KDP Reports Explained: What Each One Shows

KDP reports are the pages in your Kindle Direct Publishing account that show what your books sold, how many Kindle Unlimited pages were read and what you will be paid. There are nine of them, and they update on different clocks, which is why their numbers often disagree.

The nine KDP reports at a glance

All of them live at kdpreports.amazon.com, under the Reports tab of your KDP account. KDP’s own KDP Reports help page lists what each one is for. Here is the same list in one table, with how often each updates and whether you can download it.

The rest of this guide takes the reports in the order most authors need them: what is happening today, what you earned, and when the money arrives.

Dashboard: the fast view, not the final one

The Dashboard is the first page you see in KDP Reports. It shows today’s top-earning books, estimated royalties, orders and KENP reads, the top formats and marketplaces for the month, and a 30-day trendline of orders and page reads. KDP updates it every 15 minutes, which makes it the right place to check whether a promotion or a new ad is moving anything at all.

Fast comes at a price. KDP Help warns that the numbers in the Today tab may not match the Orders, Royalties Estimator, KENP Read and downloadable reports, because there is a delay between the Dashboard and those reports. Use the Dashboard to notice a change, and the slower reports to measure it.

Orders and Pre-orders: how many copies, not how much money

The Orders report counts books, not royalties. It shows the number of processed orders for all your formats and the placed orders for ebooks, and lets you compare up to ten books at a time. KDP says processing can take up to 24 hours for ebooks and up to a few days for print books, so yesterday’s paperback sales may still be missing.

One detail catches people out: in the on-screen Orders report, titles with the same name are combined into one row. If your paperback and ebook share a title, the downloaded version is where you get the breakdown by ASIN.

Pre-orders is the same idea for books that are not out yet: units ordered for titles you have made available for pre-order, updated every 15 minutes. Promotions does the same for Kindle Countdown Deals and is one of the two reports you cannot download.

KENP Read: Kindle Unlimited pages, finalized mid-month

If your ebook is in KDP Select, readers in Kindle Unlimited pay you by the page. Amazon counts those pages as Kindle Edition Normalized Pages, or KENP, and the KENP Read report shows how many were read. KDP updates it near the 15th of every month, and monthly KENP figures can change until then.

Pages are only half of the royalty. The other half is the rate per page, which comes from the KDP Select Global Fund. According to the Royalties Estimator help page, the fund for a month is announced near the 15th of the following month and the KENP rate changes every month. To turn pages into money yourself, the KENP calculator multiplies your page count by a rate you choose.

Royalties Estimator: money, but an estimate

The Royalties Estimator is the report that shows money as it comes in: estimated royalties from ebook, paperback and hardcover sales, converted to a single currency. KDP says it updates within 24 to 48 hours.

It is an estimate for two reasons KDP spells out. Exchange rates on the day you are paid will differ from the ones used today, and the Kindle Unlimited part depends on a KENP rate that has not been announced yet. KDP’s advice is to use the last announced KENP rate, or adjust it up or down, if you want your own estimate. If you want to check what a single sale should pay, the KDP royalty calculator works it out from the list price, royalty plan and printing cost.

Prior Months’ Royalties and Payments: the official record

When you need a number you can rely on, use the Prior Months’ Royalties report. It shows your royalties by month, uses the exchange rate from the last day of each month, and is updated near the 15th of every month. This is the report to use for bookkeeping, for taxes, and for judging whether last month’s advertising paid for itself.

The Payment Reportfollows the money from there. It lists payments by sales period, can be filtered by marketplace and payment status, and its Accrued Royalty column matches the royalty column in Prior Months’ Royalties. KDP generally pays about 60 days after the end of the month in which the sale was reported, and about 90 days for Expanded Distribution, as long as you meet the minimum payment threshold.

Put together, a sale made in March shows up on the Dashboard within minutes, in the Royalties Estimator within two days, in Prior Months’ Royalties near the middle of April, and in your bank account around the end of May.

How to download KDP reports

Open kdpreports.amazon.com, pick a report, set the filters (marketplace, author, format, title and time period) and click Download report. Seven of the nine reports can be downloaded; Promotions and Month-to-Date cannot.

You may also still see the old Sales Dashboard and its Generate Report button. KDP describes that export as a file with six tabs (combined sales, ebook, paperback and hardcover royalty, orders and KENP read) and says the old reports will remain available for a limited time, with the new KDP Reports as the main experience. Anything you build on the old file should be ready to move.

What KDP reports will not tell you

Every report above is about what came in. None of them knows what went out. Your Amazon Ads spend lives in a separate account, so KDP can show that a book earned $400 last month but not that $350 of it went back to Amazon in clicks.

That is the gap most authors fill with a spreadsheet: royalty from the KDP report in one column, ad spend from Amazon Ads in the next, per book and per month. It works, and it is worth doing even by hand. If you would rather not rebuild it every month, SelfPub Go’s royalty analytics reads the KDP report you already download and puts it next to your Amazon Ads, book by book. Either way, the ACOS calculator tells you how much each book can afford to spend on ads before it stops making money.

A simple monthly routine

You do not need to watch every report every day. A routine that fits how KDP updates its numbers looks like this:

• During the month: glance at the Dashboard and the Royalties Estimator to catch changes early, without treating the numbers as final.
• Around the 15th:open Prior Months’ Royalties and KENP Read for last month. These are the numbers to record.
• Same day:put last month’s ad spend next to last month’s royalty for each book and decide which ads to keep.
• Later: check the Payments report to confirm each month arrived as expected.

Report names and timings in this guide are taken from KDP Help as of the date at the top of the page. Amazon changes these pages from time to time; if something here no longer matches, the KDP Reports help page is the source to trust.