How to Read Your KDP Royalties Report

Where to find your reports

Inside KDP, the two reports that matter most are the Sales Dashboard (under Reports) and the Payments report. The Sales Dashboard is real-time-ish — it updates throughout the day but can lag official numbers by several hours. The Payments report is the one that reconciles to what actually lands in your bank account, usually 60 days after the end of the month in which the sale occurred.

If you're tracking a launch or promo day-to-day, expect the live dashboard and the "processed" orders export to disagree by a handful of units at any given moment. That's normal — it's not double-counting or a bug, it's just processing lag.

There's also a third view worth knowing about: the Prior Months' Royalties report, which shows finalized, closed-book numbers by month going back through your entire publishing history. This is the one to trust for year-over-year comparisons or tax prep, since it won't shift after the fact the way a mid-month dashboard number can.

The 35% vs. 70% royalty split

KDP pays two royalty rates depending on price and marketplace:

70% royalty applies when your eBook is priced between $2.99 and $9.99 (in most marketplaces), you're enrolled appropriately, and the book is available in all marketplaces where it's for sale. Amazon deducts a "delivery cost" based on file size (roughly $0.15/MB) from the 70% rate — this matters more for image-heavy books than plain text novels.

35% royalty applies to everything else: books priced under $2.99 or over $9.99, and certain marketplaces regardless of price. There's no delivery fee deducted from the 35% rate.

Paperbacks and hardcovers work differently — royalty is 60% of list price minus printing cost, which KDP calculates based on page count, trim size, and ink type (b&w vs. color).

A concrete example: a 350KB novel priced at $4.99 on the 70% tier earns roughly $3.44 per US sale after the ~$0.05 delivery fee. The same book priced at $2.49 — just fifty cents lower — drops to the 35% tier and earns only about $0.87. That fifty-cent pricing decision is worth nearly $2.60 per sale, which is why so many authors treat $2.99 as a hard floor rather than a suggestion.

Reading the marketplace breakdown

Your royalties report breaks sales out by Amazon marketplace (US, UK, DE, FR, CA, AU, and others). Each marketplace has its own currency, its own royalty rate rules, and its own delivery cost calculation. A sale in a smaller marketplace can look tiny in local currency but still be worth logging — especially if you're trying to understand which promo sites or ad campaigns are reaching international readers.

Free downloads always show 0 revenue in every marketplace, since there's nothing to pay a royalty on. But they still show up as "units" and they still count toward your Amazon sales rank while the promo is live, which is the entire point of running one.

Currency conversion is another quiet source of confusion: KDP pays out in your designated primary currency, converting non-USD marketplace sales at the exchange rate in effect when the payment is processed — not the date of the sale itself. If you publish widely and watch your UK or German sales closely, don't be surprised if the same number of unit sales produces a slightly different payout total from one month to the next purely from exchange-rate drift.

Why the numbers never quite match

Three separate systems report slightly different numbers, and knowing which is which saves a lot of confusion:

The live dashboard shows same-day orders as they come in, before returns or cancellations are processed. The KDP_Orders export (downloadable as a spreadsheet) shows processed, finalized orders and is the most reliable source for day-by-day tracking. The Payments report shows what you're actually paid, after any returns, and on a roughly two-month delay.

If you're tracking a launch or promo in a spreadsheet, use the orders export as your source of truth and treat the live dashboard as a same-day preview that may shift slightly once processing finishes.

Returns and refunds are the other quiet adjuster. Amazon allows readers to return an eBook within seven days for most purchases, and a return claws back the royalty you were credited — it shows up as a negative-unit line in your Payments report, sometimes weeks after the original sale. A launch week with a handful of returns is completely normal and not a sign anything went wrong with the book.

What a typical month actually looks like

For most midlist indie authors, a "normal" royalty month is a mix of a small trickle of organic sales, a bump from KENP reads if enrolled in Select, and occasional spikes tied to a promo, an ad campaign, or a new release elsewhere in a series pulling readers backward. Don't benchmark your own numbers against viral outlier stories you read online — the median indie author's monthly royalty report is much quieter than the loudest success stories on social media, and that's a normal, sustainable place to build from rather than a sign something's broken.

Taxes and withholding on your royalties

KDP is required to collect tax information (a W-9 for US persons, or a W-8BEN for most non-US authors) before releasing royalty payments, and for non-US authors, KDP may withhold a percentage of US-sourced royalties for US tax purposes unless a tax treaty between your country and the US reduces or eliminates that withholding — claiming a treaty rate requires correctly completing the tax interview in your KDP account, including a foreign tax ID number in most cases. US-based authors receive a 1099 form each year reporting total royalties paid, which is the number that matters for your own tax filing regardless of what any single month's dashboard showed.

It's worth revisiting your tax interview information if your circumstances change — a new tax ID, a change in country of residence, or a business structure change (publishing under an LLC rather than as an individual, for instance) all affect how KDP withholds and reports your royalties, and outdated information can result in a higher withholding rate than you're actually entitled to.