You write your book. You edit it, format it, stress about the cover, and finally get the whole thing ready to upload. You log into Kindle Direct Publishing feeling like the hard part is behind you. And then you see it. A screen full of tabs and options and numbers that nobody prepared you for, and suddenly the hard part feels like it might actually be right now.

It’s not as bad as it looks. That’s genuinely true and not just something people say to make you feel better. The KDP dashboard is one of those things that seems complicated from the outside and turns out to be pretty logical once someone explains what you’re actually looking at. The problem is that most people have to figure it out on their own through trial and error, forum threads, and the occasional panicked Google search at midnight.

This guide skips all of that. It’s a straightforward walkthrough of the dashboard written the way a knowledgeable friend would explain it to you, covering what each section does, why it matters, and what to watch out for so you’re not caught off guard by the things that trip up most new authors.

What KDP Is and What You’re Actually Working With

Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon’s publishing platform for independent authors. It’s where you upload your book, decide how to price it, choose your distribution options, and get paid for your sales. There’s no agent involved, no publishing contract, no upfront cost. You put your book up, Amazon sells it, and you earn royalties on every sale.

The dashboard is the interface for all of that. It’s where everything related to your books lives, from the moment you start setting up a new title to the moment you check your royalty payment months later. Once you understand how it’s laid out and what each part is actually doing, it stops feeling like a maze and starts feeling like a fairly sensible tool.

There are three sections you’ll spend almost all your time in as a new author. The bookshelf, where your books and drafts live. The reports section, where your sales and earnings data lives. And the account settings, where your payment details and tax forms live. Everything else exists in the background and becomes relevant later when you’re ready for it.

The First Thing You See When You Log In

Head to kdp.amazon.com and sign in using your Amazon account. The page that loads first is your bookshelf. If you haven’t published anything yet, it’s mostly blank with a prompt to get started. If you’ve already uploaded something, your titles are listed here with some basic status information next to each one.

Before you click anything, take a look at the row of tabs sitting across the top of the page. There are five of them.

Right now, the only two you really need to care about are Bookshelf and Reports. Get comfortable with those first. The others will make more sense once you’ve been through the publishing process at least once.

Your Bookshelf: Where Everything Starts

The bookshelf is where you’ll spend most of your active time in the dashboard. Every book you’ve published or started setting up appears here. Each listing gives you a quick look at the current state of that title and buttons to take action on it.

When you’re looking at a title on your bookshelf, here’s what each element actually tells you.

The status column is the one worth paying closest attention to, especially right after you’ve uploaded something new or made a change to an existing title.

Blocked is the status nobody wants to see but it happens to almost everyone at some point. When it does, Amazon sends an email that explains what the specific issue is. The most common causes are a cover image that doesn’t meet their technical requirements, a manuscript file with formatting errors, or content that flags one of their review guidelines. The email usually makes it clear what needs fixing. Read it carefully, make the correction, and resubmit. Most blocked submissions get sorted out on the second attempt.

Publishing a New Title: Walking Through Each Step

When you hit the Add New Title button on your bookshelf, you enter the publishing workflow. It moves through three steps in sequence and Amazon guides you through each one. Knowing what to expect at each stage before you start saves you from having to stop and figure things out mid-process.

Step one is your book details. This is where you fill in your title, subtitle, series name if it’s part of one, edition number, author name, and any contributors like an editor or cover designer. It’s also where you write your book description, and that part deserves more time and attention than most new authors give it. Your description is the first thing a potential reader reads after seeing your cover. It’s doing a lot of selling work. A description that’s written carelessly is one of the most common and most fixable reasons books underperform.

Step two is your content. This is where you upload your manuscript file and your cover image. KDP accepts Word documents, PDFs, and a few other formats. Their own Kindle Create tool produces particularly clean results for eBooks if you want to use it. Your cover needs to hit specific dimension requirements and KDP has a free built-in cover creator if you don’t have a file ready to go.

Step three is rights and pricing. This is where you specify which territories you have the rights to sell in and where you set your actual price. It’s also where the royalty rate decision comes in, which we’ll cover in a moment.

Categories and Keywords: The Part Most New Authors Rush Through

Somewhere inside the book details step, you’ll be asked to choose categories and enter keywords. Most new authors pick something that seems reasonable and move on quickly because they want to get the book published and these fields feel like a formality. They’re not a formality. These two things together are a significant part of how Amazon decides which readers to show your book to.

Categories are the sections of Amazon’s store where your book appears. You get two when you publish through the standard interface. You can contact Amazon’s support team after publishing to request placement in additional ones, which is worth doing once you’ve had time to research where your book fits best. The most important thing to understand about category selection is that narrower is almost always better. A broad category has thousands of books competing for attention. A specific subcategory has fewer books and makes it much easier for your title to be visible, especially when you’re starting out with no reviews and no established readership.

Keywords are the search terms Amazon connects to your book when readers type things into the search bar. You get seven keyword fields. Each field can hold a short phrase rather than just one word. Think about your specific reader and what they would actually type when they’re looking for a book like yours. Those real search phrases belong here, not single words like “mystery” or “business” that apply to hundreds of thousands of titles.

Pricing Your Book and How the Royalty Math Works

Pricing is the thing new authors agonize over more than almost anything else and it’s worth understanding clearly so you can make a decision you feel good about rather than just guessing.

For eBooks, KDP has two royalty options and which one you qualify for depends entirely on your price.

Most authors price their eBooks in the $2.99 to $9.99 range and earn the 70 percent royalty. That range tends to hit the right balance between being affordable enough for a reader to buy without much deliberation and being priced high enough that your earnings per sale actually mean something.

