Frequently Asked Questions

ScribeCount is an author operating system — a single platform that gives independent authors complete visibility and control over every aspect of their publishing business. It brings your sales data, advertising performance, email marketing, direct store sales, and reader relationships together in one place, so you can make smarter decisions, spend less time on administration, and focus more time on writing.

ScribeCount started as a sales analytics tool and has grown into a full publishing intelligence and marketing platform. Whether you are just starting out or managing a catalog of dozens of titles across multiple platforms, ScribeCount is built to scale with your career.

Yes. ScribeCount offers a 14-day free trial that gives you full access to the platform so you can explore every feature and see whether it fits your business before you commit to a subscription. No credit card is required to start your trial. Sign up at portal.scribecount.com to get started.

ScribeCount is built for every author regardless of distribution strategy. Whether you publish exclusively through Kindle Unlimited, distribute wide across multiple platforms, or run a hybrid of both, ScribeCount provides dashboard views and reporting options optimized for your specific model. If you have books in both KU and wide distribution, you can configure ScribeCount to display data in the way that makes the most sense for your catalog.

Yes. ScribeCount is fully responsive and optimized for mobile devices, tablets, and desktop browsers. You can access your dashboard, review reports, and manage your settings from any device with an internet connection.

ScribeCount operates on a subscription model because the platform requires continuous infrastructure, ongoing development, and active maintenance to function reliably across a constantly changing landscape of publishing platforms, advertising networks, and email services. Every platform ScribeCount connects to updates its systems regularly — keeping those connections working is an ongoing operation, not a one-time build.

The subscription model also means we can continuously add new features, improve existing ones, and respond to the evolving needs of the indie author community.

ScribeCount pricing is based on your income from the previous month, which means your subscription cost scales with your earnings. Authors just starting out pay less, while authors with larger revenues pay more — a model designed to be fair at every stage of your career.

At the end of your 14-day trial, you will be prompted to add your billing information. ScribeCount will calculate your first charge based on your reported income from the previous month, and billing continues monthly from that point. Full pricing details are available at scribecount.com/pricing.

ScribeCount accepts payments via Stripe and PayPal. Stripe supports Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and direct bank debit. Stripe is PCI Service Provider Level 1 rated — the highest security standard in the payments industry. ScribeCount never stores or has access to your payment card details. All payment information is handled directly by Stripe or PayPal.

Yes. You can cancel your subscription at any time by clicking the Cancel Subscription button on the Subscription page within your account settings. ScribeCount will process your cancellation within 48 hours. You will retain access to the platform until the end of your current paid subscription period. Contact support@scribecount.com if you have any billing questions.

Differences between ScribeCount data and platform dashboards are common and expected. Most platforms provide both a real-time dashboard and a downloadable spreadsheet, and these two sources do not always agree. ScribeCount pulls from the most accurate available source for each platform, which is typically the downloadable spreadsheet.

Amazon: ScribeCount uses the spreadsheet rather than the real-time dashboard because it includes only fully processed sales and is more accurate.

Apple: Apple uses a business calendar that divides months into 28, 28, 28, and 35-day periods. ScribeCount adjusts Apple data to align with the standard calendar.

Barnes & Noble: B&N's dashboard excludes sales from the final two days of the reporting period. ScribeCount pulls from the spreadsheet, which includes those delayed sales.

ScribeCount also uses verification software to detect and correct anomalies automatically, accounting for coupon codes, price matching, and short-term promotions.

ScribeCount pulls: sales numbers by title, market, and time period; KENP data for KU authors; book IDs and catalog metadata; book ranks across categories and markets; reader reviews and ratings; book prices across markets; KU enrollment dates; geographic sales data; royalty and revenue data; and advertising performance data from connected ad platforms.

ScribeCount cannot and does not modify any data on the platforms it connects to. The connection is strictly read-only.

ScribeCount calculates KU page-read income using one of three options you can select in settings: the previous month's published payout rate, the average payout rate over the last six months, or a custom rate you enter yourself. Your selected rate is used to calculate estimated KU income until the 15th of each month, at which point ScribeCount updates to the officially published rate from Amazon.

ScribeCount automatically recognizes your KU payment tier and applies the appropriate bonus rate to your income calculations. You can also manually enter KU bonus information directly into your ScribeCount reports to ensure your income picture is complete before the automated recognition kicks in.

ScribeCount supports full time zone and currency customization. Go to your account Settings to select your preferred time zone and currency. By default, ScribeCount is configured for Eastern Standard Time and US Dollars.

Yes. ScribeCount is continuously expanding its list of supported publishing and retail platforms. New integrations are in active development, and we prioritize them based on community demand. If you publish on a platform not yet supported, send your request to support@scribecount.com.

ScribeCount is built around a core principle: you should never have to hand over your passwords or install software you cannot see and verify.

For your publishing platform connections, ScribeCount uses a small browser extension — similar to tools like Honey or Google Translate — that creates a secure, read-only connection between your browser, your publishing platforms, and ScribeCount. The extension pulls data from your platforms and sends it to ScribeCount's encrypted servers. It cannot modify any data on any platform it connects to.

