So, with the month of April wrapped up, I’ve built my final reports from Amazon on sales figures and the like, and I figured I’d share, so that any aspiring writers might be able to see how I do things to track my numbers, and keep track of my income.

I use the KDP Reports Tab Sales Dashboard to get my numbers. Keep in mind, these are the most up to date and complete numbers you can pull, however, there are more detailed reports you can access if you so choose. At the bottom of this page, you can download a report that breaks it all down by day, market, and royalty (I found that a good number of my sales didn’t qualify for the 70% royalty bracket, because of the country where the sale occurred. It’s a little obscure, but I think I understand it enough to satisfy my initial confusion), but I prefer to build my own spreadsheet, so that I can calculate a pretty close guess as to how well I am doing at any point in time.

For the month of April, I ended up ranking Number One for Hot New Releases in Swords and Sorcery, which I am sure boosted my sales considerably. As of this writing, I am number 13 in Kindle eBooks, Swords and Sorcery, and number 16 in Epic Fantasy, new releases notwithstanding.

• Kindle eBooks sold: 684
• Paperbacks Sold: 26
• Kindle Unlimited Page Reads: 364,237

For a first month, this drastically exceeded my expectations. My estimated income from this month was originally a target of $500-$1000. However, I exceeded that figure dramatically, coming in at an estimated $3273 and some change. There are some caveats, though.

• I did not account for Kindle eBook returns. There were a total of seven.
• A number of my Kindle editions were sold in countries that paid out only a 35% royalty, instead of 70%, which is what I based my calculations on. There were a total of 51 of these.
• I am estimating my Kindle Unlimited payout at $0.005 per page. Chances are, it will be slightly under that, which will impact my royalties accordingly.

However, lowballing it at $0.0045 only lowers my royalties by about $180. That would be if KU Page Read Royalties were to drop again, which is unlikely. Again, just estimating here, at the extreme low end, I would still be bringing in over $3000 for my first month of sales.

That ain’t bad. It shows that self publishing through Amazon can be financially beneficial. You maintain complete creative control over your work, you control the pricing, and you have detailed sales reports throughout the month. You can see if there needs to be an immediate correction, such as the need for an advertising campaign, and initiate that action accordingly.

I’ve included a blank version of the spreadsheet that I use, in case anyone wants to use it for their own purposes. It has the space on the first sheet for inputting the daily values on the first sheet, and generates the results in tables there, and on sheet two, it generates graphs that let you see your numbers in a more user friendly format. Feel free to download it and put it to work for you!

Sales Tracking Spreadsheet

In any case, I am going to keep on writing, and occasionally put up videos, posts, and so on about my experiences with Amazon KDP, while (eventually) finishing fleshing out the website to include information about the various races and faction n the world of Erde!

As always, thank you for reading!