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I am looking for the best way to set up an Airtable to keep track of a lot of book publishing details with minimal repetitive data entry and as human proof as possible. I’m on the free plan. 
 

The situation:

I have several book series (Power of Five, Dragons, Talonswood, Trident, Draken). Each book series has multiple books. Each book can be published in multiple formats (ebook, paperback, hardback, discrete paperback, discrete hardback). Each book is being translated into multiple languages (English, German, French, Italian). After translation, each book, in each format, needs to be uploaded to several platforms (KDP, Kobo, Ingram, Tolino, D2D). Not all books get uploaded to all platforms. For example, English language books don’t get uploaded to Tolino. 
 

I need to somehow keep track of this mess so me and my assistant know what’s been done and what hasn’t. Also would be good to keep track of an error log so we know what’s needs to be fixed. 
 

how would you set this up?? 

Hey ​@Alex_Lidell!

Sounds like the kind of projects I enjoy!

I built a quick base fro you to take a look at, with the architecture I would suggest -subject to some tweaks depending on your specific needs. Check it out here.

High-level, this would have Series. Series have books under it. Books get multiple versions of it, called Translations. Each translation needs to get uploaded into multiple platforms, under table called Uploads.

Each of this tables could have its own status field for it to work as a project management system.
 



Sounds like a fun project. Please feel free to schedule a call using this link if you’d like to go through the general principles together.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Thank you!! Ok, so adjusting slightly for my flow, I’m creating 5 tables: market (language), platform, series, book, format. 
 

then a master “Published” junction table 

View limited by Market and platform

 

problem: there is a lot of data entry for set up  for each book and all formats. I’m my ideal world I can enter a series, and Airtable can auto generate records for each book in that series for me, and all 5 possible formats for each book. So for a 7 book series, I’d select the series and a platform and it would generate 7x5 records 

 

want idea how to do that?

 

Sure!

Is the data entry just entering same data across all books under one Series? If so, rather than entering that data you will probably want to use lookup fields. More on lookup fields here.

Regarding record creation, you can have an automation create a Published record for every single book for every single market and platform.

Markets:
Spanish
English
French

Platforms:
Platform A
Platform B


E.g. Book ABC

As soon as automation gets triggered, auto-generate:
Book ABC | Spanish | Platform A
Book ABC | Spanish | Platform B
Book ABC | English | Platform A
Book ABC | English | Platform B
Book ABC | French | Platform A
Book ABC | French | Platform B

Please let me know if you have any question on how to set this up!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Data entering is about creating all the permutations, which it sounds like you have a way of solving through automation.  So specific use case:

 

”I need to make sure I have all my books uploaded in German to Tolino in all formats. I know I have some uploaded and some not, and I need to go through that… ok Airtable I’ve selected “German”, “Tolino” and a series name. Can I click something so that you then generate 

 

book 1 ebook

book 1 paperback 

book 1 hardback

book 2 ebook

book 2 paperback 

 

etc  

 

I will then go and check if in each record whether it’s been uploaded, overlooked or errored out”

 

What would be the automation id use? Thank you so much the the help

 

Try using multiple tables and an automation with a ‘Repeating Group’ action:

And this is how the automation looks:

I’ve set it up here for you to check out.  I only set it up for Format and Language but haven’t set it up for Platform as I’m not sure what other qualifiers you have for it

 

If I were you I reckon I’d just do the exact same automation and create one record per Platform in the “Tasks” table, and then put the extra logic into a formula field though (e.g. that thing about English books not being uploaded to Tolino).  That way the automation’s simpler to deal with

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If you were on a Teams plan this would be somewhat trivial to do with a script, but on a Free plan we can’t use scripts and only have 100 automation runs, so I worry that you might hit the automation and record limit pretty quick.  After all the records are generated in ‘Tasks’ you can delete all the records from the previous tables too if that helps

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