Free break-even check
Your ad console is measuring the wrong money.
It reports what the customer paid Amazon, not what Amazon paid you. Drop in an ads report, tell it what you actually earn per sale, and see which keywords made money once your real royalty is the yardstick. Nothing is uploaded — this page does the math on your machine.
Break-even for that book is a 14% ACOS, not the 21% the console called a win. Every keyword you're proud of might be doing this.
1. Your ads report
Any Sponsored Products report: search term, advertised product, or campaign. Straight from the Amazon Ads console, as downloaded.
2. What you earn per sale
Your royalty on one copy — not the list price. This is the number the ad console never sees.
Not sure? Work it out
Your KDP royalty report lists printing cost as "Avg. Manufacturing Cost."
Example figures for a made-up book — not real account data.
This is the half you can see from one file.
Your Kindle Unlimited page reads earn money too, and they live in a different report on a different clock — so the numbers above understate what you really made. AuthorTally joins your KDP royalty and KENP reports with your ads reports and gives you the whole ledger.
- Every book, with paperback and ebook editions grouped as one title
- KU page-read income counted, labeled estimated where Amazon hasn't settled it
- Month-over-month history saved on your own machine
- Series view: book-one ad spend against whole-series income
Why the console's numbers flatter your ads
Amazon reports advertising cost of sale against retail value. Sell a $10.99 paperback and the console records $10.99 of "sales" — but on a 60% plan with a $6.07 printing cost, you received 52 cents. Judged against retail, an ad looks like it returned fourteen times its cost. Judged against your royalty, it lost money.
Break-even is simpler than it looks: it's your royalty divided by your list price. At 52 cents on $10.99 that's 4.7%, which means every dollar of ad spend needs to bring back about twenty-one dollars of retail sales just to break even. No screen in the ads console tells you that number, because your royalty rate and printing cost live in KDP, not in Amazon Ads.
One caveat this free check can't fix: if your book is in Kindle Unlimited, page-read income is real money that isn't in this file at all. Treat every figure here as the floor, not the verdict.