M.L. Humphrey is a former stockbroker with a degree in Economics from Stanford and an MBA from Wharton who has spent close to twenty years as a regulator and consultant in the financial services industry. She is also a self-published author with non-fiction, fantasy, and romance titles under a variety of pen names.

You can reach her. at mlhumphreywriter@gmail.com or at mlhumphrey.com.

Excel for Self Publishers by M.L. Humphrey

As soon as you self-publish, you're running a small business. (At least most of us are.) Which means you need to start thinking about things like advertising costs and whether or not you're making a profit from your efforts. That's where Excel comes in handy. Using the analysis tools it provides, you can leverage Excel to take your self-publishing efforts to the next level.

This guide will walk you through how to do that. It assumes you know the basics of using Excel already and walks you through how to apply Excel to scenarios that matter to self-publishers, including how to use the reports Amazon provides as well as create your own to track things like advertising performance, sales trends, and the titles you've published.

So if you want to learn how to calculate things like average customer value for a series or how to adjust your AMS reports to account for KU borrows, this is the guide for you. It covers that and much, much more.

 

REVIEWS

  • "The power of this book is that it inspires and helps self-publishers see themselves as a business and provides them insight and tools to help them be successful in the business of selling books."

    – Dariel Garner, Serial Entrepreneur
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

Hang around self-publishing long enough and you'll hear over and over again how self-publishing is the same as running a small business. And it is. You're selling a product to the general public for money. Now, some people do approach it more like a hobby and I've even known one or two who just gave away all of their books for free, but the majority of us would like to actually make a profit at what we're doing. In other words, bring in more than we spend on this venture.

And yet…

At the same time I hear people say that this is a business, I see authors talk about how they don't track their ad results. Or how they aren't sure how many copies of their books they've sold. Or I see them make pricing decisions without thinking about the implication.

And I think to myself how do you run your business if you don't know your expenses and your income? It's so easy if you're exclusive to Amazon to track your total sales, how would you not do that?

Anyway. This book is a small effort to help self-publishers who want to better control their business learn how to leverage Excel to do so.