KDP’s reporting dashboard contains more useful information than most authors extract from it. This guide walks through every section of the royalty report — what each number means, how the different income streams are calculated, and how to use the data to make better publishing decisions rather than just checking how much you earned this month.
| 10-minute read | All levels |
Most KDP authors check their royalty report to answer one question: how much did I earn this month? The dashboard can answer that question, but it contains significantly more useful information than the monthly total — information that, correctly interpreted, tells you which books are performing, which income streams are growing or contracting, how your conversion rate is trending, and where the discrepancy between gross and net income originates. Using the full reporting data makes every subsequent publishing and marketing decision better-informed. Not using it means flying partially blind.
This guide covers every section of KDP’s reporting dashboard in plain language — what each metric is, how it is calculated, what it is actually measuring, and how to use it productively. KDP’s reporting interface has evolved significantly since the early days of the platform and continues to improve, so specific interface details may vary from what is described here — but the underlying metrics and their meanings are consistent.
Units Ordered vs Units Sold
KDP distinguishes between units ordered and units sold, and the difference matters. Units ordered is the number of purchases made by customers, including orders that may subsequently be cancelled or returned. Units sold is the number of confirmed, non-returned sales. The gap between these two numbers is small for most books — return rates on Kindle ebooks and print books are generally low — but monitoring both gives you visibility into your return rate, which is itself a signal worth tracking.
A persistently higher-than-average gap between ordered and sold — where returns are meaningfully higher than typical — can indicate a description-to-content mismatch: readers are purchasing based on what the description promises and returning when the book doesn’t deliver that promise. This is a conversion quality signal that the standard conversion rate calculation (units ordered divided by page views) doesn’t capture, because it measures the purchase decision rather than the post-purchase satisfaction. If your return rate is noticeably elevated, revisiting your description for accuracy and your first chapter for hook strength is the right diagnostic response.
Royalties: Ebook, Print, and the Calculation Behind Each
KDP’s royalty report shows royalties separately for ebooks and print, and the calculation behind each is different. Ebook royalties at the 70% rate are calculated as 70% of the list price minus a delivery fee based on file size. At the 35% rate, there is no delivery fee but the royalty is simply 35% of the list price. Kindlepreneur’s detailed KDP royalty calculator at kindlepreneur.com covers the calculation in full, including the delivery fee calculation for different file sizes at the 70% rate — a detail that becomes commercially relevant for large illustrated ebooks where delivery fees meaningfully reduce the effective royalty per sale.
Print royalties are calculated differently: the royalty rate (60% for standard distribution, 40% for expanded distribution) is applied to the list price, and the printing cost for your specific trim size, page count, and interior colour is subtracted from that percentage to produce the net royalty per unit. A 300-page black-and-white 6″×9″ paperback priced at $14.99 generates approximately 60% of $14.99 ($8.99) minus the printing cost (approximately $3.45) for a net royalty of approximately $5.54 per sale at standard distribution. The printing cost varies by trim size, page count, and marketplace, which is why the print royalty per unit is harder to calculate from memory than the ebook royalty.
Kindle Unlimited: Pages Read, KENP Rate, and Global Fund
For authors enrolled in KDP Select, Kindle Unlimited income is reported separately from purchase royalties and appears as Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) read multiplied by the monthly KENP rate. The KENP rate is not fixed — it is calculated monthly by dividing the KDP Select Global Fund (the total amount Amazon allocates to KU author payments each month) by the total pages read across all KU titles globally. The rate fluctuates month to month, which is why your KU income can vary even when your pages read stay constant.
Your book’s KENP page count — the normalised page count Amazon uses for KU calculations, which is different from the physical page count of the print version — is visible in your KDP dashboard under your book’s Kindle Unlimited information. For a standard novel, KENP page count typically ranges from 200 to 400 pages. Multiplying your KENP page count by the current monthly rate gives you the approximate income from a full read. Kindlepreneur’s KENP calculator at kindlepreneur.com provides an up-to-date estimate based on the current rate and your book’s KENP count — useful for modelling your KU income and comparing it against purchase royalty performance.
Page Views and Conversion Rate: The Most Important Metrics You’re Probably Ignoring
KDP’s dashboard shows page views for each title — the number of times your book’s product page was viewed. When combined with units ordered, this produces your conversion rate: the percentage of readers who viewed your listing and then purchased. This is the most strategically important metric in your dashboard, and it is the one most authors pay least attention to because it requires a simple calculation rather than being presented as a headline figure.
