Support for Indie Authors discussion
Archived Author Help
>
Amazon Royalties Questions?
date
newest »
newest »
KU are paid by the page only if they get read. Conceivably, I could be a KU customer, download it and lose my kindle and never read it, and you won't get paid.
Hi Morris. I know KU pays per page read but I have already had many thousands of pages read (it gives you figures in the sales dashboard) I just don't know how amazon go about paying the author for this?
Yeah, my royalties have not gone up in three days on the chart, but I've had 913, 762 and 881 pages read the last three days. I'm not sure when they pay on that. Here is what the graph says about the pages read....
View the total number of Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) read for your selected title(s) in your chosen time period. This graph is updated as pages are read by customers who borrow your book from Kindle Unlimited (KU) and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL). Use the filters above to customize your data.
I am hoping that they pay once a week or something, because I've been getting a pile read this week.
View the total number of Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) read for your selected title(s) in your chosen time period. This graph is updated as pages are read by customers who borrow your book from Kindle Unlimited (KU) and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL). Use the filters above to customize your data.
I am hoping that they pay once a week or something, because I've been getting a pile read this week.
As far as I can see KU pays monthly at the same time as your sales get paid for.
For royalties earned, this is what Amazon says about KU payments: "This table shows your royalties earned from sales of your titles in Kindle stores worldwide during your selected time period. It takes up to 24 hours for royalties to be recorded once an order is placed for your title. This table does not include royalties earned from the KDP Select Global Fund. For KU/KOLL royalties, which are processed on a monthly basis, please refer to your Prior Months’ Royalties report."
Mod
Kindle Unlimited page reads are not recorded on the royalties chart shown there. :)
Payment for KU is made together with the royalty payment for sales. On the 15th of each month, you can find an spreadsheet on your KDP dashboard under "Prior Months' Royalties" that lists what you are being paid in each market for both sales and KU borrows. Because the payout for KU is not decided upon by Amazon until after the end of the month, the dashboard only shows sales revenue, not KU revenue.
I don't know how checks are handled, but with direct deposit, payments for each Amazon market are made separately. I suspect checks are handled in the same way (for legal reasons).
Keep in mind that Amazon pays 60 days after the end of the month in which the funds are earned.
Royalties take a bit to update sometimes. I am in the US and I usually get 6 separate EFT Amazon payments on the 29th of the month, one payment for each market (amazon.com, uk, canada, etc.). Within each payment, the Kindle Unlimited royalties for that market are included. \You can estimate about half a cent per page to guess your KU royalties, but if you download your sales report, it will tell you on there the dollar amount of your KU royalties.
If you get paid by check, you might have to reach a threshold before you receive payment.
Your royalty amounts might not be going up because you are only looking at the last 30 days, and not all your sales total, if that makes sense. So the books you sold 31 days ago won't show on the default report on your KDP dashboard.
Adam: On your sales dashboard there's a link to Prior Month's Royalties. Here you get an Excel sheet once a month, near the 15th day of the month. As far as I know, this is the only way Amazon tells you how much money the KENP graph translates into.Of course, under Prior Month's Royalties, you only get a report. The actual money Amazon pays 60 days after the end of the month in which you made the sale (or had pages read).
The KU royalties are paid together with the "regular" royalties from unit sales, only divided by the marketplace. At least that's how it works with me. I chose to have the money transferred directly to my account. I don't know if payment by check happens differently.
And your questions are by no means dumb! I'm a new author too, I'm on KDP Select since mid-July. It took me a while too to figure things out :)
Sorry if I'm repeating an answer or missing the point; your royalties on KDP...there should be a new date range showing. Click on that?
Also, keep in mind that there's a threshold of royalties earnings before you receive your first royalties check. I think it's $100? You have to make that much in royalties before Amazon will send you a check. I seem to remember that I didn't get a royalties report until I made that threshold. I could be remembering wrong, though.
Unbfortunately I don't have 'word' installed on my PC & use open office, so as far as I can gather access to reports is denied!Thanks for all the comments & advice thus far.
PS: I have another tab open into my KDP account. I cannot see anything which gives mention of KU royalties. I think it would be best to have this included in the main 'royalties earned' pane.
As Missy has mentioned, I'm guessing that I will have to hit £100 or its equivalent within the respective marketplaces before any KU payments are made.
The report can be saved as an Excel spreadsheet (xls) Open Office can open that. I use Libre Office and have no problems.
I use LibreOffice for everything, including writing, it works fine, and it's a free download.
Adam wrote: "have another tab open into my KDP account. I cannot see anything which gives mention of KU royalties. I think it would be best to have this included in the main 'royalties earned' pane."
This is not possible for the reasons Owen has stated above. Amazon does not set a firm payout each month. The amount of royalties you earn are calculated after month's end using a formula of the amount allocated to KU divided by the total number of pages read.
