Updates and some maintenance.

The Dev Team finished some updates early and pushed them before I was ready so I apologize for the surprise. Your dashboards will be a bit weird until they are done but it shouldn't take too long.

So what are we updating? Glad you asked.

Ad Tracking: Several of you requested the ability to Ghost an Ad Campaign, so we added the ability to do so. You can also disable unwanted campaigns.

Ads Login: We moved the Ads Login for FaceBook (and all future ad platforms, Amazon, BookBub, Chirp, etc) to the same page as the platforms.

Income/Expense: We changed the code to make the Date Range less picky. You should only need a start date now. We’ll be working on other updates to this to make it more user-friendly.

Email: We set this to default in the “ON” position as several people didn’t even know it was an option. If you don’t wish to get the daily email update of your sales just visit the settings page and opt-out. You can change that setting at any time.

And last but not least…..

Color Coding: This was a popular item that several of you liked from another service so we’ve been working on adding it to ScribeCount. Since we are a bit more complicated it has taken a lot longer to do so. But you can now select a color for each book and series and have those colors appear in the Top Books section of the charts. This is NOT complete yet, there is still a lot of code to write to make it 100%, but with all the other features we have in production it works better if we do this a little at a time.

A couple of other items while I’m here.

We’ve had a few complaints lately regarding the way ScribeCount works, or rather the way people want it to work. After investigating them it turned out to be a misunderstanding in how the system functions.

If you’ll allow me a brief story.

A while back I had a meeting with my accountant regarding some tax issues. He proposed a plan to lower mine and it sounded too good to be true. I said so and got this for a reply.

“I’m not willing to risk my license just to save you a few bucks, so you can rest assured this is all legal.”

There still seems to be some confusion as to how ScribeCount works. Currently, ScribeCount is structured to service ONE author with ONE KDP account. Once a link to that account has been established, ScribeCount’s software will pull all the data attached to that account. That includes Pen names and anything else uploaded under that ONE account. Since Amazon, per their TOS, only allows one account per customer, this is the way we have coded our service to operate.

If you are acting as a publisher and uploading books for several customers via one Amazon account, ScribeCount will still function, you’ll just have to sort that data out via the various tagging and filtering options we offer. We have had several requests to build a Publisher version of ScribeCount that WILL handle dozens of different accounts via the individual authors account credentials, and then group them under one dashboard, but that is a rather large project and we have not moved it out of the research stage yet.

If you are trying to pull the account data from two different Amazon accounts into one ScribeCount dashboard it will not work. The only options are to publish all the books via one “Publisher” account or have a separate ScribeCount account for each author. There is no way to combine them into one ScribeCount Dashboard at this time, but as I mentioned earlier we are working on such a feature.

If you have a client's Amazon account credentials and wish to see them displayed in ScribeCount you would first have to “Delete all my Data” from your computer/account before logging into theirs. Otherwise, the data from the first account would be mixed with the second.

What I am trying to politely say here is that we’re not going to violate Amazons, or any other platforms, TOS for your benefit, so please don’t ask us to.

Second thing; tickets.

With new features, there is always an avalanche of tickets. (Not blaming you, I ask for them and we are thankful for every one of them as they tell us where the bugs are). Since we pushed the Ad Tracking and the Calendar out so close together they have piled up a bit and response times have suffered. We’re going to try to space things out next time but its really hard to not pull the trigger on a new feature once its done. We want to give you guys all the new toys as soon as we can. We’re doing our best to address the tickets as fast as possible. Ad Tracking is extremely complicated, so those tickets usually require more research and troubleshooting than previous features. I understand the frustration, just know that we are too.

What’s next?

BookFunnel and Ingram are moving along very well, so far no real roadblocks. I think I can safely say that Damon is excited as we are to be adding BookFunnel to the ScribeCount system. A few more weeks and we hope to have that finished.

Ingram, as you can imagine, is a royal pain in the keister, but it’s coming along. While BookFunnel is a ride in the park Ingram is more of an uphill climb, but we’ll get there eventually.