After months of development and testing, AHS now supports wide reports. Building this feature is probably the toughest thing we’ve tackled, minus the launch product. There are a number of qualifiers to this launch. First and foremost, this is phase 1 of at least 6 phases. You can see the complete list as it stands here.
Phase 1 allows us all to manually upload our reports from the following markets:
KDP (as usual)
Apple
Barnes & Noble
Direct2 Digital
Google
Kobo (not Kobo+ yet)
From here on you can choose from a drop-down menu the market report you’re uploading to AHS. If you run into any issues, the help link on the pop-up window will take you to the help page for that market report. Each online store has its own way of downloading the files, so please read through the help articles if you run into issues.
If you already have the book in AHS then all you’ll have to do is assign the book to its current book record to start seeing the data. So, for instance, if you already have the book in KDP and you’re taking it wide on Google, then you’ll head to the Books page, click on the message that reads “You have unassigned books” and then assign the Google version of the book to the existing KDP version. The process is just like when you assign a paperback to an eBook when you first upload a report with paperback sales.
If the book does not yet exist in AHS, then you’ll have to create the book manually before you upload the report file. All this means is going to the Books page, adding a new book with a title and a book cover image url. Once the book is created, upload the wide report and assign the book to the right title.
For those of you who have been tracking wide markets with ‘Other Income’ you can continue to do so, or you can take advantage of this new feature. If you decide to use it then your reports will show both the ‘Other Income’ you’ve entered and the new data from the uploaded reports. Another option is to delete the ‘Other Income’ you’ve entered and upload the reports to take their place. We recommend doing this on a small scale at first as a test just to be sure you’re getting the results you expect.
Draft2Digital may add services that we need to add to our system. If this happens, please let us know. We will then go in and add that service to the system. Once that’s done, we’ll let you know so you can reupload and capture sales you may have made for that market
We’ve covered a lot more countries with this update but there may still be countries not added that you see sales in. If this happens to you, please let us know and we’ll add the country asap. Any reports you uploaded that included sales to this country will need to be re-uploaded after we add support for the country.
Please let us know if you have any questions about this. If you run into a specific issue, please open a ticket and we’ll get to you asap.
And also, again, please keep in mind this is Phase 1 of many phases. Here’s the link again for the phased plan. As with all software development, there will likely be bumps in the road but we’re ready for them.
Thank you for your patience as we tackled this huge and necessary feature. Spread the word, Author Helper Suite now supports key online marketplaces!
