Series and read-through

Why per-book profit lies for a series

A series is a funnel: a reader who buys book 1 often goes on to books 2, 3 and 4 with no further ad spend. That downstream income belongs to book 1's campaign, but no per-book view can show it.

Some authors deliberately run book 1 at a loss — permafree or $0.99 — to buy that reader. Others price it normally and it earns on its own. Either way, judged alone on Books book 1 is credited with none of what it started, so it reads worse than it is. This page fixes that.

Creating a series

KDP has series — name, reading order, the "Book 2 of 5" line on Amazon — but it never sends any of it in the reports we read. So the grouping lives here.

To save you the typing, we read your titles first: something like The Dragon Heir (Ember Saga Book 2) is recognised, and Manage series proposes the whole group. One click to accept, and you only correct what is wrong.

You can also build one by hand: name it, add titles, and move them up or down into reading order. A book belongs to at most one series, and your grouping is yours — no sync ever touches it.

The series table

One row per series: units, royalties, ad spend, expenses, net profit, margin and average daily net. Same calculation as everywhere else in the app, so a series total is exactly the sum of its books on Books — KDP withholding tax, advertising VAT and per-day currency conversion already applied.

Average daily net needs a date range to divide by, so it only appears when your range has a start and an end.

The donut underneath splits net profit between your series. Series losing money over the range are named under it rather than drawn as a slice — a negative share of a total means nothing.

Read-through

Expand any row. The ladder shows the share of readers who reached each book:

Book 1 → 2   62%      Book 2 → 3   80%      Book 3 → 4   79%

Then the per-book table:

A book with no estimated readers is marked Excluded: its royalties are real, but there is no reader count to attribute them to.

Royalties per reader, and what you can pay

Royalties per reader (RPR) is the total one reader entering the series generates across every later book. It is the number you bid with.

Beside it sits the decision: what you can pay up to — the same figure after KDP withholding tax, which is the most you can spend to acquire one entry reader and still break even — against what you currently pay (ad spend ÷ entry readers). Green means every reader you buy makes money.

Two ways to model it

Calculate from — model a reader entering at book 3 instead of book 1, for example when book 1 is retired or permafree.

Exclude mid-series starters — a later book can legitimately show more readers than the one before it (its own ads, a promo, readers starting mid-series), which flatters RPR. Turn this on and each book is capped at the previous one, its royalties scaled down to match; adjusted books are badged Adjusted N%.

What counts as a reader

Readers = paid units + floor(KENP pages read ÷ KENPC)

A Kindle Unlimited borrow earns pages, never a unit — so it has to be converted. KENPC is the normalized page count of your book; KDP shows it on your Bookshelf but never in a report, so you enter it once per title in Manage series. Partial reads are rounded down: half a book is not a reader.

Without KENPC we count paid units only, and say so — the series is marked understated rather than quietly wrong. If you are KU-first, fill it in.

What Amazon itself measured

Everything above is a model built from totals. Amazon publishes one figure that is a genuine measurement: of the Kindle Unlimited pages your ads generated, how many were read on a book other than the one advertised. That is series read-through, observed rather than inferred, and it appears in the panel whenever Amazon reports any.

Treat it as a floor. It only covers KU reading that an ad drove — not paid sales, not organic reading — so the real read-through is always larger. Its value is as a second opinion: it comes from a different source than the ladder above, so when the two agree you can trust the picture.

Nothing to enable, and it costs no extra sync.

Honest limitations

Amazon never reveals who your readers are. Read-through here is a ratio of totals over a window, not a tracked cohort: nobody — no tool on this market — can prove the same person moved from book 1 to book 2. A reader who starts book 1 in January and finishes book 4 in June is spread across both.

It is still the right signal for a decision — just do not read it as if each reader were followed individually.

Showing or hiding the page

Settings → Preferences → Series section: Always show, Always hide, or Hidden until you create a series. The page stays reachable by link either way.