KDP tools roundup: everything worth using

Your KDP Bookshelf dashboard is mission control: units sold, pages read, royalties earned, split into month-to-date and prior-months reports. Check it weekly, not hourly — daily noise makes authors fiddle with prices that were fine. The reports that matter most are the Orders report (what sold, where) and the Payments report (what you'll actually receive, and when).

One habit separates hobbyists from earners: exporting the numbers monthly and comparing them against your list price and royalty choice. That arithmetic is exactly what our free royalty calculator does in seconds.

Every KDP ebook offers two royalty options: 35% of list price, or 70% minus delivery costs for sales to customers in eligible territories (35% elsewhere). The 70% option is the better deal for most short guides priced in the usual range — delivery costs run about six cents per sale for typical file sizes — but the qualifying price band and territory list are Amazon's rules, so confirm them on Amazon's eBook royalties help page before you commit.

The practical move: price inside the 70% band, pick 70%, and verify with the royalty calculator what each sale nets you. Revisit only when you change the price.

Kindle Create is Amazon's free formatting tool: drop in a DOCX manuscript and it produces Kindle-ready files with a table of contents, chapter styling, and themes. Kindle Previewer then shows exactly what readers see across Kindle devices and apps. Both are free, both are official, and both are worth an afternoon even if you format elsewhere.

Honest positioning: if you build with EarnDraft, the manuscript and cover already arrive formatted — Kindle Create becomes a preview-and-polish step, not a requirement. Upload your DOCX, check the Previewer output on a phone-sized screen, and only rebuild what looks wrong.

KDP Select enrolls your ebook in Kindle Unlimited, where subscribers read free and you earn per page read, plus access to promo tools like Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions. The price is exclusivity: while enrolled, that ebook can't be sold or given away anywhere else — not your Shopify store, not Etsy.

Take Select when your book is short, bingeable, and aimed at heavy Kindle readers; stay wide when you already sell direct or the book anchors a bundle. It's a per-book, per-term decision — not a marriage.

Amazon tells you the rules; it won't do your arithmetic. Our free calculators cover the four questions authors ask before every launch:

• Royalty calculator — per-sale earnings under both royalty options.
• KENP estimator — what Kindle Unlimited page reads are roughly worth for your book.
• Pricing recommender — a sane list price for your length and niche.
• AI disclosure checker — whether your build needs a disclosure answer, and what to say.

No signup on any of them. Run the numbers, then publish with confidence.

Amazon asks every KDP author about AI assistance during title setup, and answering honestly matters — wrong answers risk takedowns. Our KDP AI disclosure guide walks through what counts as AI-assisted, where to declare it, and what happens if you skip it. EarnDraft builds include a disclosure page by default and come with listing answers pre-filled, so the step takes minutes instead of research.

Keep notes on your process — what you drafted, what you edited, what you added — as your authorship record. Five lines in a text file is enough.

The full loop in order: draft the book with the ebook maker, price it with the recommender, sanity-check earnings with the royalty calculator, answer disclosure with the checker and the disclosure guide, preview with Kindle Previewer, then publish — and watch the dashboard weekly. Six tools, none of them expensive, all of them earning their place.

Before you hit publish, run the launch checklist — it turns this whole toolkit into twenty-four boxes to tick.