KDP Download Reports: Sales Analytics & Insights

Okay so the reports section in KDP is honestly where most people mess up because they just download the sales dashboard numbers once and think that’s all there is. But there’s like five different report types and they all show different stuff, which is super annoying but also useful once you figure out what each one does.

First thing – the main reports you’re gonna use are in the Reports tab, obviously. But KDP splits everything into “Payments” and “Reports” which confused the hell out of me for like my first year. Payments shows what Amazon actually paid you (after their cut, after returns, all that). Reports shows raw sales data before some of those adjustments. I still check both because sometimes there’s discrepancies and you need to understand why.

The Main Report Types You Actually Need

So there’s the Month-to-Date Unit Sales report which is your basic “how many books sold today/this week/this month” thing. This updates pretty much in real time, maybe with a few hours delay. I check this one obsessively during launches because it’s the fastest way to see if your promo is actually working or if you just wasted money on ads.

Then there’s the Prior Months’ Royalties report and this is the one that actually matters for your taxes and real income tracking. It shows finalized sales from like 60 days ago because of Amazon’s return window. People can return ebooks within 7 days but paperbacks have a longer window, so Amazon holds that data back to account for returns.

Oh and another thing – the Sales Dashboard is separate from downloadable reports. The dashboard is pretty but it’s limited. You can’t export the data easily and it doesn’t give you some of the granular stuff. I use it for quick checks but for real analysis you gotta download the actual CSV or Excel files.

Geographic Rights Report

This one’s interesting because it shows where your books are selling by country. I didn’t pay attention to this for years and then I noticed one of my planners was selling like crazy in Germany for some reason. Turned out the niche I accidentally hit was way bigger there than in the US. So now I actually optimize some listings for UK/EU markets separately.

The geographic data helps you figure out if you should enroll in Expanded Distribution or if certain markets are dead for your niche. Like I have a recipe journal that sells maybe 2 copies a month in the US but does surprisingly well in Canada. No idea why, but I’ll take it.

How to Actually Download and Use This Stuff

Go to Reports > Payments. You’ll see a date range selector at the top. For regular monthly tracking I download the prior full month around the 15th of each month because that’s when the data is mostly finalized. You can pick Month-to-Date, Last Month, Custom Date Range, whatever.

The file format options are Excel or CSV. I always do CSV because it’s smaller and opens faster, plus I import everything into Google Sheets anyway. Excel files from KDP can be weirdly formatted sometimes.

Wait I forgot to mention – there’s also an “Orders Report” vs a “Royalties Report” and these are NOT the same thing. Orders shows every transaction. Royalties shows what you actually earned after Amazon’s cut, delivery fees for ebooks, printing costs for paperbacks, all that.

For low-content books especially, the printing cost thing is huge. A 120-page planner might sell for $8.99 but Amazon’s printing cost could be like $3.50, then they take their 40% cut, and suddenly your royalty is like $2.20. The Orders Report just shows the $8.99 sale. The Royalties Report shows the $2.20 you actually made.

The Columns That Actually Matter

Okay so when you download a royalties report, you get like 20+ columns and most are useless. Here’s what I actually look at:

• Title – obviously, which book sold
• ASIN – the Amazon product ID, useful for tracking if you have multiple editions
• Marketplace – which Amazon store (US, UK, DE, etc)
• Royalty Type – KDP Select earnings vs regular sales vs KENP reads
• Transaction Type – Sale, Refund, or Free promotion
• Units Sold – how many copies
• Royalty – what you actually earned

I ignore stuff like “Currency” because I only care about USD, and “Promotion” unless I’m running a specific promo campaign.

The KENP stuff is Kindle Edition Normalized Pages – that’s page reads from Kindle Unlimited. If you’re in KDP Select this is huge. Some months my KENP earnings are higher than actual sales, especially for longer books. The rate per page changes monthly but it’s usually around $0.004 per page read.

Setting Up Your Tracking System

This is gonna sound weird but I have a Google Sheet that I’ve been updating since 2018 and it’s just… a running log of monthly totals per book. Nothing fancy. Every month I download the royalty report, filter by title, sum up the earnings and units for each book, and log it in my sheet.

Takes like 15 minutes a month but then I can see trends over years. Like I have one coloring book that’s been earning $200-400 every single month for 5 years straight. I wouldn’t have noticed that pattern without tracking it manually.

You could use fancy tools like Publisher Rocket or KDP Spy or whatever, but honestly the built-in reports plus a basic spreadsheet is enough for most people. I tried Book Bolt’s analytics for a while and it was cool but I didn’t renew because the KDP data is already there, you just gotta organize it yourself.

The 60-Day Delay Thing

So this trips people up constantly. Amazon pays you approximately 60 days after the end of the month when sales happened. Sales from January get paid out around the end of March. BUT the reports in your account show different timeframes depending on which report you’re looking at.

Month-to-Date shows current month sales immediately, but those could still get returned or refunded. Prior Months’ Royalties shows finalized data from 60+ days ago. And the Payment page shows what they’re actually gonna deposit to your bank account.

