[DRMarvello]

I have the ear of someone at Amazon who actually asked me what kind of information Amazon could give me that would be helpful to me as a publisher. I think my response was more than he bargained for. 

I told him about the spreadsheet I keep which tracks my daily sales versus my high/low ranking over the previous 24 hours. I told him it would be nice to know how many people actually read the free or paid books they download. He told me that I could email him with anything else I thought might be useful. I don't know whether or not my feedback will ever truly lead to new KDP metrics, but it would be a shame to waste this opportunity. Amazon is notorious for keeping aggregate figures secret, but it's possible they will be more generous with giving information to individual authors about their own books.

So here's your big chance. Tell me what kind of information you wish Amazon would share with you about your book sales, and I'll pass it along. It can't hurt to ask, and we might just get a few of those things on our wish lists.

 

[DRMarvello]

This is great stuff! Thanks, everyone. Keep the suggestions coming.

Don't be afraid to duplicate what someone else said. It may be useful for Amazon to know which requests were the most popular with authors, so I'll tally the "votes" when I collect the info from this thread.

 

[DRMarvello]

Interesting. A lot of you are obviously familiar with web analytics. It sounds like we would all essentially like to have the equivalent of "Google Analytics for KDP," among other things.

 

[DRMarvello]

I just wanted to say a final thanks to everyone who posted. I summarized the info in this thread and passed along the thread link to my Amazon contact so he could see your responses first-hand.

He asked me to tell you, "The response to your post is awesome. Please thank everyone. It gives us many great things to mull over."

 

[DRMarvello]

First of all, most of this is stuff your blog does, so I can't imagine it's all that difficult for them to do. They probably track it anyway. I sent Amazon a letter a few months ago asking for these things and received a polite and fairly dismissive pat on the head, so I'm not holding my breath, although I'm certainly hopeful.

I can see why Amazon might be reluctant to share some of the web analytics authors are asking for here. It isn't so much a matter of wanting to keep the information secret as the technical difficulties in collecting the astounding amount of data that would be involved, and then slicing and dicing it for consumption by individual publishers. I can't imagine how many page views Amazon must get per minute, much less over the course of a day.