KDP's Four Report Types — Where Everything Lives

KDP's reporting is split across four distinct areas. Most authors know about the Sales Dashboard but miss the others entirely, which means they're working with incomplete information about their publishing business.

The Sales Dashboard — What It's Good For and What It Isn't

The KDP Sales Dashboard (the graph and table you see when you log in) shows estimated sales and royalties. The keyword is estimated — the dashboard updates throughout the day but is not a final accounting record. It rounds numbers, uses estimated royalty rates, and does not include all transaction types.

📋 NOTE:  The Sales Dashboard does not include: refunds and returns (which are subtracted from your final royalty calculation), Kindle Unlimited page reads converted to currency (shown separately), Expanded Distribution print sales, or any taxes and currency conversion effects that apply before payment. For final numbers, always use the Prior Months' Royalties report.

What the Sales Dashboard is genuinely useful for: spotting trends, monitoring the impact of a new release or promotion in near-real-time, and identifying which titles are performing at a glance. For decision-making, it's a useful indicator. For accounting, it's not the right source.

The Month-to-Date Report — The Detail You Actually Need

The Month-to-Date report, found under Reports > Month-to-Date, shows a line-item breakdown of every unit sold across every title in every Amazon marketplace during the current month. This is where you see: exactly how many copies of each book sold in the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Australia, and other markets separately.

To access it: go to your KDP dashboard > Reports (in the top navigation) > select 'Month-to-Date.' You can filter by date range and download the data as a spreadsheet for your own analysis.

The Month-to-Date report also shows your KENP (Kindle Edition Normalised Pages) read count — the page reads that feed your Kindle Unlimited income. This is the most accurate near-real-time source for KU read data.

Understanding Kindle Unlimited Reporting

KU income works differently from sales income. You earn a per-page-read rate from a monthly global pool — the rate varies each month and is not announced in advance. Your KENP read count appears in the Month-to-Date report. The actual income from those reads appears in your Prior Months' Royalties report after the month closes and Amazon calculates the per-page rate.

💡 TIP:  Amazon publishes the monthly KENP per-page rate in the KDP community blog, usually in the second or third week of the following month. The rate typically ranges between $0.004 and $0.005 per page read, but this fluctuates. You cannot calculate your KU income precisely until after the month closes.

Prior Months' Royalties — The Source of Truth

This report (Reports > Prior Months' Royalties) contains your actual royalty figures for completed months — the numbers that feed into your payment. Unlike the Sales Dashboard estimates, these figures account for returns, currency conversion, and all applicable fee deductions.

The report is available for download as a tab-separated text file that opens in Excel or any spreadsheet application. Download and save these monthly — they are your financial records for tax purposes.

⚠️ WARNING:  KDP does not provide formal tax statements. Your Prior Months' Royalties reports are your income records. Download and save each month's report to a dedicated folder — if you ever need to reconstruct your income history, these are the documents you need.

Expanded Distribution — The Report Most Authors Miss

If you have KDP's Expanded Distribution enabled for your print books, those sales do not appear in your standard monthly royalty reports. They appear in a separate report section under Reports > Print, with a significantly longer lag — typically 60+ days after the sale occurs.

This delay catches many authors off guard. A bookstore or library that ordered your print book in January may not appear in your reporting until March. Build this lag into your cash flow expectations for print distribution.

How ScribeCount Helps

ScribeCount pulls your KDP data through Amazon's API and consolidates all report types — ebook royalties, KENP page reads, print royalties, and expanded distribution where available — into a single dashboard view. Instead of switching between the Sales Dashboard, Month-to-Date report, and Prior Months' reports separately, you see the complete picture in one place. ScribeCount's Historical view also makes multi-year income comparison straightforward — a function that requires significant manual effort in KDP's native reporting.