I keep a separate “pending earnings” tracker because of this. Current month sales go in as “pending” and I don’t count that money as real until it hits my bank account 60 days later. Helps with budgeting because otherwise you think you made $2k this month but you won’t actually see that money until April.

Analyzing What’s Actually Selling

Okay so funny story, I had like 180 books published at one point and I realized I had no idea which ones were making money. Downloaded a full year’s royalty report, filtered and summed everything by title, and found out that literally 12 books were generating 80% of my income. The other 168 were basically dead weight.

That analysis changed everything. I started focusing on making more books similar to those 12 winners instead of just publishing random stuff. My income went from like $5k/month to $15k/month in about 8 months just from doubling down on what was already working.

Here’s how to do that analysis – download a full year or even two years of royalty data. Import into Google Sheets. Make a pivot table with Title as rows and sum of Royalty as values. Sort descending. Look at your top 20% of books. Those are your winners. Everything else is noise.

Then look at what those winners have in common. Same niche? Same format? Same price point? Same cover style? For me it was specific types of planners and journals with minimal interiors but really nice covers. So I made more of those.

Seasonal Patterns You Can’t See Without Historical Data

This is where tracking over years matters. I have a budget planner that sells okay year-round but absolutely explodes every December and January. Like it’ll do $300/month normally then $2,500 in January. If I only looked at one month’s data I’d think it was either a huge hit or a total dud depending on when I checked.

Same with certain activity books – they spike in summer when kids are out of school, tank in September, spike again before Christmas. You need at least 2 years of data to see these patterns clearly.

My cat just knocked over my coffee all over my desk, hold on…

Okay back. So yeah, seasonal stuff. Once you identify seasonal products you can plan ahead. Like I know my Q4 books, so I make sure to have new similar titles ready by October, run ads in November, all that. Without the historical reports I’d just be guessing.

The KENP Read-Through Problem

If you’re in KDP Select and you have series or related books, KENP data shows you something interesting – whether people are actually reading through your books or dropping off halfway.

Like I had a 200-page guided journal and the KENP reads were averaging like 50 pages per borrow. That means 75% of people who borrowed it didn’t even finish it. That’s a problem. Either the book wasn’t engaging or it wasn’t what they expected.

I can’t fix that directly through reports but knowing the number helped me improve the next version. Added more variety to the prompts, made it more interactive, and the next version’s average KENP read is like 140 pages. Much better.

You can kinda calculate this by taking total KENP reads for a month, dividing by the number of borrows (which you can estimate from the KENP units data), and comparing to your total page count. It’s not perfect but gives you a rough read-through rate.

Ad Campaign Tracking Through Reports

Oh wait I forgot to mention – if you’re running Amazon Ads, the advertising reports are completely separate from KDP reports. You gotta go to ads.amazon.com and download those separately. Super annoying.

But then you can cross-reference your ad spend with your sales reports to figure out actual ROI. I have another spreadsheet tab where I log monthly ad spend per book alongside the sales earnings from the KDP report.

Sometimes you’ll spend $200 on ads for a book and only make $150 in royalties that month, but then the next month (after you turned off ads) you’re still making $100/month from the visibility boost. So the ad campaign was profitable, just not immediately. You wouldn’t see that without tracking both over time.

Tax Time and Why You Need These Reports

Your accountant is gonna want detailed records. The payment summaries Amazon sends aren’t enough for a real tax filing if you’re making decent money. I download the full year royalty report in January and give that to my accountant along with my expense tracking.

The report shows exactly how much you earned from US sales vs international sales, which matters for tax purposes. It also breaks out KDP Select earnings separately which can be categorized differently in some cases.

Plus if you ever get audited (hasn’t happened to me, knock on wood), you have Amazon’s official reports as documentation. Screenshots of the dashboard aren’t gonna cut it.

Returns and Refunds Analysis

This is depressing but important. The reports show returns and refunds as negative transactions. Every few months I filter for just the refunds and see which books are getting returned most.

If a book has like a 10% return rate, something’s wrong. Either the listing is misleading, the interior doesn’t match expectations, or it’s just bad. I’ve unpublished books because of high return rates – not worth the hassle and it probably hurts your account health anyway.

Normal return rate for me is like 1-3%. Anything above 5% consistently means there’s a problem you gotta fix.

The Mobile App vs Desktop Reports

KDP has a mobile app and it shows some basic stats but you can’t download real reports from it. It’s good for checking sales numbers when you’re away from your computer but that’s about it. All the serious analysis has to happen on desktop.

I use the app mostly during launches to obsessively check if my new book is getting any traction, but then I do the real number crunching on my laptop with the downloaded CSV files.

Honestly the whole KDP reporting system is functional but clunky. Amazon could make this so much better with just some basic filtering and visualization tools built into the dashboard. But whatever, once you have your system set up it works fine. Just gotta download everything monthly and do your own analysis outside of KDP.

One last thing – export your data regularly and keep backups. I’ve heard stories of people losing access to their KDP accounts (usually from violating terms accidentally) and then they lose all their historical data. I keep all my monthly reports saved in Google Drive going back to 2017. Never had to use the backups but glad I have them just in case.