Published your book on Amazon, but not sure how to track sales? Confused by all of the options inside of KDP? Want to know how many books you've sold in a certain time period? Then, this blog post is for you! I'm going to show you one of the most fun parts of being a self-publish author, and that is checking your stats - your royalties and getting paid on Amazon KDP.
Note: KDP is making changes, so your steps may look different than what’s shown in the video. The written directions below are from the new reports dashboard. If you’d like to switch to the old reports in your dashboard, select the second to last option on the left hand side within the new repots screen.
First, log into your account at kdp.amazon.com. Amazon has reports that allow you to track many metrics which help make you a better book marketer. Let’s get started.
Reports (Orders)
Click on Reports at the top. On the first page, you’ll see your sales for that day split up by each book. To check sales for other time periods, click on Orders. You'll have all of your available books. The last 30 days is the default view. Life to Date is the full lifetime of your books, last year, 12 months, and then year to date. So that would be January to December. Same thing, you have those options to toggle as well. If you're somebody who likes to keep track of how many books you're selling per month, then you can use this one. However, it only shows you the current month and the previous month. Same thing, you have the option to toggle paperback and hardcover if you have hardcovers.
You can adjust the view to your liking based on dates, book, author, etc. Additionally, you’ll be able to compare books. You'll see the different color-coding that is there to represent each different book. As you look across the top, you can also toggle to different options. If you have pen names or other names you could toggle those on and off and it'll show you how many books, were sold for each one. If you're somebody who likes line graphs over bar graphs, then you'll be able to see it that way.
You can also see each of the countries that your books are being sold in - the United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, India, Canada, Mexico, and then Australia.
See Different Book Formats
If you have books that are on Kindle, it will show you how many pages have been read of your books which is fun to see (click on KNEP Read). You also get paid for pages read! You have the option to see which formats of your book are selling the best. This is helpful information for your marketing and in general.
Payments (Royalties Estimator)
On this tab, you’ll be able to adjust the different settings like you did under the Reports (Orders) page. The next screen is payments (royalties estimator) which shows you how you're getting paid from each marketplace (basically per country). Your inital payment will be shown first in the currency of that country, and then your country’s currency will be shown in the final column. As mentioned earlier , you get paid for page turns which you'll be able to see in the KENP column. Each of these country’s royalties are going to show up in your bank account as different transaction. If you have direct deposit, they’ll automatically deposit towards the end of the month, usually on the 27th, but the exact day depends on your bank.
Pre-orders Promotions
You only need Pre-orders if you have those set up and in promotions, if you're running Kindle Countdown Deals ads. Prior months royalties simply shows a breakdown or your sales from each marketplace for each of your previous months. If you wanted to see how much did you make in January or whatever the case may be, then you can see it that way. Amazon Ads, Author Central, KDP Select, A+ Content, and Price Promotions can all be found under the Marketing Tab. If you need assistance with these features, please don’t hesitate to reach out at info@sheppublishing.com to find out what options may work for you.
If you're using the new version of the dashboard, the features are slightly different, but contain the same information.. This is in beta at the time of this blog post, so it might not actually be on your account just yet, but this is kind of the overall look.
General KDP Dashboard Tips
Keep in mind, your sales won’t show up in the dashboard until the book is shipped. Someone could have actually bought your book on Saturday so it might not have shipped. That could be because it hasn't been sent from the printer. Give it a couple days to update your sales.
Lastly, a survey is featured to give feedback on the new beta version which is kind of a new feature that they like to add in so that they can get different feedback for what they should include in this updated version.
Let me know in the comments below, if you have any questions or if this was helpful. What do you think of the new KDP dashboard?
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