You will finish the tour with a folder of numbers. Clicks. Opens. Reviews. A sales rank that moved on a Tuesday and then moved back. None of it will mean anything unless you wrote down where you started.
This is the part of tour planning that feels least like planning. It is a spreadsheet, a fixed seven-day window, and about ten minutes a week. It is also the only way to answer the question you will actually ask on day nine of a fourteen-stop tour: is this working, or am I just tired?
The fear underneath the question is real. You are pitching strangers, hoping someone shows up to a blog post or a livestream, spending money you may not recover, and making dozens of small decisions with no publicist to absorb them. A baseline does not remove that fear. It gives you something firmer than a feeling to act on.
Why the baseline comes before stop one, not after
A tour result is a difference, not a number. If you end the tour with 412 email subscribers and you do not know whether you started at 380 or 395, you cannot say what the tour added. You can only say what your list is now, which is a fact about your list, not about the tour.
The same applies to sales, reviews, and traffic. Post-tour figures get read as verdicts when they are really just snapshots. The fix is unglamorous: record a small set of fields in one fixed seven-day window immediately before your first stop, then record the same fields every week until the tour ends.
Choose that window before you book stop one. If you take the snapshot after you have started announcing the tour, you have contaminated the baseline with early tour promotion and you will undercount the tour’s effect. The window should be an ordinary week.
The fields worth recording (and the ones to leave out)
The most useful distinction for a solo author is between leading and lagging numbers. A publishing guide from publishing.co.uk puts it directly: measure leading indicators that predict future sales — email-list growth, review velocity, series read-through, and advertising cost against real royalties — rather than lagging, feel-good numbers like daily sales rank and social follower count. The same guide notes that a weekly spreadsheet beats a fancy dashboard, and that consistency of tracking matters far more than sophistication.
That principle gives you a short list. Keep it short on purpose. A solo author who maintains ten fields will still be maintaining them in week six. One who maintains forty will abandon the sheet by week three, and an abandoned baseline is worse than a modest one because it produces half a story.
Record these every week
- Net new email subscribers. Sign-ups minus unsubscribes, not gross sign-ups. The publishing.co.uk guide recommends tracking net growth together with open rate, because a list growing in size while engagement falls is a warning, not a win.
- Open rate on your most recent newsletter. One number, not a dashboard.
- Units sold per book for the week, from your retailer dashboard. Weekly totals, not daily rank.
- New reviews per book this week. Review velocity tells you whether readers are converting into advocates.
- Ad spend and total royalties for the week, so you can calculate total advertising cost of sale against actual royalties rather than platform-reported figures.
- Series read-through estimate, reviewed monthly rather than weekly: units of book two divided by units of book one over the same period, allowing for launch timing.
Leave these out of the weekly sheet
Daily or hourly sales rank, total social follower count, and ad impressions. The publishing.co.uk guide classifies these as vanity metrics: numbers that can rise without any plausible increase in sales or owned audience. Rank is lagging and volatile; by the time it moves, the cause is over. Follower count is rented reach. Impressions measure exposure, not purchase.
This is where the common advice breaks down. You will hear that you must “track everything” during a campaign. You will also hear that rank is the only honest signal. Both are wrong for a solo author. Tracking everything produces a dashboard you will not maintain; tracking rank produces a number you cannot act on. Track the few fields that change a decision.
Why email subscribers belong at the center
Of all the fields, net subscriber growth deserves the most attention during a tour, because it is the one asset the tour can build that persists after the stops end.
Publishing Xpress describes an email list as the only audience channel an author fully owns, since social platforms can change algorithms or disappear overnight. The same source argues that a small, engaged list of 300 to 500 readers can outperform a large but passive social following on launch day. Treat that as a directional claim from a publishing-services blog, not a benchmark you must hit. The useful part is the logic: a subscriber asked to hear from you; a follower did not necessarily ask for anything.
For a tour, this reframes what a stop is for. A guest post that produces 200 page views and 3 subscribers is not obviously worse than one that produces 40 page views and 3 subscribers. The subscriber number is the one that carries forward. Record it weekly and you will see which stops actually converted attention into an owned audience.
Attribution: accept the fog, measure what steers
Here is the uncomfortable truth about a solo tour. You cannot cleanly separate tour-driven sales from ads, email, organic discovery, and the friend who bought three copies after seeing your post. Retail platforms do not report back to social platforms, and platform consoles cannot see everything that influenced a purchase. The publishing.co.uk guide is blunt about this: perfect attribution is impossible for a solo author, and pursuing it wastes time better spent writing the next book.
