Interested in Writing? Here’s How Authors Get Paid Today

How do authors get paid? I’m coming at you here from the self-publishing aspect of things because I’ve never done traditional publishing once I found out the rigmarole you had to go through to get that situated and accomplished. Just wasn’t the thing I’m interested in right now.

Time wise, schedule wise, and quite frankly they just can’t keep up with me. So, with that in mind, the author gets paid, actually quite simply after you have your books. And I’ll go with Amazon KDP because the experience I had with Smashwords that also deals with Apple, Barnes & Noble, KOBO and some others were pretty much in the same thing.

Watch the video or read the transcription:

[feIsTBq2jUo]

Or save the audio for later, if you’d prefer:

*Podcast No Longer Available*

With the warning that Smashwords only pays out quarterly and Amazon is getting more frequent and it used to be a lot worse where you had to get your checks from different countries and when you deposition them you automatically lose $25 because of the collection fee. Thank goodness that’s done with and there’s a direct deposit option.

So, assuming you have a bank account or checking account, savings account, whatever, probably checking because they need the routing number and the bank account number. You can have just straight up direct deposit. You put your information in the Amazon KDP dashboard in the background, for your author profile and as long as it meets the thresholds, I don’t know, I didn’t care too much, I picked the number that was above the minimum threshold and I would wait for it to just come in.

Cause you know it was money I was expecting before, so, the limits doesn’t really matter too much. But once the money earned reaches a threshold, they’ll go ahead and initiate the direct deposit. And then you’ll get an email stating we are transferring money over to your account for your USA sales, the European sales, the German sales, the Japanese sales, the Mexico sales, all the different countries that you’re distributing rights to and you’ll get a separate distribution for each one.

That’s really it, now there’s a little bit of a lag of course you’re not getting paid each transaction. It’s a little less than 2 months. You know, it’s a month behind, but then there’s a couple weeks processing, so if you’re keeping track of numbers for your dashboards, don’t expect the money for a couple of weeks after that. But this is how jobs work and it’s really pretty similar for authors.

You see the money come in, you gets your emails. It’s all quite transparent, all the fees and everything are listed right there. And it’s all taken out automatically and about as simple as I think it could be. Some of the reports aren’t great. But the money is still coming in. I hope that answers your question.

If you have any more, leave them in the description or comments below and I’ll get right on it. Thanks. Publish more books. And have a great day, bye.