Want to learn more about Kindle Direct Publishing? Check out some of the most common questions we hear from authors and self-publishers online.
How you can check your sales on KDP?
There are two ways for you to check your sales on KDP:
- Download an actual copy of the sales excel sheet
- Use the new Amazon KDP Reports
One caveat about using the new Amazon KDP Reports is that the report shows you the orders instead of your sales. I’ll explain a bit on that below:
Difference between Sales and Orders: An order is when a shopper places an order to purchase a book. A sale is when the payment actually clears through Amazon’s payment processing.
While the difference may seem superficial at first, this can actually lead to a fairly noticeable discrepancy between your sales royalty and your orders.
How often does KDP update sales?
[bctt tweet=”KDP updates sales very frequently. From experience, the charts are updated on 15 minute intervals from the hour (e.g. 2:00, 2:15, 2:30, and 2:45)”]How long does it take for sales to show up on KDP?
Because of the way Amazon classifies sales, a sale can take anywhere from immediately to upwards of several hours–sometimes even days–before it shows up on your KDP report.
As a rule, the number of sales you have will often be lower than the number of orders you see on your KDP Dashboard.
[bctt tweet=”If your KDP royalty and orders don’t match up, don’t panic! Amazon isn’t losing or erasing sales. It just means that the money is still being processed.”]How to use your Kindle Sales Report to sell more books
The best way to use your Kindle sales report to sell more books is to compare it with your marketing efforts–namely your ad spend and related expenses. If you see a rise in sales and royalty when you begin your marketing efforts, then it means you’re doing something right and should double down on what you’re doing.
On the other hand, if you see your sales and royalty decrease or remain unchanged with marketing, then it means your marketing is ineffective and you should change your strategy before wasting a lot of time, money, and effort.
See your daily sales and expenses in one place with PublishWide
What to do if your kindle eBooks suddenly stopped selling
The brutal honest truth is that if your eBooks have suddenly stopped selling, it’s because Amazon has determined that people no longer want to buy your books.
This could happen for any number of reasons:
- You’re running ads that lower the conversion rate on your product page.
- You’ve hit set days when Amazon’s promotional ‘juice’ automatically drop.
We’ll first look at how ads that lower conversion rate on your product page can cause Amazon to stop promoting your books:
Put simply: Conversion rate is the number of purchases divided by the number of impressions.
The higher the conversion rate, the more likely Amazon is to think that people want the product.
Conversely, the lower the conversion rate, the more likely Amazon is to think that people don’t want the product.
For people running ads to your books, it means that if your ads bring a ton of people (impressions) but they don’t end up buying your book, it can actually hurt your conversion rate, and by extension, cause Amazon to stop promoting your books.
If your ads are lowering your book’s conversion rate, you need to kill those ads ASAP.
On the other hand, the other reason your books have suddenly stopped selling could be because you’ve hit the set days when Amazon’s promotional juice automatically drop.
[bctt tweet=”There is a 90 day window where Amazon will do free promotions for your new book. But those will scale back every 30 days.”]Amazon likes new and fresh books, and will provide some promotional effort to books that convert well in those first 90 days.
However, this promotional effort drops off at 30 day intervals until it stops altogether after 90 days.
If your book sales are declining because you’ve hit these intervals, you can do the following:
Publish a new book: If you can keep up with publishing a book within the 90 day promotional period, you will be able to stagger one promotional window after another.
Run ads: The best time to run ads is during the promotion window of Amazon. By driving well-targeted traffic that converts well to your books, you can ‘train’ the Amazon algorithm to recommend even more people to your books.