Which of your books actually make money
Earnings Studio reads the two reports you already download from Amazon — your finalized KDP royalties and your Advertised Product ad report — and tells you, per book and per month, what is left after the ads. In the currency Amazon paid you, with every figure tracing back to the row it came from.
Sample data — what the portfolio looks like
| Book | Earnings | Ad spend | After ads | Net units |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cryptogram Puzzles for Grown-Ups | $326.30 | $417.00 | -$90.70 | 93 |
| Maze Adventures for Kids Ages 6-8 | $294.50 | $316.00 | -$21.50 | 84 |
| Sudoku for Seniors: Easy to Medium | $1,080.40 | — | $1,080.40 | 285 |
| Large Print Word Search for Adults, Volume 1 | $1,633.50 | $459.00 | $1,174.50 | 406 |
$86.40of ad spend is not in any row above: Amazon's report did not tie it to a specific book, so neither do we. It is counted once, in the portfolio total. Figures are sample data.
What's in it
- Portfolio
Every book you have ever been paid for, with earnings, the ad spend Amazon tied to it, and what is left after — plus a trend line per book. Sortable on every money column, and never across two currencies, because minor units are not comparable between them.
- Book detail
One book, month by month: earnings and ad spend on the same axis, split by marketplace and by royalty type, and the fact rows behind every figure. KENP appears as the earnings Amazon reported, never as a per-page rate we guessed.
- Months
The profit-and-loss sheet you would have built in a spreadsheet: earnings, attributed ad spend, unattributed ad spend and what is left, per month and per currency, footing to a total.
- Imports
Every file you have uploaded, what it contained, which worksheets were read and which were skipped and why. Removing one states exactly what it takes back out before you press the button.
The line most tools quietly delete
Amazon's ad report does not tie every pound of spend to a specific book. Some of it arrives attached to a campaign and nothing else. That is normal, and it is real money.
The tempting thing to do is share it out across your books in proportion to something, so every book gets a tidy profit number and the totals still add up. We do not, because that number would be ours rather than Amazon's — and per-book truth is the only reason to build this at all. Unattributed spend gets its own line, on every view where spend appears, and attributed plus unattributed always equals the total on your invoice.
The same rule runs through the rest of it. No exchange rate we picked. No KENP per-page rate, because Amazon does not publish one. No estimate accepted into the record. And when a report arrives in a format we do not recognise, it is refused with the column headings we saw, not guessed at — a refusal costs you a message, a wrong number costs you your trust in every other figure on the page.
What it will not do
- It is not an accounting system and not tax software. It organizes the reports Amazon gives you — verify against your KDP payments before you rely on a figure.
- It does not forecast. There are no projected revenues and no “you could earn” numbers anywhere in it.
- It does not convert currencies behind your back. A book selling in three marketplaces has three honest earnings figures and no honest single one.
- It does not connect to your Amazon account, and never asks for a password. You download your reports; you upload them.
- It does not read your dashboard estimates, your Month-to-Date report, or the ads Campaign report — the first two are provisional, and the third has no per-book detail to work from.
Frequently asked questions
Which reports does it read?
Two. KDP Reports → Prior Months' Royalties, which is the finalized one — it includes returns, KENP earnings and the All Stars bonus, so it matches what Amazon actually paid you. And the Amazon Ads console's Advertised Product report, which is the only ads report with per-book detail. Both are the files you already download; there is no account connection and no password to hand over.
Why won't it accept my KDP dashboard export?
Because it is an estimate. KDP's own help pages say the dashboard and Royalties Estimator exclude returns, the conversion of KU pages to currency, Expanded Distribution and taxes. Importing one would put numbers in your ledger that Amazon never paid you, and you would only find out months later reconciling against a payment. We recognise that file specifically so we can refuse it and tell you where the right one lives, rather than showing a generic error.
What does “after attributed ads” mean, exactly?
A book's profit is its earnings minus the ad spend Amazon tied to that specific book in its own report. Some spend is never tied to a book — Amazon's report simply doesn't say which one it was for. That money is real, so we show it as its own line rather than hiding it, and we do not divide it between your books. Splitting it would make every per-book profit figure a number we invented, and per-book truth is the entire product.
I sell in six marketplaces. Does it convert everything to dollars?
No, and that is on purpose. Amazon pays you in each marketplace's own currency and does not tell you the rate it used. A single converted total would be a number we made up with an exchange rate we chose. So totals read like “£412.10 + €381.77 + $1,204.55” — one figure per currency. A labelled home-currency view is a future option, not a silent default.
What happens when I re-download a month Amazon has corrected?
Import it again. A month's data is replaced wholesale rather than merged, which is the only approach that structurally cannot double-count a correction — and you are told exactly which months and how many rows will be replaced before you confirm. Re-uploading a file you have already imported does nothing at all and says so.
Can I check the numbers?
Every total drills down to the rows that add up to it, and every row names the file it came out of. That applies to profit too: it opens both the royalty rows and the ad-spend rows behind it, because a subtraction with only half its terms shown is not something you can check.
Is my sales data private?
It is yours and it stays in your account. Nothing is aggregated across users, nothing trains anything shared, and there is no opt-in to do either because no such feature exists. Deleting an import removes the rows it created and the original file with it. If a report format we don't recognise ever needs looking at, what reaches us is the column headings — never your figures.
Which plan includes it?
Publisher and above, from $39 a month, and it is included in the Founders' Lifetime plan at Publisher limits. Plans cap how many books, how many months of history and how many imports a month you can hold. If you go over a cap, new imports stop — what you have already imported stays fully readable. Your own accounting history is never paywalled back out of reach.
Stop guessing which books are worth reprinting
Upload last month's royalty report and your Advertised Product export, and see the answer in about a minute.
Publisher and above, from $39a month, and included in the Founders' Lifetime plan. Your imported history stays readable even if you move to a smaller plan.
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