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.)
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.
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.
be still my nerdly heart! <3 this so much!
<3 I love it when people love spreadsheets with me. :)
oh man, i totally geeked out today and got to use the lookup function. and now i wish i was a writer so i could use your nifty spreadsheets!
Ooh, thanks for sharing! These are fabulous.
As an author/accountant mix, I love this post on the glory of spreadsheets :). ESPECIALLY the glitter! LOL
Very kind of you to share. Thanks!
In the end, I had to make my own spreadsheet since I realised I need the income in my local currency, but your spreadsheet made it less hairpulling to create a spreadsheet that suited my needs so thank you!