Onboarding Import: Introduction
The first step towards experiencing the ease of using PubGizmo is probably the least fun: prepping for import your press’s data, including the titles, contacts (authors, translators, literary agents, etc.), editions, contracts, and optionally, previous sales numbers. While you could manually enter everything, importing will be faster, less work, and more accurate, especially if your dataset is large.
Get Your Data into Excel
PubGizmo imports your data from spreadsheets, which you may already use to manage your data. Most software will export to Excel or tab- or comma-delimited formats, which we can also work from. We have templates to get you started organizing everything in the correct format and columns:
- Google Sheets: we much prefer working in Google Sheets, because you can share them with us, and we can test import these. If there are minor issues, we make the edits on the sheets themselves, and try again. Less back-and-forth than option 2, emailing Excel sheets. Google Sheets are free. How to create a set of sheets to work from: Open the template here, then go File > Make a Copy to create your own document on Google Drive to work from.
- Microsoft Excel: you can also work directly in Excel, and email us the sheets. Use the link above to the Google Sheet, and when you have it open, select File > Download > Microsoft Excel (.xlxs). This will save a copy in your Downloads folder, which you can then open in Excel.
What Version Are You Using?
When you submit your sheets, please indicate the version. The set of sheets you create using the link above download today are Version 1.9.
Prepare Five Google/Excel Sheets
- Titles
- Editions
- Organizations
- Contacts (people)
- Contracts
Need Help?
You can email us at any time for help with formatting your sheets. Share your work with us at any time in the process (by using the share function in Google Sheets, or emailing your Excel files) so we can ensure you’re going in the right direction.
Rules for All All Sheets
- Please maintain the column order.
- Try to use date format YYYY-DD-MM (Google Sheets/Excel may reformat these to match your computer’s format settings – this is okay).
- Be relentlessly consistent with all spelling and capitalization. You’ll see in the notes throughout sheet instructions where consistency is essential.
- Because computers are literal, data used to match information on different sheets must exactly match. For example, the Title column on the Editions sheet must perfectly match the title as it appears on the Titles sheet. To match correctly, the following column data must be consistent throughout:
Author Name
Title (only – do not include the Subtitle when matching)
Organization Name