Here is another "The Story of a Book" journal entry: Washington State excise taxes are due by January 31. St. Rosaline pray for us!

Fellow mommies (and dads), look over my shoulder and smile as I gather the information I need to declare the income received from our St. Rosaline book sales on the Kindle Direct Publishing, KPD, website. I must admit it was easier than I thought.

I am recording my steps in two tutorials hoping they may be useful to someone out there.

My aim is to compile the figures for our gross receipts, the money we received in the form of royalties. I also need the amount of expenses as far as directly recorded on kdp.amazon.com.

KDP sent me an email with a link to sign into my KDP account. There, I was told, I could opt to receive electronic statements. I clicked and followed the instructions.I recorded what I did in this tutorial:

Now, the IRS form 1099-MISC states the royalties we made by selling our books on KPD in one easy figure in field 4. Early in the year, I had started saving the individual monthly reports on the website Reports page. I soon gave that up when I discovered they had a year-to-date amount. I was just going to wait until the last amount for 2018 had been entered there and use that. No need for that. The 1099-MISC shows all the royalties received. Done! Thank you St. Rosaline!

Now I needed to figure our expenses. We conducted two advertising campaigns. To find them, I started again from the beginning.

I went to kdp.amazon.com and signed in. Enjoy the Expenses Tutorial:

Now, that I see how little we spent, I am planning to run a continuous campaign throughout the year and perhaps add some seasonal Facebook campaigns.

Unfortunately, the field at the top of the page tells us that Amazon is going to change their advertising by February 5, 2019. Alas, this part of my wonderful tutorial for mommies may be out of date. I quote the motto of the Carthusian order for the second time in a week: "While the world changes, the cross stands firm." (see post: Myth and History Brought to Life by the D'Aulaires )

Another expense is the number of St. Rosaline books we bought and paid for ourselves to give away – for advertising purposes. I printed and filed the receipts when I bought them. If you did not, you could always go back into your regular Amazon orders and bring up all the orders of your book in 2018. (As we have Amazon Prime, we bought regular copies with free shipping rather than author’s copies on KPD. We paid the full price but were later reimbursed through royalties.)

Now I am ready to file our state excise tax return. I know we will not have to pay taxes because our income was so low. This is good news and bad news. So much work for so little return? I will call another business meeting soon to evaluate our efforts. Stay tuned!