KDP authors despair — Amazon can’t get a grip on ebook returns

Is your KDP dashboard showing above-average sales today? Don’t rejoice too soon. You could be in the red tomorrow.

René Junge
The full time writer

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Picture of an author staring at his computer screen in disbelief.
Picture created with Dall E 3

Yesterday was another one of those days. By lunchtime, my KDP dashboard was already showing earnings of almost 80 euros, and I was very happy about that. I generally sell a lot more on Sundays than on the other days of the week, but these figures were too good to be true, even for a Sunday.

So I should have known that the big end was yet to come.

A few hours later, my sales counter suddenly stood at minus 16 copies. I only had just over six euros left of my previous earnings.

Today, I downloaded the detailed sales report from the previous day to see how big the problem was this time. When I saw what had happened, I became extremely angry.

26 books from a single series were returned. All had been bought and returned on the same day.

By midnight, I had at least made up to 78.99 euros. This is a depressing result for me every day of the week. By the way, I owe most of my daily income to Kindle Unlimited.

The returns have a system

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René Junge
The full time writer

Thriller-author from Hamburg, Germany. Sold over 200.000 E-Books. get informed about new articles: http://bit.ly/ReneJunge