This is the 43rd monthly report for Print My Blog (PMB) WordPress plugin, documenting my journey to be fairly compensated for my time and reach 10,000 active installs.
💰 $8,738.49/$38,019.28 (fairly compensated for time)
🖥5,????/10,000 active installs (on-par with other print button plugins)
What Happened This Month
Downloads
Mailing List Stats
Stats from my MailChimp mailing list.
Website Visits
Stats from my site’s Koko analytics (don’t need no Google Analytics, thank you!)
Freemius Stats
Freemius just upgraded their analytics data, and there’s a ton of it. So much that it’s actually tedious taking screenshots of it (I tried using Nimbus note to take a screenshot of the entire page, but somehow that doesn’t work on this particular page.)
Sales
Audience
Finances and More Plugin Stats
The Details
Interview with an Author Using Print My Blog
Semi-Retired Reporter and Author Mark Scheerer graciously gave me an interview, which I published in a blog post at the very end of the year. He shared his thoughts on publishing a book to Amazon using Print My Blog.
In the spirit of transparency, I admit: his experience wasn’t as good as I would have hoped. Basically, PMB never quite laid out the images as well as he wanted, and he ended up exporting his posts to Microsoft Word and hiring someone to help finish it up and get it on Amazon.
But somehow I think it’s good to share anyway. Mark was at least very pleased with my support and did say he’d recommend using WordPress to publish a book to others, with the caveat “You may well find it works perfectly for you. User experience is always tied to user expertise.”
Tutorial on Publishing a Book on Amazon with Print My Blog
In a similar vein, I made a video tutorial showing how to use Print My Blog to publish a book and eBook to Amazon.
I intended to also write a blog post, taking screenshots from the video (which has only had a lacklustre 11 views so far) because I suspect it’s something Google and other search engines will like to see in text format on my site. So I still intend to write that post soon.
Business User Service
I had my first purchase of a Business license this month that’s actually utilizing the white-glove services offered. Their site uses the Elementor pagebuilder, which has often not integrated great with Print My Blog, so I’ve been working on making it work for their site, and it’s been ok.
Elementor uses CSS flexbox a lot, especially for columns. That’s trouble because flexbox doesn’t work great with PMB’s upstream HTML-to-PDF service, Prince (images get cut off across page breaks). But I realized a workaround that seems promising: change the div using flexbox to use the CSS columns property instead. I think columns works great in print, but less so on web (because the columns end up super long―it needs to have a set height.)
I think the $90 for a month of Business license isn’t sustainable considering how many hours of my time it occupies, but for now, while I’m rusty at it, and the work done for this user also improves PMB, I hope it will be a win-win arrangement.
I also had an introductory video chat with the license purchaser. This is the second time I’ve talked with a custom face-to-face. While email is so much more convenient, there are a lot of details and context that seem to mostly only come out in live chat (for example, the customer reported that they’re trying to replace their membership site with selling books because they’re so often finding themselves being tech-support, when they really just want to focus on their business). Plus, I’m learning that it especially helps when folks are trying to make sense of something new, like my plugin.
Thinking Out Loud
New Freemius Analytics… After Finally Clarifying What the Old Stats Meant
Last month I shared what I finally learned Freemius’ stats meant… only for them to finally get rid of those stats! (I talked with their support and shared my post to Freemius’ Slack channel, so maybe the release of the improved stats was even in response to my post.) They’ve released some way more in-depth stats (which took up about a dozen screenshots instead of 3).
There are a couple bugs in the new analytics still (it said I have negative active installs and choosing the dates is frustrating because they keep on getting changed on you) but overall I much prefer it. As I pointed out last month, many of the old stats weren’t intuitive (like “Uninstalls” being the number of users that activated that month that uninstalled the plugin, it wasn’t total number of sites that uninstalled the plugin) so I’m generally in favour of the change.
Struggling with Pageload Order
I’ve had a number of bug reports in December resulting from Javascript code getting executed in the wrong order. For example, Elementor places the YouTube videos on the page inconveniently after Print My Blog had already looked for them (to convert them into screenshots). Also, with images being lazy-loaded, sometimes the Javascript window.load event gets fired before the document.ready event, which also caused me grief.
WordPress has a somewhat similar problem on the PHP side, but it’s mostly been solved with its actions and filters having various priorities. But it feels like the wild west when it comes to getting your Javascript code to execute at the right time. I’m not sure what a good permanent solution is yet, I only have workarounds.
What’s Next?
Like I said last month, I didn’t get too much done over the holiday. I feel like this month will be mostly bug fixes, some custom design work, and a blog post on publishing to Amazon. Besides that, I really want to figure out how I’m wanting the Print Buttons with Pro Print to work, as it’s such a high-demand feature.
Anyways, thoughts and feedback are welcome!