I’m going to pick on epublishers for a bit. No, I’m going to pick on any publisher who sells their books online.

As authors, we frequently hear how important it is for us, the author, to promote ourselves and our books. There are books about it. Articles. Blogs, entire websites and workshops, companies and services dedicated to helping us promote.

And so we go about it. Printing up bookmarks and placing advertisements. We arrange events, hang out in chatrooms, hover around message boards and flutter over social networks. All this time spent on something we’re not trained to do. Things that, though are in our best interest, we have no idea if they actually work or not.

My complaint is this.

We’re doing the work and we have no way to check the numbers, to see what works best. Do you sell more books after advertising for a month or attending a readers loop for a day?

With technology being what it is and every site from yahoo to individual authors sites having a registration/login system, why in the world are publishers not offering real time statistics to authors?!

I won’t go into the fact that some publishers might be hiding, bloating, skewing their numbers. I don’t know if or who would do that.

I do know that if you’re going to collect the information, you should take it a step further. Help people track their promotion. Time and again authors direct their traffic to you, dear publisher, and they don’t know if they’re getting any clicks at all. Making any sales.

I know this is probably more work for the publisher, but it’s time for someone to step up to the plate. Join the 21st century where stats rule. Offer this kind of information to your authors. Bestseller lists don’t mean squat. Individual sales are what we want to track. Help us do it.

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