For ScribeCount Email and direct store integrations, connections are established through secure API keys and webhooks — industry-standard mechanisms that give ScribeCount only the specific data access it needs to power the features you use, nothing more.

ScribeCount uses a browser extension to connect to your publishing platforms. Think of the extension as your personal doorman: it controls exactly what ScribeCount can and cannot see, and it works for you — not for ScribeCount. Unlike other reporting services that ask you to hand over your credentials, ScribeCount's extension means you log in to each platform yourself, exactly as you normally would. The extension facilitates the data transfer without ever seeing or storing your password. ScribeCount never has access to your login credentials for any platform.

The ScribeCount browser extension is a small software application — the same category of tool as widely used extensions like AdBlock, Honey, or Google Translate. It has been reviewed and approved by Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, and the extension code is publicly visible on the Chrome and Firefox extension portals for full transparency. It is read-only and cannot modify data on any platform.

ScribeCount uses cookies in two distinct ways. On the marketing website and platform portal, we use cookies for authentication, session management, analytics, and performance — as described in our Cookie Policy.

For platform connections, ScribeCount uses encrypted cookies generated by the publishing platforms themselves — not by ScribeCount — to maintain your data connections. These are the platforms' own cookies, relayed through the extension. ScribeCount uses them solely to keep your connections live. The extension remains read-only throughout.

Log out without disabling connections: ScribeCount stops requesting data while you are logged out. Your settings and previously collected data remain saved so your next login is faster.

Disable platform connections and log out: ScribeCount stops all data collection, your settings are cleared, and all your data is purged from our servers. A full data reload will be required on your next login.

You have two options: disable all platform connections (which removes your data and clears your settings), or use the Delete All My Data button in your account settings to purge your data while keeping your platform connections and settings intact.

All data stored at ScribeCount is protected using AES 256-bit encryption — the same standard used by financial institutions and governments worldwide. In the event of an unauthorized access attempt, your data would appear as a random, unreadable collection of characters to any attacker. ScribeCount's data infrastructure is hosted on Microsoft Azure.

Ransomware targeting your ScribeCount data is not a meaningful concern for two reasons. First, your publishing data lives on the platforms you publish through — not solely on ScribeCount. Second, ScribeCount is backed by Microsoft Azure's cloud infrastructure, which means we can rebuild and restore the service rapidly from backups.

No. ScribeCount never sees, stores, or processes your payment card numbers, bank account details, or any other sensitive financial credentials. All payment transactions are handled directly by Stripe and PayPal, both of which adhere to PCI-DSS standards. Contact support@scribecount.com for subscription-level billing questions.

Processing on ScribeCount's servers is necessary because: the volume of data and complexity of cross-platform calculations exceeds what individual computers can handle reliably; ScribeCount collects new data every 15 minutes — including when your computer is off; publishing platforms update their systems frequently, requiring a centralized team to keep connections working; and ScribeCount Email and store integrations require server-side processing to function.

ScribeCount Email is a fully integrated email marketing platform built directly into ScribeCount. It gives independent authors everything they need to build a subscriber list, send professional email campaigns, create automated email flows, and manage their reader relationships — all within the same platform where they track their sales and advertising.

Unlike standalone email tools that require manual data exports, ScribeCount Email is natively connected to your sales data, your store, and your reader history. Your email automation can respond to real reader behavior — purchases, cart abandonments, series completions — automatically.

A campaign is an email you manually schedule and send — a newsletter, a book launch announcement, a flash sale, a cover reveal. You write it, choose who receives it, and decide when it goes out.

A flow is an automated sequence of emails that fires on its own in response to something a reader does — signing up for your list, completing a purchase, abandoning a cart, going quiet for 90 days. You build the flow once and it runs continuously in the background.

The most effective author email systems use both: flows handle the always-on relationship work, campaigns handle the planned moments that matter.

ScribeCount Email includes 30 pre-built flow types across six categories, including: welcome flow, post-purchase thank you, abandoned cart and checkout recovery, post-purchase follow-up (review requests), re-engagement flow, series completion, digital delivery, and subscription management flows.

Each flow includes configurable dwell times, decision branches, and conditional logic so the right reader always gets the right message at the right moment.

ScribeCount Email supports 36 campaign types across seven groups: broadcast campaigns (newsletters, announcements, cover reveals), promotional campaigns (book launches, price promotions, flash sales, BookBub features), ARC and launch support, drip campaigns, segmented campaigns, re-engagement campaigns, and community and event campaigns (giveaways, newsletter swaps, reader surveys).

ScribeCount Email integrates directly with your direct sales store — Shopify, WooCommerce, and other supported platforms — through a secure API and webhook connection. Once connected, your store sends real-time notifications to ScribeCount Email whenever a reader completes a purchase, abandons a cart, or cancels a subscription. ScribeCount Email receives those notifications and automatically fires the appropriate email flow in response. The connection is established once during setup and runs automatically from that point forward.

Email authentication is a set of technical records — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — that you add to your domain's settings to prove to inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook that your emails are legitimate. Without authentication, your emails are more likely to be routed to spam folders regardless of your content quality. With authentication properly configured, inbox providers trust your emails, dramatically improving the likelihood they reach your readers' primary inboxes. ScribeCount Email provides a step-by-step Authentication Setup guide and an in-dashboard verification tool.

