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Amazon payment thresholds
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Depending on how much of a fee (if any) your bank charges to convert the currency, You might not get anything anyway. It would be nice if all the sales were lumped into the market of choice, in reality different countries and different tax policies make it a mess to do foreign business. They get charged tax for doing business in each country, then they get taxed again when they bring that payment home to the corporate office.Of course the solution you'll receive is if you don't like the policy, don't do business with them. It might be worth the aggravation just to shut off some of those low performing foreign markets and force them to shop through the .com site if that one person in Brazil wants your book.
Amazon does not use Paypal. A writer could wait for ever to reach that threshold of 100 USD or whatever for a check to arrive. In the meantime royalties would keep accruing which is the writer's money not amazon's. Had they paid through Paypal and not by check, then the question of a threshold would not rise.
I remember setting up a bank account for wire transfers because there was no threshold that way. Did I misread the info?We haven't published anything yet, so no royalties yet, hence I did not stop to check yet.
Kat I get regular royalties from my trad published book, The Blotted Line. But for the ones,I've self-pubished, I can see my royalties accruing, but amazon won't send it to me through Paypal. The only way is to send a check when they reach the threshold.
The situation, as I understand it, that there is no threshold only on EFT (electronic funds transfer) payments and those are available for the accounts in the US, UK and maybe a couple of more countries and only if you expressly choose this option. It can be checked here under 'Payment options by Location':
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A...
The threshold is a real problem. For example: Somebody bought one of my books in Germany, but I'm unlikely to receive MY royalties, ever.
As Mehreen said, Amazon could easily solve this problem by paying through PAYPAL or through providing credits for purchases on AMAZON itself equal to the amount of accrued royalties. But no, the money that belongs to the authors just sits there ....
Ah, I checked. I THOUGHT I signed up for wire transfer, but it was EFT.I like the idea that amazon could provide credits for purchases, it would be a lot more useful than just sitting on other people's money.
Amazon likes sitting on other people's money. I see everyday both on createspace as well as KDP, how my money just sits there and not delivered to me because I have't met the threshold yet! The other thing is if I sell 5 units in Australia and 10 in Great Britain, that would be 15 units in total across different shops. But Amazon's calculations are different. A thousand units has to be sold in either one of those shops alone in order to meet those atrocious thresholds.This is outrageous. There is no EFT system where I am in Australia.
That makes me wonder if it would be possible to get a person in an EFT country to set up a bank account to receive your royalties, and then send you the money via paypal.Business idea?
That would be good. But I don't know if that person will stick around long enough to do this.
Could be an idea, if done in bulk. I think many authors might apply. I mean there are successful businesses now, offering a US address for free delivery of goods bought on Ebay or Amazon and relatively cheap further shipment to the end-users abroad.
Collecting of payments for authors can be a viable service, if and until Amazon kills it by solving this problem -:)
oh god, yes, shipping fees!I just bought something from the US for 70$. Shipping was 47$, and customs was another 35$. So in total I paid 152$ - more than double the price I bought it for!
The items were worth it for me personally, but for other goods I'm not doing that again anytime soon.
Nik wrote: "Could be an idea, if done in bulk. I think many authors might apply. I mean there are successful businesses now, offering a US address for free delivery of goods bought on Ebay or Amazon and relat..."
You could be onto an idea in a different direction. If you know a number of other authors in your area, you might form a shell company and put all your books under their banner. Reach the threshold more quickly with a group of authors, then divide up the payment when it comes. Only problem is the authors in this pool have to trust each other and you would need someone handling the "company" that you could trust and wouldn't mind putting in the work.
I'm sort of going to do that with my parents, who both wrote as-yet-unpublished books. We're going to put them all under one label as an indie publisher.
This is an interesting problem. Like Nik, I nominally have a number of euros from France, Germany, Italy and Spain, but the chances of ever getting enough to past the threshold in each country is negligible at current sales rates. Actually, the same occurs from Canada and Australia.As an aside, Australia will certainly have EFT, BUT perhaps persuading Amazon to use it is another matter. I say that because NZ has EFT from Amazon, and Amazon always puts NZ behind a lot of others.
As another aside, every time I sell 1 book on Google, I get a prompt payment by EFT. Google is not at all bad on that. (Getting your books onto Google, though is a bit if a bureaucratic nightmare.)
Ian wrote: "This is an interesting problem. Like Nik, I nominally have a number of euros from France, Germany, Italy and Spain, but the chances of ever getting enough to past the threshold in each country is n..."Yeah, I think Amazon should solve it.
If I get desperate I'll write Bezos about it -:)
It's probably a very naive question, but which venue(s) does Google offer for selling books? Google play, google store?
Google Play. As I remarked above, it is quite a problem getting books on it because you have to do everything right, and sometimes it is not clear what is right. I have also not sold many on it, but it does pay what it owes.
Any news on thresholds maybe? New countries joined EFT during this year?
Y'all seem to have missed that the whole EU gets EFT payments. That's not new though, it's at least 2-3 years ago they implemented it.
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A...
In a nut shell: last time I checked Amazon allowed EFT payment of royalties to authors from 4 countries: US, UK and maybe Canada and Australia, if I remember correctly and not everybody choose EFT there. All the rest, are not entitled to EFT payments, but are supposed to receive royalties by check or wire, which are subject to a threshold of a minimum of 100 USD, pounds, EURO or whatever accrued. And each marketplace has its own threshold.
Now, there are different statistics and evaluations, most of which indicate that average indie author doesn't sell a lot of books, some even less than 100 ever!
Imagine all the money sitting somewhere in Amazon coffers, which represent authors' royalties that isn't being paid because of the threshold. We might be looking into Millions of USD here.
I haven't reached a threshold in any country yet, having the first book published 1.5 years ago and the 2-nd - 0.5 a year ago.
Isn't it like an unjust enrichment of a sort? A possible cause for a class action?
I mean I understand that wiring 20 USD through wire is not feasible, as correspondent banks' commissions would be higher than that, but Amazon could provide credits for purchases on Amazon, for example. Would stimulate its business even.
Moreover, lets say I sold 2 books in Brasil, 5 in Mexico and 7 in Italy. Not gonna see a penny of these sales, because each such country represents its own marketplace with its own threshold.
What do you think?