Now you’ve seen a brief tour of what BookTrakr can do for you. But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many ways that you can look at your data that we couldn’t possibly cover them all in this brief tour. If you want to try it, click below and start your free trial!
BookTrakr supports books published with:*
* Please note: You must publish through your own account with one or more of the above services in order for BookTrakr to work for you.
Every night, BookTrakr automatically logs into your store accounts in much the same way you would and downloads your sales reports. It then converts these raw reports into a common format so that numbers from different stores and countries can be compared and combined. It also visits the web pages for each of your books to extract its reviews, ratings, and rankings, and scours the bookstores' bestseller lists looking for BookTrakr users' books.
This is all done completely automatically; no human ever uses your account data.
In order to get your sales figures, BookTrakr must log in to the booksellers' sites on your behalf. There is simply no way to get accurate sales numbers without access to accounts. Some other services guess sales based on rankings, but those estimates can be wildly inaccurate.
We use the most sophisticated methods available to keep your logins and passwords safe. All of your sensitive data is kept encrypted; only parts of the software that need to use your passwords can decrypt them. BookTrakr employees cannot see your logins or passwords.
Our support for Google Play uses a completely different procedure where you grant BookTrakr access to your account without giving us any passwords, and you can also set up a separate iTunes Connect user with limited access for BookTrakr to use. Unfortunately, the other bookstores don't yet offer similar options; we're lobbying to get them to add them, and will adopt them if they become available.
We understand that not all potential users will be comfortable sharing their passwords with us. All we can do is ask you to trust us.
BookTrakr is a small, family-run business. Jack Royal-Gordon, BookTrakr's CEO, was formerly responsible for the security of over $2 billion in bank accounts for a financial services business in his role as Chief Technical Officer, moving millions of dollars in deposits among thousands of accounts every day involving the largest US banks, without ever losing a penny. He has extensive experience securing sensitive information. Since he's married to NY Times bestselling author Lauren Royal, he understands the sensitivity of the information protected by your login credentials.
BookTrakr staff never have contact with your credentials. They are used only by a fully-automated procedure that uses them to fetch sales figures from the bookstores. For more on the technical measures we use to protect your bookstore accounts, see How do you secure authors' login credentials?
BookTrakr is designed specifically to protect your bookstore passwords. Bookstore passwords are encrypted when we store them, and only parts of our system that talk to the bookstores can access the keys needed to decrypt them. These parts of BookTrakr are specially isolated from the pages users access, making it very difficult for a hacker to even find, let alone access, the decryption keys. Having extensive background in security, we feel that we have done everything possible to safeguard your sensitive data.
Passwords to log in to BookTrakr itself are secured using industry-standard one-way encryption. Nobody—not even BookTrakr itself—can actually decrypt these passwords; you can only check if a provided password is correct. Someone attempting to break into your account would be forced to guess possible passwords until he stumbled across the right one; to make this more difficult, we encourage you to pick strong passwords.
All communications with BookTrakr are secured with SSL, the same technology that secures e-commerce and online banking sites, so nobody can steal your passwords or your sales numbers in transit.
(Technical details: Bookstore passwords in our database are encrypted with a 2048-bit RSA key. The BookTrakr front-end app has access to the public key, allowing users to set passwords, but only the backend app has access to the private key, allowing it to read those passwords later. BookTrakr login passwords are stored with bcrypt, with a different random salt for each password.)
Visit our Support Center which has more articles answering common questions. You can also email us from there with your question if it's not answered there. Click the Help button at the top right of this page to go to the Support Center.