In mid 2019, Amazon released new updates to their KDP reports beta (which now appears to be available to almost all users). This is exciting news for anyone with books published directly on the Amazon platform. If you are selling your own books, you know first-hand how hard it can be to easily and accurately access sales data. And, as many of you know, this is the kind of problem we’ve been waiting for Amazon to fully tackle.
Well… hopefully this is it! In this post we’ll give you a quick overview of what’s new in KDP reports and how it could impact authors. The new KDP reports dashboard is still in its early stages but gives an easy-to-read overview of estimated royalties, daily sales, KENP reads, and more. Since the new KDP reports dashboard is directly connected to KDP, it should be the most accurate way for you to track your Amazon sales. Bottom line – the new reports include feature enhancements that are value-added to authors.
If you’ll use KDP Reports Beta, keep reading to learn more about:
What are the benefits of the new KDP reports?
- Simple, clear graphs display book performance by assigning each book a color of it’s own.
- The layout is beautiful and user-friendly.
- A royalties estimator that calculates the amount of money you are expected to earn this month by taking your past KENP payout rate into consideration.
- Authors can view Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library page reads by custom date and by book title.
- Overall, this enables authors to gain a more accurate understanding of how much money they’re making on books.
Reports overview
As you can see in the image above, this is the dashboard that will greet you when you visit the KDP Reports Beta website. From here, we can see our estimated royalties, sales, KENP reads, and our top-earning books. If you continue to scroll to the bottom of that page, you’ll also see…
The top formats (Kindle, KU, paperback) and marketplaces (the US, China, etc.) that book sales are coming from. Pretty cool, right?
Of course, there’s much more to the Reports Beta than what is included on the homepage. Don’t forget that on the left side of the page you can access an in-depth sales report, your KENP page reads, and a royalties estimator.
The Royalties Estimator is the crown jewel of this new interface. Currently, it is capable of estimating how much an author will earn in the current month. This page can be updated to estimate royalties from just one, several, or all books (even in different marketplaces or formats).
As this is a Reports Beta, expect even more updates and features to roll around to this dashboard in the future.
Let us know what you think about the new reports in the comments below!
I think the new dashboard is so a great improvement and it so helpful to KDP authors.
Really like the new Amazon KDP interface. Sales of my books are presented clearly. Great author benefit from KDP.
I like the article and the enthusiasm, but until Amazon starts reporting Kindle Unlimited book downloads the reports remain crippled. We know Amazon has the information, because they track sales rank based in KU downloads not page reads. We know they “could” report it because they used to before the change to the payment model. My theory is they don’t report it because of some paternalistic need to protect people from learning not every downloader reads a whole book. I find it impossible to like any Amazon reports that withhold available and incredible useful information. The carry-over into the crappy AMS Dashboard sales reports is equally weak. Nit excited about the beta – and no crown jewel just yet. Why not call them out? Amazon, how many downloads have author marketing efforts resulted in? Should the author keep at it? If an average downloader manages 18 pages a day, it could take weeks to get “1 sale” doing silly math that really shouldn’t be necessary. Nope – not excited.
Hey Michael! That’s a great point about not seeing the KU book downloads. Ultimately, though, I do think the KDP reports beta seems to be moving in the right direction. Fingers crossed that Amazon is able to tackle some of these concerns in future updates.
I agree with Michael. We need to see the Kindle Unlimited Downloads. We need some idea how many readers have our books in their que to make decisions about continuing series and so forth.
He’s also right that we need better data from AMS/Amazon Ads. Sales reporting there is extremely slow to non-existent for weeks at a time. There is no reporting at all from AMS of Kindle Unlimited downloads or page reads. That needs to change. I mean, let’s be real; we’re paying for those clicks, so they should be giving us data that lets us actually let’s us see if we’re getting KU downloads as well as sales. I have one book, as an example, that has a couple of hundred clicks in the month my ad for it has been running but not one reported sale. The book sells at least a copy every day and gets hundreds to 1,000 or more KU page reads per day. Amazon Ads make it look like it’s losing me big money.
Michael, in general I agree. This is years now but important still. I continually rail at Amazon to provide authors/content producers/and publishers with access to more insights, in fact I have mentioned they could charge for the access. Simple promotional tools alerting past buyers to future products, surveys, etc would drive massive engagement and more sales. Seriously, the GUI of amazon, google etc… for the size of the company, and depth of the talent is appalling to me. The UI /UXpeople are either clowns or the politics are horrific. This is like saying a Ph.D. Graphics Art level pro who uses chewed crayons for ‘art’ is genius. No, its lazy, and underwhelming.