A conversion rate below 2% on a book with meaningful traffic indicates a listing problem — something in the cover, description, or review profile is failing to convert browsers who are finding the book into buyers who are purchasing it. A conversion rate above 5% suggests the listing is working well for the traffic it receives. The gap between these benchmarks identifies which books warrant description or cover attention. Tracking conversion rate monthly across all your titles — a ten-minute task with the data already in your dashboard — builds the trend data that shows whether listing changes are improving performance or having no effect.
Conversion Rate Is High? Make Sure What Readers Find Earns the Sale.
A strong conversion rate brings buyers to your book. The review profile those buyers create — based on what they find when they open it — determines whether your ranking sustains. Vappingo’s manuscript proofreading ensures the book behind your metrics is earning the reviews that make the dashboard numbers compound rather than decline.
Marketplace Breakdown: Where Your Sales Are Coming From
KDP’s reports break down sales by marketplace — amazon.com (US), amazon.co.uk (UK), amazon.com.au (Australia), amazon.de (Germany), and other marketplaces where your books are available. This breakdown reveals which markets are your strongest performers and, importantly, which markets you might be underperforming in relative to the total addressable readership for your genre.
An author whose books are generating strong US sales but minimal UK sales, in a genre with a large UK English-language readership, has a potential opportunity: verifying that their book’s metadata is using UK genre conventions and search terminology where they differ from US conventions, and checking whether their book appears in UK category searches for their target genre. Many authors’ metadata is calibrated entirely for US search patterns without considering how UK readers search for the same type of book — a correction that sometimes produces meaningful UK sales improvements with minimal effort.
Using the Royalty Report for Business Decisions
The royalty report becomes most useful when it’s consulted as part of a monthly business review rather than simply checked for the total earnings figure. A monthly review that takes fifteen to twenty minutes and covers: conversion rate for each title, KU pages read trends, marketplace distribution, and month-over-month royalty trends by title produces a clear picture of which books are growing, which are declining, and which need attention. This review informs the quarter’s metadata update priorities, identifies titles that may warrant advertising investment or description revision, and provides the longitudinal data that makes annual publishing planning more evidence-based.
For authors managing multiple titles across multiple marketplaces who want more sophisticated reporting than KDP’s native dashboard provides, third-party sales tracking tools aggregate the data into more analytically useful views. Kindlepreneur’s review of the best book sales trackers at kindlepreneur.com covers the available options including ScribeCount, which is particularly useful for authors distributing wide across multiple platforms and needing consolidated reporting. The KDP income cornerstone guide provides the broader context for understanding what the dashboard numbers are telling you about your publishing business’s trajectory.
Payment Schedule and Currency: When and How You Get Paid
KDP pays royalties approximately 60 days after the end of the calendar month in which the sales occurred — sales from January are paid at the end of March. This 60-day delay is consistent across all marketplaces and all royalty types (purchase royalties, KU page read income, and print royalties). Understanding this payment schedule prevents the confusion that arises when authors check their bank account in February expecting to see January’s sales deposited and find nothing yet.
For UK authors, KDP pays in pounds sterling for UK marketplace royalties and in US dollars for US marketplace royalties, with the dollar payments converted at the prevailing exchange rate at the time of transfer. Currency fluctuation can produce meaningful month-to-month variation in the sterling value of US royalties that has nothing to do with actual sales performance — a consideration worth keeping in mind when comparing monthly income figures across periods with different exchange rates. The payment threshold — the minimum royalty balance required before KDP issues a payment — is £10 for BACS payments and £100 for cheque payments for UK authors. Most authors who have reached meaningful income levels are well above the threshold and receive payments every month without interruption.
The royalty report, used consistently as a decision-making tool rather than just a financial record, becomes the compass for the publishing business. Authors who review it monthly with specific questions in mind — which titles’ conversion rates are declining, which marketplaces are underperforming, which KU titles are generating the highest pages-read-to-cold-traffic ratios — extract operational intelligence that makes every subsequent decision more targeted. The report does not tell you what to do; it tells you where to look, which is the diagnostic step that precedes every effective publishing optimisation.
Authors who discover this practice late — who have been publishing for years without monthly royalty report reviews — often find that a single systematic review session reveals two or three immediately actionable insights that improve their income within the following quarter.
