Somebody recently recommended Book Report to me and it’s such a useful tool for self-published authors, I wanted to share.
Those of you who self publish via Amazon will know that the stats on the dashboard leave something to be desired. The most frustrating thing for me is that you can’t see at a glance how much money you’ve earned in a particular time period. You can view royalties on sales, but they’re split between different currencies. And there is no easy way of viewing your combined earnings based on sales and Kindle Unlimited borrows.
In order to get an estimate of how much I’m going to be paid at the end of any given month, I have to go through the (frankly intimidating) spreadsheets that Amazon provide on the 15th of each month. Even then, it takes ages to work out an approximate value.
If you’ve ever wished you could view those stats at a glance, and compare earnings for different months, and compare earnings for different books… then you need Book Report in your life.
Earnings per book for December. If I hover over the sections it shows me the book title and the amount earned.
Total earnings per day for December. I’ve deleted the numbers on the left for my privacy. In Book Report, if I hover over a particular day, it gives me the exact amount.
Accuracy
Book Report is very accurate. I tested it out for October earnings, which were paid in December and it was over 99% accurate in it’s prediction of my earnings.
Kindle Unlimited data
The other thing I love is that you can see the total number of pages read for books that are enrolled in KU. This is another thing that Amazon doesn’t show you at a glance, because it separates the figures into different Amazon regions, so it’s clunky trying to work out the total for any given title.
Storing old data
Book Report initially only shows you 90 days of data (because that’s all that Amazon show – another frustration for me). But once you start using Book Report, it keeps your older data. So eventually you’ll be able to see back 6 months, a year etc.
All in all, Book Report does what the KDP dashboard should do, and with prettier colours and a more user friendly interface.
I won’t go into details here about how Book Report works, and how they guarantee privacy etc. If you have questions about that then follow the link above because all the answers are on their site. But I love Book Report because it gives simple, easy to read/interpret data.
Want to try it?
Anyone can use it free for two weeks. It takes seconds to set up and is super easy to use. After that, there is the option to sign up. The pricing is simple, and fair, because it’s based on earnings. If you earn less than $1000 via KDP in a month, then Book Report continues to be free for you. If you earn over $1000 per month, then you pay $10 a month to use it.