So do not build an attribution system. Build a comparison instrument. The baseline week gives you a before. The weekly sheet gives you a during. The same fields recorded after the tour give you an after. What you are looking for is not a precise causal number but a direction and a size: did net subscribers rise faster during the tour than in the weeks before it, and by roughly how much?
That comparison is imperfect. It is also enough to decide whether to run another tour, change your stop mix, or stop pitching a particular kind of host.
An illustrative baseline sheet
The example below is hypothetical, constructed to show the format. It is not a case record and the numbers are not benchmarks.
| Week | Net subscribers | Open rate | Units (book 1) | New reviews | Ad spend | Royalties |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline (pre-tour) | +4 | 38% | 11 | 1 | $0 | $31 |
| Tour week 1 | +19 | 41% | 14 | 2 | $0 | $39 |
| Tour week 2 | +7 | 36% | 9 | 0 | $0 | $26 |
Read that sheet as a steering instrument, not a scoreboard. Week one added subscribers at roughly five times the baseline rate. Week two fell back near baseline. The question that follows is not “did the tour fail?” It is “what was different about week one’s stops?” Maybe one host had a genuinely engaged audience. Maybe the topic of that guest post matched your book. That is a decision you can make mid-tour: pitch more hosts like the week-one host, or change the angle of your remaining stops.
Without the baseline row, week two’s seven subscribers would look like nothing. With it, seven is a modest gain over four, and the real signal is the gap between week one and week two.
Decide in advance what would make you change course
Decision fatigue is the quiet cost of a solo tour. By stop eight you will be tired of judging. The baseline protects you from that by letting you set the trigger before the tour starts.
Write one sentence before stop one: If net subscribers are flat against baseline after four stops, I will change X. X might be the type of host you pitch, the length of your guest post, the call to action at the end of each stop, or the lead magnet you offer. The specific choice matters less than making it in advance, when you are calm and the numbers are not yet personal.
This is the difference between a baseline and a scoreboard. A scoreboard tells you how you did. A baseline tells you what to do next while you can still do it.
What this costs
Time: roughly ten minutes a week to update the sheet, plus one thirty-minute session before stop one to choose the window and fields. Money: nothing, if you use a spreadsheet and the dashboards your retailer and email provider already give you. The publishing.co.uk guide makes the same point: a single spreadsheet updated weekly is enough for a solo author, and better than a sophisticated dashboard you will not maintain.
When this is not worth it: if your tour is a single stop, or if you are running it purely for relationship-building with no expectation of measurable audience growth, the weekly sheet may be more overhead than signal. In that case, record the baseline week anyway — it costs ten minutes — but do not commit to weekly tracking you will not keep.
The pre-tour checklist
- Choose the window. One ordinary seven-day period immediately before stop one, before any tour announcement.
- Choose the fields. Net subscribers, open rate, units per book, new reviews, ad spend, royalties. Add read-through monthly if you have a series.
- Set the weekly review time. Same day, same ten minutes, every week of the tour.
- Write the trigger sentence. What change would make you adjust mid-tour, and what would you adjust?
- Record the baseline row. Then stop thinking about it until week one.
The tour will produce plenty of noise. The baseline is how you tell the noise from the signal — and how you answer, with evidence rather than exhaustion, whether the stops were worth the hours.
FAQ
How far before stop one should I record the baseline?
Immediately before, in one fixed seven-day window, and before you announce the tour publicly. The goal is an ordinary week uncontaminated by early promotion. If you have already started teasing the tour, pick the most recent week before that teasing began and note the caveat.
Do I need paid analytics tools?
No. Your retailer dashboard, your email provider’s reports, and a spreadsheet cover the fields above. The publishing.co.uk guide explicitly recommends a weekly spreadsheet over a sophisticated dashboard for solo authors.
What if my subscriber count goes up but open rate goes down?
Treat it as a warning rather than a win. The publishing.co.uk guide recommends tracking net growth and open rate together for exactly this reason: a list growing in size while engagement falls is not the same as a healthier list.
Can I attribute sales to specific tour stops?
Not cleanly. Retail platforms do not report back to social platforms, and organic, email, and ad activity interact. The practical approach is to compare weekly totals against the baseline and look for direction and size, not a precise per-stop number.
Is a bigger email list always better?
No. Publishing Xpress argues that a small, engaged list can outperform a large, passive following on launch day. Treat that as a directional claim, not a benchmark. The useful question is whether the subscribers you gain during the tour open and act, not just whether the number rose.