A custom sending domain moves your emails so they come from your own author domain (e.g., hello@yourname.com) instead of a shared platform domain. This gives you an isolated sender reputation and makes emails feel more personal and professional. Custom sending domain setup is included in the Authentication Setup guide and takes approximately 15 minutes to configure.

Every email sent through ScribeCount Email includes a functioning unsubscribe link as required by CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CASL, and other applicable email laws. When a reader clicks unsubscribe, they are removed from your active list immediately and permanently suppressed from all future sends. Unsubscribed addresses cannot be re-added through automation — any re-subscription must be initiated voluntarily by the reader.

The Pre-Send Score Check is an automated quality control tool that ScribeCount Email runs on your email content before it goes out. It analyzes your subject line, preview text, body copy, links, and technical headers and returns a score out of 100 along with specific feedback on anything likely to cause deliverability problems. The check covers content analysis, technical analysis, link analysis, and compliance analysis. ScribeCount Email will send any email regardless of its score — the check is advisory, not a gate.

A segment is a defined group of subscribers who share one or more characteristics — purchase history, engagement behavior, geographic location, or subscription status. Segmentation lets you send different messages to different groups based on what you already know about them. Targeted emails consistently outperform broadcast emails on open rate, click rate, and conversion rate because they feel personal and relevant. ScribeCount Email builds segments automatically from your store purchase data, flow activity, and engagement history.

Subscriber list size limits and monthly email sending volume limits depend on your ScribeCount subscription tier. Full details are available at scribecount.com/pricing. ScribeCount monitors sending volume across the platform to protect deliverability for all users.

Yes. As the author and data controller for your subscriber list, you are responsible for ensuring that your email marketing practices comply with the laws applicable to your subscribers' jurisdictions — including CAN-SPAM (US), GDPR (EU and EEA), CASL (Canada), PECR (UK), and any other applicable laws. ScribeCount Email provides the tools to support compliance, but the obligation to obtain lawful consent, provide required disclosures, and honor opt-out requests rests with you as the list owner.

Direct sales means selling your books directly to readers through your own author website store, rather than exclusively through retail platforms like Amazon or Kobo. When a reader buys from your store, you receive approximately 97 cents of every dollar compared to 35–70 cents through retail platforms.

Direct sales also give you complete control over your reader relationships. You know who bought your book, you can email them directly, you can offer exclusive products and bundles, and you are not dependent on any single platform's algorithm or policy changes. ScribeCount integrates your direct store data into your dashboard alongside your retail platform data.

ScribeCount currently supports direct integration with Shopify and WooCommerce. Support for additional direct sales platforms including Payhip and Gumroad is in development. Send requests to support@scribecount.com.

Connecting your store to ScribeCount takes approximately 15 minutes and requires no technical background. The setup process walks you through generating a secure API key in your store platform and adding a webhook URL. Once connected, your store sends ScribeCount a notification every time a reader completes a purchase, abandons a cart, creates or cancels a subscription, or triggers a refund. Full setup instructions are in the Store Integration Guide, accessible from your ScribeCount dashboard.

No. Payment processing is handled entirely by your store's payment provider. What ScribeCount receives from your store are event notifications only: the fact that a purchase occurred, the buyer's email address, the title purchased, and the order amount. No card numbers, no bank details, no sensitive payment data.

Yes. If you sell from multiple storefronts — for example, a Shopify store for your main catalog and a separate store for a specific series or pen name — you can connect both from your ScribeCount Store Integration settings. Each store generates its own connection credentials and reports independently in your dashboard.

ScribeCount is actively developing: ScribeCount Intelligence (AI-powered market analytics); AuthorVault (rights management and contract organization); PromoFLOW (promotional campaign planning and automation); ScribeCount Industry Reports (aggregated, anonymized market data); additional retail platform integrations; social media integrations; and advanced email analytics including click mapping and predictive engagement scoring.

Subscribe to the ScribeCount newsletter at scribecount.com for feature announcements, platform news, and early access invitations. ScribeCount subscribers also receive in-platform notifications when new features become available. To submit a feature request, use the Submit a Suggestion form.

Pricing for new features will be communicated before each launch. Some features will be included in existing subscription tiers; others may be available as add-ons or as part of higher subscription tiers. ScribeCount will always provide advance notice of any pricing changes before they take effect.

Email support: support@scribecount.com — typically responds within one business day.

Live chat: Available from the ScribeCount dashboard for real-time help with setup, integrations, and technical issues.

Help center: Step-by-step guides, setup documentation, and troubleshooting articles accessible from the dashboard.

This FAQ: If you cannot find what you need here, use the question submission form below.

Yes — and we genuinely appreciate it. Submit it using the suggestion form at scribecount.com/suggestions. We review all submissions and feature the best resources through our community channels.

Yes. ScribeCount is a proud partner of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) and Novelists, Inc. (NINC). These partnerships reflect ScribeCount's commitment to the professional indie author community and to supporting organizations that advocate for author rights and professional development.