I do remember now, that spreadsheets weren't available to me until after I set up direct deposit to bypass the threshold. The first month after I did that was the first month I had a downloadable royalty report.
Neil wrote: "The report can be saved as an Excel spreadsheet (xls) Open Office can open that. I use Libre Office and have no problems."Thanks for that Neil. I tried it and indeed it does work!
Neil & Ken - a couple of questions - using Open Office how do I make changes to my book? Dummies guide to please by PM if you like so as not to go off topic? I need to correct a few passages.Thanks.
Missy wrote: "I do remember now, that spreadsheets weren't available to me until after I set up direct deposit to bypass the threshold. The first month after I did that was the first month I had a downloadable r..."Downloads are available to me however having checked my spreadsheet (my book was published on 26th August) I can find no figures which relate to KU royalties.
Adam wrote: "Missy wrote: "I do remember now, that spreadsheets weren't available to me until after I set up direct deposit to bypass the threshold. The first month after I did that was the first month I had a ..."There won't be. Until the payment for August reads is due (end of this month if memory serves) all you will see is pages read on your graph.
Adam wrote: "Neil & Ken - a couple of questions - using Open Office how do I make changes to my book? Dummies guide to please by PM if you like so as not to go off topic? I need to correct a few passages.Thanks."
I think it's probably useful for other people to know, so I'm just replying publicly. You use LibreOffice (LO) in very similar ways to using Word etc., though the user interface is probably a bit more like Word et al from pre "ribbon" days. With LO, you can read and write in Microsoft format or native LibreOffice format, as you wish.
My workflow for making corrections is to edit in LO; save; "save a copy" in .docx format; import that to Calibre (it works better with .docx than LO's .odt format); click the "convert" button in Calibre, and choose .mobi output. Then I just upload that.mobi file to Amazon in the usual way, preview it, etc.
If I also want Amazon to inform existing purchasers of my corrections, I then prepare a detailed list of the changes and use the "Contact Us" link from my author page and request that, providing the detailed list of the changes to them. They've been very good, and done just that each time (so far).
I found these Q&As on the KDP forum incredibly helpful in understanding the KDP sales dashboard: https://kdp.amazon.com/community/thre...That guy really seems to know his stuff.
The royalty figures in my sales dashboard are all over the place. Even when copies are bought they don't move or actually go down! (I have had only one refund since it was published!)
Aislinn wrote: "I found these Q&As on the KDP forum incredibly helpful in understanding the KDP sales dashboard: https://kdp.amazon.com/community/thre...That guy really seems to know..."
That's a great link Aislinn.
C.B. wrote: "Vagif wrote: "Dear all! I' m so happy to get such creative friends like you! Let me introduce myself! My name is Vagif Gaziyev ( pen name Vadim Gazi). I'm historian, sociologist and beginning write..."Where? *poof*
Mod
Thank you!
*Hands C.B. an ice pack*Thanks mods!
Another stupid question. In the author dashboard I noticed the following message: E-BOOKS
Upload an e-book excerpt with the above "add ebook" links and let users browse, preview, or download your work.
No e-books uploaded.
How do I go about doing this as I can find no 'add ebook' button?
Adam, it's on the top right of your author dashboard. It says 'add a book'.
Adam wrote: "Neil & Ken - a couple of questions - using Open Office how do I make changes to my book? Dummies guide to please by PM if you like so as not to go off topic? I need to correct a few passages.Thanks."
Open Office is difficult to convert to MOBI because Open Office doesn't support current versions HTML. You must do your own HTML editing which is not recommended for novice geeks. If possible buy subscription to WORD and use the Word document as your source. Also be sure to download all the wonderful documentation for Kindle Direct Publishing.
The way I do it, I use LibreOffice (free download) and convert the doc to HTML when it's done. Then I feed the HTML doc through Calibre (also a free download) to get a MOBI. No HTML editing necessary. It uploads straight to Amazon.
My approach is similar, except I Save A Copy from LibreOffice to .docx format, and in Calibre, add that .docx to the book (if you've already loaded the book beforehand, you select it and under the "Add Books" option, you choose "Add files to selected book record", and browse to your new version's .docx file).Calibre's conversion to .mobi is flawless (you choose the "Convert books" option, and make sure you select Input Format DOCX and Output Format MOBI), and you just upload that resulting .mobi file to Amazon.
The Calibre developer, Kovid Goyal, recommended importing the .docx format rather than the .odt version, as Calibre's .docx import is more comprehensive.
You don't need to touch html at any stage, nor do any special editing of anything. Calibre is great. I go into a bit more detail about it here: http://toeinthebookocean.blogspot.com..., since you might need to change one setting in Calibre to get the table of contents being generated properly.
