statsI use Kindle Direct Publishing exclusively to publish my books. There are some advantages, and some disadvantages. And while I could go into both of those topics, I’m kinda making today into a rant.

Editor’s Note: All of the information that follows, pertains to the KDP Kindle Unlimited program that you can opt into. It’s not mandatory, but if you do, you are making a promise not to sell your book through any other site… only on Amazon.

When I first started using KDP, I was able to see how many ‘purchases’ and how many ‘borrows’ I got for my books. It wasn’t much, but it was good information… considering the fact that I got paid for ‘borrows’. Not long after, Amazon decided to change the format of how authors were paid. They switched from ‘borrows’ to ‘page-reads’.

The community of authors that sold their wares on KDP was very vocal when the decision was made to change the sales format. I, on the other hand, being a new author, had no input at the time. I hadn’t made enough sales to justify being angry about anything, so I went with the flow and accepted the change with no complaints.

Now it’s been a few years since the change, and I see something that is still a shortcoming on Amazon’s part. The lack of information. Giving us sales and page-reads is a great start, but just isn’t really enough to allow us to make decisions regarding our books.

With my account, I get access to a report that tells me where my sales and page-reads came from. The only reason they give me that information is because you get paid according to the conversion rate of each country’s currency.

What I don’t get is any information that I can use. For example, look at the picture for this post. On the day highlighted, it says I got 795 KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) reads. The first thing to realize, is that these aren’t ‘pages’ as you’re used to defining. There is some magical calculation that Amazon uses to determine how many KENP your book contains. A good example is my short story, Galileo Among the Stars. It is approximately 39 printed pages long, yet it gets a KENP number of 61.

Using that example above, 795 page reads doesn’t even tell me how much money I’ve earned for that day. I don’t even know how much a page read is worth, exactly. The payouts change each and every month, and everyone that is using the Kindle Unlimited service shares in the payout. There have been many people that have made the calculations, and have decided that a good, round figure to use when figuring out what you might get paid, is to use .58 cents per page read (yes, that’s just a little over half a cent per page).

So, what would I like to see? How could Amazon do better by the authors they’re making money off of? Here’s a list of things I’d like to see:

  1. How much money I make per page read.
  2. If a book was finished. (this might be difficult, as some people take long breaks between reads) This would be nice for the fact that I could see if there was a problem. (i.e. nobody makes it past chapter 4 in my book)
  3. Which book page reads are from. I have no idea if people are reading my full-length novel or my short stories.
  4. Contiguous page reads. It would be nice to know if someone binge-read a book.
  5. How many views your book’s page recieved. (how many people stopped to look at your book and didn’t buy or borrow it)
  6. Improve the rating/review system.

I’ll touch on that last one real quick. Since I can see how many page reads per day I get, it seems that people are reading my books (again, I have no idea if they finish them or not).  Out of the 4 books I have available on Amazon, I have 11 ratings. Something’s wrong when you can have 795 page reads in one day… and you don’t get a single rating or review. I’m not sure how Amazon can improve that process, but it’s definitely broken.

The thing that frustrates me the most about this, is that it seems like Amazon is withholding information from its authors that they deserve. While some writers may be okay with this, I’m not. I can’t seem to find too many people discussing this on the internet, either.

What do you think? Do you think Amazon should have this information available to us? Should they share their analytics information? Should they at least make it available for a small fee? Or does it make any difference to you? Let me know in the comments.