Software & Spreadsheets

A5 Planner Sheet: Daily To Do list w/ word count & goals

March 7, 2015 by Bree

So, this is just a quick post, mostly because I’m uploading something a few people on twitter were interested in downloading. This isn’t anything fancy, just a tweaked version of the daily sheets I use in my planner. They’re very, very slanted to exactly what I want, which is encouragement to drink 8 glasses of water, a big spacious To Do list, and places to focus on goals, priorities and my word count.

These are designed to be printed on 8.5″x11″ paper and cut in half. You can print them front & back and end up with 4 days per 1 piece of paper.

Daily A5 To Do List w/ Word Counts

Custom printables for A5 planners with a to do list, space to track words and goals, and even handy tracking of how much water you’re drinking. Print on 8.5×11″ paper and cut in half.

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I’ve also included the download file for my writing project word count trackers, in case you missed those! (The novel one tracks a 100k book. The other is cut up into 10k parts, in case you need smaller goals. I do love coloring that thing in every 1,000 words.)

100,000 Word Project Tracker

Custom printables for A5 planners with space to track 100,000 words. Print on 8.5×11″ paper and cut in half.

Download Now!3132 Downloads

10,000 Word Project Tracker

Custom printables for A5 planners with space to track 10,000 words. Print on 8.5×11″ paper and cut in half.

Download Now!3532 Downloads

Self-Publishing Income Tracking Spreadsheet

January 30, 2015 by Bree

Don’t look now, it’s time for another round of… LOOK, LOOK!

(What, I made that glittery pink sparkle image, and I’m going to get some use out of it. Never waste glitter text, guys. It’s like, the first rule of the internet.)

Last time I uploaded my Self-Pub MTD Income Estimate spreadsheet, which is how I keep a rough running estimate of my monthly sales.

This spreadsheet is a lot more straightforward, because all I track with it are deposits. I update this at the end of the month (*coughcough* or the end of the year) with all of the deposits that hit my bank account. There’s no conversion here, just straight up dollars. The big things I keep track of with this sheet are my monthly and quarterly totals, my totals by vendor and my breakdown of self-pub vs publisher money.

This one has fake numbers in January. The breakdown of the fake numbers probably tells you a lot about my idea of what % of income comes from which vendors, even though I tried not to be too obvious.

There’s really not a lot to it, but I’ll break down the three parts just in case.

The top of the spreadsheet is all automatic. Everything in here should update as you put your numbers in the bottom two sections. It tracks your total monthly payment, and also breaks it down by traditionally/epublished vs self-published. On top of that, it keeps a running total of each quarter, and at the end of each line it breaks down what % of your income came from publishers and what % came from self-publishing vendors.

The self-publishing section is also pretty straight-forward. The vendors are pretty easy to tweak and update as needed. That holds my current list, including revealing my current laziness in tracking down which country $1.47 payments from Amazon came from. (Bad, Bree, bad.)

Some vendors pay quarterly. I tend to black out the months I don’t anticipate payments so I won’t be dumb and wonder why they aren’t there, because almost everything I do with spreadsheets is pre-planning for the days where I’m really dumb and wonder very silly things.

As you add payments, the monthly totals will update at the top in the green boxes. The year-to-date total by vendor will update in the 2nd column in teal. The year-to-date grand total for self-publishing shows up in the YTD Selfpub box. At the end of each line is the % breakdown by vendor. Finally, quarterly self-pub totals show up above the months.

And finally…

The publisher section is basically exactly the same as the self-publisher, except you have to fill in your own publishers. I’ll be honest, this section is pretty basic and doesn’t handle a ton of excitement or variation…but I only have a few epublishers, one who pays monthly and one quarterly, so I don’t have a lot of excitement here. But if you’re just tracking deposits, this should do it.

And that is the spreadsheet in all its glory! There’s a download link below, and I have it on good authority that it works just fine on google docs. Feel free to take and adapt and have fun. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask! (And just for fun, I threw the link to my Running Totals spreadsheet in the bottom here, too.)

Year to Date Totals

A file for tracking your Year-to-Date payments from vendors and publishers. Includes monthly and yearly totals and percentages, broken down by vendor, publisher and self-pub vs publisher, and quarterly income totals.

Download Now!3017 Downloads

Running Totals Spreadsheet

An excel spreadsheet that tracks MTD sales for self-pubbers. Vendors included: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Draft2Digital, Apple, and Google. Also provides a way to estimate money from Amazon borrows.

Download Now!3446 Downloads

Project Word Count Trackers for A5 Planners

January 15, 2015 by Bree

One of my goals this year was to get more organized. The stress of trying to carry this increasingly complex business in my head (oh god, why was I still doing that) got to me last year, and I decided it was time to work smarter or have a gibbering mental breakdown. (Or another one.)