The whole process generally takes me about two minutes.
I usually use LibreOffice to save to .docx and bypass Calibre when I upload to other vendors. Draft2Digital usually does very well with it, and it's easy to download their converted formats for a followup look.
Another dumb question about royalties!If you have more than one amazon title published do the royalties for all your works get paid separately or do they go into the one account? IE if book one earns £20 and book two earns £50 does the 'royalties earned' show £70?
I know it sounds a dumb question but as I'm currently working on my second book I will be interested to learn the answer.
Adam wrote: "Another dumb question about royalties!If you have more than one amazon title published do the royalties for all your works get paid separately or do they go into the one account? IE if book one e..."
They all get bundled together. You just see your sales and royalties earned for all titles as one figure. You can see what comes from which title, but it's not the default view. And you get paid in one lump. (Unless you aren't in the US like me, so each currency gets paid out differently. But your titles are all still bundled together.)
Hope that helps. :)
Thanks Aislinn. I'm UK based so am in the same boat! I realise I still have to wait for the royalties for each marketplace to reach £100 (or equivalent) before payout. I don't have any issue with that though.
Alex wrote: "Adam, you only need to wait for them to reach £100 if you're getting paid by cheque, if it's direct deposit they'll pay out on a much lower figure."I'm not sure if that's the case. At least, it isn't for me. I get paid by direct deposit, but I have to wait for the $100 minimum or equivalent (and as far as I understand, it will be released 60 days after I reach that threshold). The only marketplace I don't have to wait for is the Australia, where my account is based.
Because you are in the UK, you get the option for EFT payments in all currencies. Because I am in Australia, I only get the option of EFT payments for my own local currency.Lucky you!
Agreed! It's a pain in my arse, for sure.
I didn't explain myself correctly. Yes I'm paid by cheque. As far as I can gather there are pros and cons both ways. I believe you have to pay fees to convert monies paid from overseas into local currency and this can be frustrating if you are receiving small amounts via EFT. Of course those same fees apply when presenting a cheque. Personally I am no fan of electronic banking so chose the payment by cheque option.
Adam wrote: "Another dumb question about royalties!If you have more than one amazon title published do the royalties for all your works get paid separately or do they go into the one account? IE if book one e..."
For us [in the US], income for all titles are paid together (as stated), but each Amazon market is a separate payment. So we get a payment for Amazon.com [all titles + KU for all titles], another for Amazon UK, Germany, etc. As mentioned there is a 60-day holding period.
Alex wrote: "Ah, right, that's a pain, it's annoying when Amazon can't get things organised properly."
Amazon has to deal with banks and banking regulations, tax laws, and the whole bit in every country they do business in. These countries do not always make it easy. In my business, I once had clients and customers in the UK, Japan, Poland, Australia and Canada. Paying and getting paid was often a nightmare back in the day, and I dealt in small amounts, well below where many of the regulations kicked in. So yes, it can be a pain if you are outside the US, but Amazon has limited control over that.
Aislinn wrote: "Alex wrote: "Adam, you only need to wait for them to reach £100 if you're getting paid by cheque, if it's direct deposit they'll pay out on a much lower figure."I'm not sure if that's the case. A..."
I was paid eleven cents a few months ago, and that was by EFT, so I know they'll pay really small amounts.
I read through all this and I am still trying to figure this out. Maybe someone could answer this question. I downloaded my prior months sales report. It shows me the ebook sold and the amount paid for each. Great. The problem is the Normalized Page Views. It shows that in December I had over 900 NPV. Then it shows nothing for the royalties for those. Is there a reason it is showing nothing? Am I not getting paid for those page views?
Hi AS. If you mean page reads, yeah, 900 should have made you about $4.50 (assuming they were in the US). Did you scroll all the way to the right of the spreadsheet? Because that is where the royalties are listed. If the last column shows $0.00, but the 900 pages read show, you will want to contact Amazon and provide a screenshot of your report.
Christina wrote: "Hi AS. If you mean page reads, yeah, 900 should have made you about $4.50 (assuming they were in the US). Did you scroll all the way to the right of the spreadsheet? Because that is where the royal..."Ok now I feel stupid. I did not scroll all the way to the right. I just looked where it said royalty and seen nothing. Thank you for helping me through my blonde moment. :-)
Nah, not stupid at all. There's a ton of info on those reports, so it's easy to miss. :)
Firstly I noticed that despite getting daily book sales my 'royalties earned' on the main sales dashboard hasn't increased since the 27th of September. I have had only one book refunded during this time.
Also could someone please explain how kindle unlimited payments are made? Are they stand alone payments or are they included with the general royalties within their specific marketplace? I don't know if this makes any difference but I elected to be paid by cheque.
Thanks in advance for any answers.