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Preparing Amazon payments (publisher income)

Here’s a step-by-step guide to downloading all Amazon Payments from a Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) account, and then translating into the template format, ready to upload to Royalties HQ.

Download the KDP payments data #

First, you need to download the data from Amazon KDP.

  1. Log in to your KDP account at kdp.amazon.com
  2. Click on “Reports” in the top menu
  3. Select “Payments” from the dropdown menu
  4. Click on the “Payment History” tab
  5. Set the date range for which you want to download payments. Keep in mind that there is a delay between the sales month and Amazon sending you payments for royalties for a sales month.
  6. Click the “Generate Report” button
  7. Once ready, click the “Download” button to save the report as a CSV file

Prepare the data for import #

Next, you need to translate this data into the Royalties HQ publisher income template format. The steps below detail how to do this.

  1. Open the KDP payments report (see the steps above) with a spreadsheet program like Google Sheets, Excel, or Open Office. This is the source data.
  2. Open the publisher income CSV template in a separate tab in the same spreadsheet, or in a separate document.
  3. Sort the KDP payments by Payout Amount column.
  4. Delete all rows that have no value in the Payout column (these rows are subtotals, which are not needed). 
  5. The “Date” field in the KDP payments report becomes the “Payment date” in the new format. Ensure it’s in ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD), for example “2024-07-29”.
  6. Locate the “Payout Amount” column. Copy this data to the “Amount” in the template format. Do not include a currency symbol with the amount data.
  7. Find the “Sales Period – Start Date“. This becomes the “Sales Month“.
  8. The “Sales Channel” is “Amazon“.
  9. Use the “Marketplace” field exactly as it appears in the KDP report (e.g., “Amazon.nl”, “Amazon.de”, etc.). Note, including the Marketplace makes it much easier to reconcile income payment with its corresponding sales batch.
  10. If there’s any additional important information, add it to the (optional) “Note” field. Tip: It can be useful to include the FX rate (exchange rate) in the notes field, to compare with the exchange rate calculated in Royalties HQ when reconciling the publisher income payment with a sales batch.
  11. Transform (or copy data to) each column and check that the transformed data’s column headers match the template column headers exactly.
  12. (Optional) Sort the final CSV by Payment Date and then by Marketplace if desired.
  13. Double-check the data and, when you are happy with it, download as CSV.
  14. In Royalties HQ, go to Publisher Income and click the Import Publisher Income button.
  15. On the next page, click Browse to select your CSV file and click Continue to begin the import.
  16. You will see a preview of the import. Any issues or errors will be highlighted here. If all looks good, click Import.

Your Amazon publisher income has now been imported. You will see these payments listed on the Publisher Income Listing page (Main menu > Publisher Income).