My solution was to get an A5 planner. But instead of relying on the default filofax refills, I went out to find things that would fit the sort of organization I needed. Etsy is wonderfully full of such printable options, and there are tons of other places where you can get them for free, I discovered. It’s going well so far…two weeks in and I’ve already got a better grasp on what I need to delegate and I’m getting more done, more efficiently.

But some of the stuff I wanted to keep track of, I couldn’t find on etsy or the internet. So I popped open photoshop and went to town. And in case there’s anyone out there with an A5 planner who wants to keep track of word counts, I’m posting my project trackers here. 🙂

(In case you are new to this–I was!–A5 planners easily fit things printed on standard 8.5×11″ paper. These printables are designed to be cut in half and then have holes punched in them. You can buy a fancy six-hole punch, but I didn’t have one when I printed out my first run. So I used a divider from my planner as a guide and punched those holes freehand one at a time. If you’re determined, you can get it done. :D)

100,000 Word Project

This one is good for up to 100,000 words. You can scribble in the totals as you go (I was inspired to use the thermometer image by my friend Vivian Arend, who does this on a white board for each project!) and keep track of the date and your word count/how many words you wrote on that day. Whichever you prefer. This sheet is designed to be printed on both sides, so when you cut them, the right side will be the “front” and the left side will be the back.

But 100,000 words is a lot, and sometimes I have a smaller project, or I just want to chop my goals into things that feel more satisfying. So I also made…

10,000 Word Project Part

This is also designed to be printed on both sides. Each side can be 10,000 words of your current project, and you can use as many of them as you want. 🙂

Feel free to download these and adapt to your own needs!

100,000 Word Project Tracker

Custom printables for A5 planners with space to track 100,000 words. Print on 8.5×11″ paper and cut in half.

Download Now!3132 Downloads

10,000 Word Project Tracker

Custom printables for A5 planners with space to track 10,000 words. Print on 8.5×11″ paper and cut in half.

Download Now!3532 Downloads

Tracking Month-to-Date Self-Pub Sales

December 19, 2014 by Bree

So, I haven’t posted since July, because the first rule of Self-Pub Club is do not make any plans you’re not okay cancelling in a feverish zombie deadline fervor. But a conversation on twitter today prompted me to come on over so I could post…

(I mentioned the zombie fever, right? Give me some sparkles, y’all.)

This is not the world’s fanciest spreadsheet, but I find it pretty useful as a quick way to keep an eye on how much money I’ve (probably, roughly) made this month. When I’m feeling excitable, I update it a few times a day. When I’m tired…well, I just started December’s Running Total page 4 days ago. But you don’t need to update it constantly to keep it accurate, since it was designed to use the information vendors give us.

In no particular order… (and with totally bogus numbers)…

Amazon section of the spreadsheet.

You can grab the Amazon numbers from your Sales Dashboard (the one with the graph.) Remember to set the totals to Month to Date first (and click Update, which I never do) because it defaults to showing the last 30 days. Paste the totals in the 2nd column. The 3rd column are conversion rates (some more recent than others, all subject to change, all just estimates) that spit out US Dollars in the last column.

The Apple & Google parts of the spreadsheet.

The B&N and Kobo parts of the spreadsheet.

Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo are simpler, since all will let you grab a MTD total. Barnes & Noble has the “Month to Date” sales that exclude the current and previous day, which you can click on to get. I’m lazy, so I have a space for each of those numbers so I don’t have to add them together. If I wanted to add, I wouldn’t have a spreadsheet.

I also have a line for draft2digital, since I have some books through there, but prefer to keep track of those by the vendor they’re selling on.

As for google…I don’t know. Make something up. (I’m kidding. Maybe. You can pull a transaction report and add your total, but only if you’re a masochist completionist–or you’re making enough money on Google to get you excited. :D)

I grab my borrows totals from the Month to Date sales reports. (NOT the one with the graphs.) I just add up the borrows for each book manually, because I haven’t found a less annoying way to do this yet. And you have to do it for each domain (so Amazon US, UK, DE…) The good (bad) news is that you may not have many sites moving borrows yet. Though I changed the numbers above, I didn’t change the countries I’m tracking for.

The estimates at the top are my current range for what those borrows might be worth. I keep a high/mid/low range, and this spreadsheet uses the low range in all totals. Because I’d rather be happy than cranky.

Breakdown of %s sold at each vendor.

Finally, the monthly breakdown is…a monthly breakdown. Because, you know. I like knowing where my money is coming from, and where it isn’t. And where I want more coming from.

So, that’s the form! Like I said, not the fanciest thing in the world, but if you need an easy way to keep track of stuff, it works okay, it’s easy to update, and it’s compatible with google docs, which is where I keep mine. 🙂 Feel free to download it and adapt to your own needs! Link below.

Running Totals Spreadsheet

An excel spreadsheet that tracks MTD sales for self-pubbers. Vendors included: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Draft2Digital, Apple, and Google. Also provides a way to estimate money from Amazon borrows.

Download Now!3446 Downloads