Paperback royalties work differently and the calculation is a little more involved. You earn 60 percent of your list price minus whatever it costs Amazon to print that specific book. The printing cost depends on your page count and whether the interior is black and white or color. The good news is that KDP shows you the exact printing cost and your estimated royalty per sale right there on the pricing page as you set things up, so you can try different price points and see the real numbers before you commit to anything.

Your price is not a permanent decision. You can change it at any time, the change goes live within 24 to 48 hours, and there’s no limit on how often you can update it. A lot of authors experiment with different price points over time, especially in the early months, to see what converts best for their specific book and audience.

KDP Select: Read This Before You Tick That Box

During the eBook setup process, Amazon will ask if you want to enroll your book in KDP Select. It’s easy to click yes without fully understanding what you’re agreeing to, and it’s worth taking a moment to understand the trade-off before you decide.

KDP Select gives Amazon exclusive digital distribution rights to your eBook. That means for as long as your book is enrolled, which happens in 90 day blocks, you cannot sell the digital version anywhere else. Not on Apple Books, not on Kobo, not on Google Play, not on your own website. Amazon only.

What you get in exchange is meaningful if Amazon is where your readers are.

Whether KDP Select makes sense for you depends on where your readers are and how important wide distribution is to your strategy. If you want your eBook on multiple platforms, don’t enroll. If Amazon is your primary focus and you want access to the Kindle Unlimited subscriber base, which is genuinely large, it’s worth trying. You’re not locked in forever. At the end of each 90 day period you can simply choose not to renew.

The Reports Section: What the Numbers Are Actually Telling You

Once your book is live, the Reports tab becomes the place you’ll check most often. It’s also the part of the dashboard that causes the most confusion for new authors, not because it’s poorly designed but because it shows several different types of data and the connections between them aren’t obvious at first.

The reports you’ll use most as a beginner are Month to Date and Prior Six Weeks.

Two things catch new authors off guard here more than anything else.

The first is the payment delay. The numbers in your reports are not money in your bank account. KDP operates on roughly a 60 day payment cycle. Sales you make in January are paid out in late March. This is completely standard and consistent but it’s genuinely surprising if nobody warned you about it beforehand.

The second is that different formats and different revenue types live in different parts of your reports. eBook sales, paperback sales, and Kindle Unlimited page reads are all tracked separately. If a number looks wrong, the first thing to check is whether you’re looking at the right format and the right report type for what you’re trying to understand.

Understanding What Your Royalty Numbers Mean

Inside your reports you’ll see two figures sitting side by side: units sold and royalty earnings. New authors sometimes assume these are more or less the same thing scaled differently. They’re not. Units sold is how many copies of your book were purchased. Royalty earnings is how much of that purchase price actually ends up as your income after Amazon takes their share.

Here’s what the math actually looks like across different price points.

Kindle Unlimited earnings work on a completely different logic. Instead of a royalty per sale, you earn per page read. The exact per-page rate changes every month depending on how many total pages were read across all enrolled books and how large the monthly royalty pool is. The rate is always a fraction of a cent, which means Kindle Unlimited income is directly tied to how long your book is and how many readers get all the way through it rather than stopping early.

Setting Up Your Account So You Can Actually Get Paid

Everything else in the dashboard is academic if your account isn’t set up to receive payments. This is the part new authors are most likely to put off and it’s the one thing you really shouldn’t delay on. Get it done before your book goes live so there’s nothing holding up your first payment when it comes.

There are two things you need to complete inside the Account section.

For your bank details, KDP pays by direct deposit. You’ll need your routing number and account number. If you’re based outside the United States, check which payment methods are available for your country as this varies.

For tax information, US authors complete a W-9 form inside the dashboard. International authors complete a W-8BEN. KDP takes you through both with a guided interview format that most people get through in about ten minutes. It’s one of those things that sounds more complicated than it is. Just do it.

One last thing worth knowing: KDP won’t send a payment until your earnings hit a minimum threshold of $100 for US direct deposit. If a given month’s earnings don’t reach that, they roll over and accumulate until the threshold is met.

Keeping Track of How Your Book Is Actually Doing

Checking your sales reports is the obvious thing to do once your book is live. But there are a couple of other habits worth building alongside that.

Your Amazon Best Sellers Rank is worth looking at regularly. You’ll find it on your book’s actual Amazon listing page. It’s a number that tells you where your book ranks relative to every other book on Amazon at that moment. A lower number is a better rank. It fluctuates constantly because it’s based on recent sales velocity, so a single number on a single day doesn’t tell you much. What does tell you something is the pattern over time. If your rank improves sharply after a particular promotion or media mention, that’s useful information you can act on.

Your customer reviews are worth reading too, including the ones that sting a little. The Reviews section inside Author Central pulls everything together in one place. Reading your reviews regularly, looking for patterns rather than reacting to individual comments, gives you genuine feedback on how readers are experiencing your book. That feedback is some of the most valuable information you’ll get as you work on your next project.

Give It a Little Time and It Clicks

The KDP dashboard genuinely is not complicated once you’ve been through it a couple of times. It just has a learning curve that’s steeper than it needs to be because nobody walks you through it when you sign up. Most authors find that after their first published title and a few weeks of checking in on their reports, the whole thing starts to feel familiar. The tabs make sense, the numbers mean something, and what felt like a wall of confusing information starts to feel like a tool you actually know how to use.

The most useful thing you can do right now, whether your book is live or still in progress, is spend time in the dashboard when nothing critical is happening. Click into different sections, look at the reports even if they’re mostly empty, read what’s there. The time you spend getting familiar with it now is time you won’t have to spend panicking later when you’re in the middle of a launch and need to find something fast.