These are my book sales on Amazon. I only have 4 books, but I have them for sale in both paperback (Print-on-demand or POD) and e-book formats. That’s what all the different colours are. Now, these sales numbers are not fantastic, but still, it’s a few each month and I don’t do much marketing. Some books earn 50c royalties, others earn $3. So that’s money for nothing, right?
Wrong.
First of all, because I’m based in NZ and don’t have a bank a/c in the USA, I don’t receive royalties as I earn them, but have to accumulate USD100 in royalties before Amazon will pay them out.
The first time I accumulated $100 (which took a year!) I eagerly awaited my payment. Nothing. After a month, I contacted them, and was advised to read the fine print. It’s not $100 worth of total royalties, but $100 within one marketplace. What? Well, Amazon.com is the marketplace for the US. Amazon.com.au is the marketplace for Australia. I have my book available in 3 marketplaces (US, Aus & UK) and had accumulated $25 in one, $30 in another, $70 in the third.
So I had to wait another few months before I accumulated $100 in a single marketplace. By now I had read the fine print, and realised that Amazon will pay out up to 2 months (60 days) after the $100 had been accumulated. 2 months! But, I finally got that first payout. Which, once converted into NZD was $140 (back in 2020). My second payout (NZD 170) came in September 2022, my third in March 2023 and I just got my fourth in Feb 2024.
But now–over 5 years since I first started–I still have not received any royalties for the sales I’ve made in Aus or UK. Amazon holds my precious royalties because I’ve not met the threshold. Nearly US$100 of unpaid royalties.
When I first queried my royalty payouts, I was able to email and got a response from a human. It was nice. Most recently, I’d exported my sales reports from the Amazon dashboard, and knew that I’d accumulated another USD100 in the US marketplace (in Nov 2023), and waited 2 months before following up. In January, there was no longer the option to email an enquiry, instead you needed to use the chat function.
I had a very frustrating conversations with the ‘person’ responding to my enquiry.
There had been a disclaimer that the ‘chat function was new, and please bear with us as we get used to this new technology’ (or something to that effect). Okay. I stated my case: that I’d accumulated the USD100 worth of royalties in a single market in Nov, and now at the end of January, I had still not received my royalty payout. Could I please be told when I could expect to receive my royalties? I was given the response stating that my royalties would be paid out when I’d accumulated USD100 royalties in a single market! Straight from the Amazon Marketplace help page. I was starting to get frustrated. After 2 more to-ing and fro-ing I typed “Thanks, obtuse chatbot, I know all of that stuff, I just want to know when I’ll get paid out”.
The response? “I’m not a chatbot.”
Yeah, right. I didn’t believe that for a second. I ran off to tell my husband about this exchange. By the time I got back to my computer a message awaited me: “You haven’t engaged in this chat for 5 minutes. The chat is terminated.” Like a human would write that.
I left it there. A month later, I received a notification that my royalty payment would be paid out in 2-5 days. I received it on 29th Feb. According to my calculations, 29th Feb is more than 60 days after 30th November. Amazon is definitely swindling us authors!
So, what can we do about it? Well, there are a couple of options:
- Apparently, you can set up an account with Wise which counts as being in the States, in which case your royalties will get paid out as you earn them. I haven’t set this up yet, so can’t give you any further advice on that count.
- You can forget Amazon, and use another online distributor. I am investigating Draft2Digital, which I understand pays out royalties as you earn them. With D2D you can still sell your books on Amazon, it’s just not direct.
- You can figure out how to advertise properly on Amazon. I’ve made attempts over the years, but I work full time, and it’s really easy to lose money, and seems to be quite tricky to make it. I just don’t have the time & energy to figure it out properly.
I’d be interested to hear your stories!
When I first self-published, there was lots of drama going on around Amazon and KDP underpaying authors, and the general buzz was that going ‘wide’ was giving better returns than staying with Amazon. So, I went through D2D and have stuck with them. Even in months where I might only sell 1 or 2 books, I get paid out.