A right royalty rumpus

Tags

Amazon, CreateSpace, KDP, Kindle, print-on-demand, royalty, self-publishing, tax

Part of being a self-published author is dealing with the money side of things.  I am extremely lucky in that, for me, writing is a hobby and so I do not count on it for my income.  (Just as well, considering it makes me £25 per week.)  I do hope that one day I will be able to rely on it a little more, but for the moment, it’s an enjoyable side-line.  And this is why I have never bothered getting to grips with the royalty situation.  (Isn’t that a marvellous word for something rather ordinary?  Here’s the explanation from etymologyonline, one of my most-used websites: “c. 1400, ‘office or position of a sovereign’, also ‘magnificence’, from or modelled on Old French roialte [12c., Modern French royauté], from Vulgar Latin regalitatem, from Latin regalis.  Sense of ‘prerogatives or rights granted by a sovereign to an individual or corporation’ is from late 15c.  From that evolved more general senses, such as ‘payment to a landowner for use of a mine’ [1839], and ultimately ‘payment to an author, composer, etc.’ for sale or use of his or her work [1857].”)

Don’t get me wrong: I have a fair grasp of how much I make from each copy sold.  (It’s a bit approximate, because it does vary according to country of sale, exchange rates, etc., but it’s about £1.10 per paperback copy sold on Amazon, and £1.10 per Kindle book.)  But what mystifies me is that every month I get five royalty payments.  Yes, five.  Three of them come accompanied by statements, while the other two sneak in alone.  The three statements cover purchases made in pounds, US dollars and euros.  But I have no idea what the other two payments are for.  On my bank statement all five payments say simply that they have come from “Amazon Media”.  And so I tot them up and bung them on the tax return.

But now change is a-foot.  I have received an email from CreateSpace (the print-on-demand company that I use, which is – like almost every business under the sun – owned by Amazon) announcing that “CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing will become one service”.  KDP is the service I use to sell my Kindle books, and CreateSpace authors seem to have little choice in the matter (pick your battles, as my grandma used to advise), so I have pressed the button to migrate my CreateSpace titles to my KDP account.  On the surface, this seems like a good development: I can now go to one dashboard to see all my sales – POD paperbacks and Kindle books.  But I can’t help thinking that things might not be that simple…  For a start, I’m going to have to wait longer for my £25: “CreateSpace pays monthly royalties 30 days after the end of the month in which they were earned while KDP pays monthly royalties approximately 60 days after the end of the month in which they were earned.”  And those royalties might well shrink a little, as they are calculated after the cost of production is deducted, and “some low-page count books will see an increase in printing fees when they are printed in the UK and EU”.  It remains to be seen how low is low when it comes to page count…

Amazed by Amazon

Tags

Amazon, CreateSpace, Faith Hope and Trickery, Fatal Forgery, KDP, pricing, self-publishing

As I recover from self-publishing my twenty-seventh book (you know about the five Sam Plank novels, but in my day job I have self-published twenty-two “piggy” books about anti-money laundering – so-called because of the piggy who features on the covers), I thought that I had pretty much come to terms with how Amazon does it all.  Compare and contrast, if you will:

• First self-published book: Upload to Amazon and then refresh their website every four seconds or so for the next three days (and occasionally at night, so great was the excitement), before collapsing with nervous exhaustion when “the book” finally appears in the Amazon catalogue.
• Twenty-seventh self-published book: Upload to Amazon and then go about my daily life, until husband comments in passing, “Did you know that the purple one is on there now?”

Because I started self-publishing some years ago, I find myself following a system that a new, self-publishing author might not choose – in short, I publish paperbacks through CreateSpace and Kindle books through Amazon.  Now that Amazon offers paperback publishing as well, if I were starting out today, I might combine the two.  But as mine are uploaded separately, I always get two Amazon listings: one for the paperback and one for the Kindle book.  This used to concern me…

• First self-published Sam book: Upload paperback files to CreateSpace and Kindle files to Amazon (via KDP) and then refresh, etc., as above.  Spot that there are two separate listings and spend hours on user forums to understand what is going on.  Email a very detailed request to Amazon asking them to link the two listings.  After 72 hours the two listings are linked.
• Fifth self-published Sam book: Upload paperback files to CreateSpace and Kindle files to Amazon, and then forget about it all for 72 hours until the two listings are linked automatically.

So I consider myself something of an old hand at Amazon.  But no: they have surprised me.  I logged in this morning to check that the two editions of “Faith, Hope and Trickery” have been linked – they have – and what should I spot but a special offer.  Of its own volition, Amazon is offering the Kindle editions of the first four Sam books as a bundle, for (on the UK website) £12.96.  I wonder whether this was prompted by my special 99p offer on “Fatal Forgery”?  (I know I said that I would run that only until “FHT” was published, but I’m going to let it ride until Sunday.  Since the start of the 99p deal, I have sold twelve Kindle copies of “Fatal Forgery”.)  So there it is: an Amazon-generated offer on my books, complete with a fabulous “group portrait” of the covers.

New book on the block

Tags

columnist, cover, CreateSpace, formatting, KDP, Kindle, Susan in the City

I know: I have been a very bad author recently.  Well, to be fair, I have been a very bad historical fiction author, but a rather laudable modern non-fiction author.  Yes, my collection of columns from my decade writing for the local newspaper is just about ready to be launched on the world.

“Susan in the City: The Cambridge News Years” is the final title, and it has a really eye-catching yellow cover.  The cover designer came up with two options – the yellow, and a more serious, almost-Financial-Times pink one – and I had a little poll on my Facebook page, and asked anyone else who would listen, and the yellow was the runaway favourite:

So where am I in the self-publishing process?  I have finalised, formatted and uploaded to CreateSpace the interior file (as a PDF, which must look exactly as you want it to look in the final book – so every bit of formatting, page-breaking, header-and-footering and so on must be just to).  Today the cover designer sent me the finished cover file (that’s a PDF as well, created based on a template generated by CreateSpace using the book size and number of pages that I have specified), and I have uploaded that too.  I have filled in all the other details required – description for Amazon and other catalogues, key words for searching, etc. – and accepted the free ISBN offered by CreateSpace (I’ve never seen the point of paying for my own).  And then I’ve sent it all off to CreateSpace for review, which takes about 24 hours.  When it comes back, I will use their online proofer to check one last time, and then press the big “Publish” button.  And order my own copies.  And wait for the sales to flood in.  Hah.

But in a spare few hours today, I also created the Kindle version of the book.  I wasn’t going to do one, but the nerd in me triumphed again.  So this involved taking out all of that careful formatting – particularly the page breaks, page numbers and headers and footers – as it just interferes with whatever settings people have on their e-readers.  Everything needs to be as plain as possible to maximise legibility.  I then uploaded that very plain document as a Word file – that’s the format they favour, over at Kindle Direct Publishing – along with the JPG file created by the cover designer to work best with e-books, and copied all of the search term and book description stuff.  And finally, I set the price.  I then clicked “Publish”, and KDP said that it takes a few hours for the Kindle book to appear.  But it was there when I came back from lunch, so that’s already published.  Once again, I shall sit back and wait for the sales to roll in.  And once again, hah.