Keeping Track of Sales

It's that time of the year again - time for the creation of new spreadsheets for the New Year.  Every year, I create two new spreadsheets to keep track of the year's sales. 

The first spreadsheet does the day-to-day stuff.  It looks like this:

Of course, you see the layout for Dying Embers at the top, but beneath that is each book with its own data and color - in the order I published the books in.  (So below DE is Accidental Death and then Wish in One Hand, etc.) Each color here corresponds to the color on the next spreadsheet. 

This, of course, is the big 'Totals' spreadsheet.  This one takes all the numbers from the first spreadsheet and spits them into a form where I can see where sales are at across the board in one place.  If you click on it, you can see there are tabs for different things I want to know - Overall Data, Overall by Month, Monthly Chart, Daily (which is units sold by day each month), Daily Pgs (for KU sales), Pages Read (which totals pages by book), Pages Chart, and then the previous years' info.  (You only see the 2017 tab here, but there are tabs for 2016 and 2015 as well.)

Here you only see January and February, but all the months are done.  I've hidden those rows so I don't have to scroll down to see the totals.  If you look, you'll notice a new brown row in February for the new book I'm publishing.  I add rows as I go along.  (Frankly, this is becoming a behemoth, but what's a gal to do.  Stop publishing more books?  As if.)

I think I'm also going to hide some columns this year, because I don't sell books at $3.99 anymore and I don't sell through Createspace's Expanded Distribution.  I might hide the D2D column, too, because I haven't done that in a while. :shrug: I can always unhide any of these when/if I do need them again.

I'm not really sure how much these spreadsheets are actually helping me, but I'm a geek and I like to see the numbers this way.  I like to think it helps me track whether advertising and discounts or freebies are doing what they're supposed to do.  I'll talk more about that after the first of the year when all the 2017 numbers are in.

Well, I hope all y'all weren't too bored with this post, and that it helps someone somewhere.  If you're a writer, how do you keep track of sales?  Do you bother?  If you're a reader, do you have any questions?  Feel free to drop them in the comments.