Amazon KDP angst

At the end of January, Kindle Direct Publishing sales reports broke. I'd sold 201 copies of Replica on the 31st January after my promotion; when I woke on the 1st I'd sold another 20. For the rest of the day, nothing. For the next day or two, sales limped in intermittently, like survivors of a lost battle.

Nobody who hasn't self-published via KDP on Amazon will appreciate the disruptive effects of any glitch in Amazon sales reporting. We all look at our stats far too often, hoping for that small jolt of pleasure we get when another sale ticks up. When things go wrong, the herd gets restive - see this mammoth thread on Kindleboards. Traditionally published authors know nothing of this; their frustrations come from being completely in the dark as to what their book's rank means in terms of numbers sold. They are reduced to asking indies about it, who are generally much more helpful than their publishers.

Should we worry that, if sales are not reported to us, they are lost in the system and will not be paid for? Almost certainly not. Terence O'Brien wrote this about Amazon's two independent systems, sales and reports:

We can look at the characteristics of the two systems. One is the ordering/billing/delivery (OBD) system. The other is the KDP reporting.

The OBD is vital to the life of the company. The time and effort devoted to that kind of system, the backups and redundancies included, and the attention from management reflect that importance.

KDP reporting isn't necessary for anything. Nothing depends on it. It's just a nice gesture from Amazon to some of its suppliers.

So the OBD system is far more robust and flexible. It can, and probably does, recognize impending problems every day, and route around them. There is no reason to devote the same level of resources to KDP reporting, not in building it or fixing it.

There's a similar difference between Amazon Customer Support, which is legendary and excellent, and KDP Support...which is not. Responses are slow, and staff often misunderstand your point, deny there is a problem, or repeatedly fail to fix an acknowledged problem. It's really quite bad.