Net profit
The one number TrueRoyalties exists for — what goes into it, what stays out, and why royalties are shown before tax but profit after, per book and per day.
The formula
Net profit = Royalties kept − Ad spend (tax included)"Royalties kept" is your royalties after KDP withholding tax. Ad spend is what your ads really cost, VAT included.
What counts as royalties
Everything KDP pays you — paid sales, Kindle Unlimited pages read, and Expanded Distribution — plus your sales on every other platform you connect: Kobo, Draft2Digital, Apple Books, Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, ThriveCart, Fourthwall and the rest. One figure, whichever stores you sell on.
The Royalties card shows the gross amount, before withholding tax. That is deliberate: it is the figure you can compare, line for line, with your KDP dashboard. To see the same total split store by store, see Retailers.
What counts as ad spend
Every ad platform you connect: Amazon Ads, Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok Ads. On Amazon that includes the spend no single book can be charged with — Sponsored Brands, ads on ASINs outside your catalog. It is real money, so it belongs in the total.
Spend is counted with VAT or GST: per marketplace for Amazon, one rate per provider for Meta and TikTok — see taxes and currencies.
Where withholding tax appears
Only in net profit. So the two cards read differently on purpose:
| Card | Tax treatment |
|---|---|
| Royalties | Gross — matches KDP |
| Net profit | After withholding — matches your bank |
Per book, per marketplace, per day
The same calculation runs at every level — per title on Books, per storefront on Marketplaces, and any other way you slice it on Comparison. A book's net profit is its royalties minus the ad spend attributed to it; your total is the sum of everything, including unattributable spend.
That is why the sum of your books' net profit can be higher than your global net profit: brand campaigns count against the total, but belong to no single book.
Filters change the number
Every filter — date range, marketplace, book, format, distribution — recomputes net profit from the underlying daily data. Nothing is estimated from a total.
One exception worth knowing: selecting a distribution that has no ads (Expanded Distribution only) removes ad spend from the view, so ad-based metrics are hidden rather than shown as zero.