t cover here please fire away. I may not have the answer right away, but I will eventually.
And that is your ScribeCount update for the day. Now go right duh wurds!
- Randall