Hello Reader,

Have you ever paid money for some sort of marketing and wondered if you were getting any kind of return on investment?

(Literally everyone raises their hands.)

Or maybe you've spent countless hours doing something for your marketing - and you're not sure if it's worth the amount of time you're spending?

Yep, most of us have been there too.

While there are some things just require some elbow grease to get done and may not have a tangible return on investment for quite some time, that's not the case with everything.

Examples of things that take a long time and may be slow to yield huge results (but still require consistent action):

• Growing number of email subscribers
• Growing number of KU page reads
• Increasing social media following
• More sales
• More purchases of your products, courses, tools, etc

It's also true that some activities are just a waste of time and money.

You've got to be looking at data to measure results and determine if anything positive is coming from it.

If you're not tracking your data and doing some analysis on where your money and time are going vs. the results you are or are not seeing in platform growth and sales, how do you know what's fruitful and what's a waste of your time?

Why Authors Should Track Stats and Data

1. Measure What’s Working (and What’s Not)​
Tracking data like sales, email open rates, ad performance, or social media engagement shows you what marketing efforts are effective—so you can focus your time and resources wisely.

2. Set and Achieve Goals​
Knowing your starting point helps you set clear, measurable goals (e.g., increase book sales, grow your email list, improve open rates). You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

3. Refine Your Audience Targeting​
Stats like Amazon category rankings, email click-through rates, or reader demographics help you understand your audience and create better content and offers for them.

4. Build a Stronger Author Platform​
When you know what content or channels your audience engages with, you can create more of that—leading to better engagement, stronger launches, and long-term loyalty.

5. Leverage Opportunities (Like Pitches & Sponsorships)​
Having stats on hand—like number of books sold, email list size, or engagement rates—makes you more appealing to agents, publishers, podcast hosts, and potential sponsors.

6. Understand ROI on Expenses​
Tracking advertising and promotional costs against resulting sales or traffic helps you determine which tools and platforms are worth the investment.

7. Track Growth Over Time​
Keeping an eye on trends month to month or year over year helps you understand your long-term growth and where to focus your next efforts.

You can track all of this by simply creating a spreadsheet of numbers of sales, reviews, etc when you start a promotion and how those grow over the next few weeks/months, etc.

This is just ONE of the many topics we cover in Book Launch in a Box - our six month guided program on preparing for your next book launch.

Our 2025 cohort kicks off on June 23rd, and we're currently in Early Bird pricing - click here to save 30%!​

If you have questions about Book Launch in a Box, please join me on May 29th at 2pm ET/NY time zone for an open Q&A session about the program.

​Register for the Q&A here!​

Write on!

Alexa

Alexa Bigwarfe

Author coach & Publishing Consultant

Write|Publish|Sell

​Join us for the 2025 Book Launch in a Box Cohort!​