Kindle Dollar Royalties Sorted, At Last

Indie-authors who operate outside the US often feel like country cousins who invariably arrive late to the party. But slowly things are improving. One breakthrough came earlier this year when Amazon’s CreateSpace switched to regional distribution for print-on-demand books. This alone persuaded me to go with CreateSpace for my paperback (announcement coming imminently on that front).

Last week, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing fixed another major issue for non-US authors. (Though many authors, myself included, did not receive email notification). From the self-publishing online community we learn that KDP will now pay US dollar royalties into a European bank account via EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer). Hurray! Until now, authors received dollar cheques. It was a slow and expensive process to bank the cheques. So I’ve logged onto my KDP Account and under ‘Your Royalty Payment’ I selected payment via EFT for Amazon US (including India). And I assume there will be a modest currency conversion charge as opposed to the big charge for negotiating paper cheques.

I hope Amazon’s CreateSpace will follow suit.

For readers and authors alike, it would be good if we could ‘gift’ an eBook. This is possible on the Amazon.com website, but not on Amazon.co.uk. It can’t be that difficult to roll out, surely…