ISBN, ASIN, ISRC, and other codes

Products need unique codes to identify them.  Why?  Well, people tend to use the same product names as others, so that isn't very good in differentiating one product from another.  In fact, in some businesses, all products may have the same name, but differ in other attributes such as sub-title, version, mixer, etc.

When you sell your products through distributors, other vendors, or over the internet it becomes important to use the standard product codes available there.  Many distributors will require it.

Most people have probably heard of ISBN.  That's a book code, right?  Yes.  If you are in the music industry, you might recognize ISRC as the code relating to a recording such as a track on an album.  ASIN?  Amazon decided to setup its own unique coding system that goes across all of its products, not just books.

So when you are selling your product on the internet using multiple services, you very well may end up with more than one product code for the same product!  Now you will receive a sales report from one source referring to product X, while another source indicates how many of the same product was sold, but refers to it as Y.  That could be tricky.

Fortunately, DashBook Royalty Pro can handle multiple code styles for each product.  So your book can have an ASIN, a pISBN and an eISBN (made-up variations of ISBN to indicate the difference between print and electronic).

Then when you instruct DashBook to import sales from a given sales report, you simply use an import map (relates columns in the report to DashBook data fields) that points to the proper DashBook field.  So your Amazon Kindle import can perform matches on ASIN, while your Lightning Source refers to ISBN.

Similarly in the music business, you can have an ISRC for your tracks and an SKU or Barcode for your albums or releases.  Our import mechanism might seem complex, but it is a simple relationship that directs report columns to DashBook terminology.

Do you have extra codes like Catalog Number?  No problem.  You can go to Setup->Products->Product Code Types and add your own type to your DashBook system.  On the Product screen is an All Product Code Types link where you can see all of the codes for a given product.

This all can be a bit daunting for someone new to the industry, but a lifesaver for those who have to deal with this real world.

Lightning Source to royalties to authors

When DashBook introduced importing sales reports, we received a lot of praise from our customers. Book publishers still are a large percentage of our customer base, and when a publisher can't justify printing thousands of copies of a title, they turn to print on demand (POD). This may be for the initial printing of a book or it may be a fallback to keep a book from becoming "out of print" when its popularity wanes.

Why do so many book publishers choose Lightning Source (LS) for their POD? This is very simple. Because LS is owned by Ingram, all books carried by LS are placed in Ingram's book listings. This means that all booksellers who use Ingram (that'd be every one in the U.S.A., plus) is able to see the LS book in the catalogue and order it. That would be fine for anyone expecting the readers to request a book from a bookstore, but it won't put a book on their bookshelf. No bookstore is large enough to carry every published book. Well...

then there is Amazon. While Amazon does not warehouse all of the books it sells, it does maintain a database of every book that it could sell. So to follow the thread, this means that all books in LS are listed in Amazon's database and are searchable and purchasable from http://www.amazon.com. Not only are the books listed, but Amazon keeps ratings and comments about each book, so if the authors or readers wish to comment on a POD book carried by LS, they can do so on Amazon - the largest seller of books in the world. (nope, I'm not gong to bother researching the veracity of Amazon's success)

So, now that many book publishers are using Lightning Source, they receive a nice report showing them their sales. Here's where we get back to Dashbook. Publishers generally need to pay authors and other contributors a percentage of the sales of books. The royalty contracts describing the conditions and amounts can vary quite a bit, and can become unwieldy to track without specialized software like DashBook. Within DashBook, a publisher can describe these royalty arrangements so that subsequent sales transactions will generate royalties accrued to each royalty recipient.

Now that DashBook has a built-in ability to import LS sales reports and perform a currency conversion (LS - U.S., LS - U.K., etc.), we save a lot of typing, which greatly reduces time and errors. In fact, when a publisher has a large list of book sales to import, this can save hours. When you add that savings on top of the time saved in actually performing the royalty calculations, publishers just can't afford not to use a great tool like DashBook.

DashBook v3.1

It's a wrap! DashBook version 3.1 is out the door. Well, it is on the internet for anyone to freely download, and existing DashBook customers will automatically receive the update the next time they run DashBook.

As I wrote in the prior post, the big news for v3.1 is the ability to import orders from text files. We have included common vendors such as Lightning Source (LSI), Fictionwise, and Amazon, but also made the import flexible so that you can map your report columns to DashBook's expected data. Send us the maps you create so that we can add to our "out of the box" experience!

With the import, DashBook automates the process from beginning to end. You can start using DashBook by pasting in your complete list of ISBNs (if you're a book publisher), and DashBook will fetch your titles and authors. Now you can import your sales report to get orders created automatically, and you can still use DashBook's facility to electronically pay your authors and email them their respective royalty reports all at once. Job done. Move on to more fun.

I'll post later about another new feature in DashBook v3.1 that lets you attach your signed royalty contract to DashBook's royalty agreement.

Cheers!