At least win a skirmish with KDP on getting data out of the system…
Okay… if you’re a indie publishing through Amazon, I finally figured out how to get a report for an individual book out of the new ‘dashboard’ for various periods. Maybe everybody else knew this, but I sure as hell didn’t…
Open your reports- Select Royalty Estimator and you get the 1st photo-
In the upper left corner, select Choose a date and you get a pull down menu. Select the interval you want. (NOTE: Do THIS step BEFORE you select a book otherwise you get this month’s data.)
Next select books- DESELECT all books, then pick the book you want data for, and click apply 3rd photo.
Your screen ‘should’ change and you get something like this. It gives you a decent quick look, and if you want a more detailed in depth day by day look, go to the upper right corner and download the ‘report’.
It will download an Excel spreadsheet with a file name something like this- KDP_Royalties_Estimator-+ a long string of numbers.
This is the bottom of the Excel spreadsheet with all of the different sheets produced for each item. This is really nice if you’re doing an anthology and want to share the data with other authors in the anthology!
There are also a number of other ways to use this, going all the way to the entire history of the book, or you can build your own custom periodicity.
Hope this clarifies at least a little bit of utilization of the ‘new’ dashboard, and I’m gonna use the hell out of this!
Wow. A president of a computer users group I was involved with (when CPM was a thing) once referred to WordStar as user -hostile (vice user-friendly). In retrospect, compared to MSWord, the WordStar guys were amateurs. However, I think some of them went to KDP as web designers. Either that or KDP hired the folks that did the initial Obama Care website.
Amazon only hires the finest of Indian villagers who never saw a computer until their cousin Praki, who is now a manager, hired everyone from his village to lead the design team.
And honestly, that’s what’s going on there now.
Thanks for doing this, Jim! I linked it to the Mad Genius Club post I did, so people should be able to get all kind s of data.
Took me quite a while to figure that one out, only did a few weeks ago when I couldn’t use the old reports.
NRW/John- Yeah… dammit…
Cedar- Thanks!
John- I miss the old report format! Grrr…
~You’re writing some books, you’ll never get rich! You’re in the Writers Guild now!~ (to the tune of a well known WW2 ‘Jody call’)😆🤭
Richard- LOL, never planned on it!