Getting paid
It's by no means unseemly to want to get paid for your books. If you can arrange to make this happen often enough and involve a sufficient number of digits on your royalty statements, you'll be able to write more books.
The world needs more books.
We've structured the payment terms we offer to make them fair, easy to follow and unlikely to require the services of a professional accountant to understand. If you've actually been confronted with a traditional publishing agreement — wherein you get paid 11.725 percent of the purchase price of your book for the first 10,000 copies and 9.1735 percent thereafter unless it's sold through a book club, in which case you'll receive 0.75 percent of the agreed-upon royalty minus the amortized fulfillment costs plus a fraction of the overseas sales revenue for those countries not having a camel or other large quadruped printed on their currency — you'll know what we worked to avoid in our payment system.
Collecting and Forwarding Royalties
At present, we offer several management structures for our clients.
Novelist Accounts: A Novelist Account will let you get your book published to Kindle for a flat rate of $99.99. This covers formatting your manuscript, uploading it to Kindle, converting your cover graphic for display on a Kindle tablet, managing Kindle's submission process and forwarding your royalties to you for one calendar year. There are no other costs involved. A Novelist Account can be renewed for subsequent years for $49.99 per year, assuming that we won't be making any changes to your book or your submission details.
A Novelist Account can only manage one book. You can create multiple Novelist Accounts if you wish to have us manage multiple titles this way.
In order to qualify for a Novelist Account, your book need not be fiction, but it does have to be structured more or less like a novel. Specifically:
- It must be in English. We have nothing against other languages, but books in languages other than English — typically involving special characters and punctuation — require significantly more time to format.
- It must have no interior graphics, graphs, charts, tables or special text formatting.
- It should have a printed page count of about 500 pages or less — don't get too bent out of shape if it stretches the envelope a bit in this regard.
- You'll need to provide us with a high-resolution cover graphic that we can use to generate an interior cover image with a minimum of manipulation.
- Your book needs to be provided as a Microsoft Word or RTF document. We can usually accept PDF files as well, as long as they don’t include any exotic formatting elements.
Prior to clicking on anything legally binding, we invite you to submit your manuscript for review to make sure it will qualify for a Novelist Account. Please contact us for more information.
We’ll keep track of your sales and forward you your royalties — monthly if you choose payment by PayPal, or once every six months if we’re sending you a bank draft. You’ll receive a monthly e-mailed statement of your sales.
Author Accounts: Author Accounts are intended for clients who have a five or fewer books to publish on Kindle. For $49.95 per year, payed at the beginning of a billing cycle, we’ll keep track of your sales and forward you your royalties — monthly if you choose payment by PayPal, or once every six months if we’re sending you a bank draft. You’ll receive a monthly e-mailed statement of your sales.
Author Accounts can be used to manage up to five books.
The following fees will be applicable to books managed under an Author Account:
- Formatting costs: Formatting costs $15.00 per hour, with the number of hours involved varying with the complexity of the book in question. Really simple ones can be handled in a few hours, and we'll format such books for $19.99 if we'll be managing them for you on Kindle. Complex books with lots of internal text formatting, tables and graphics can run to ten or twelve hours. As noted elsewhere at our web page, you don’t have to use our formatting services.
- Graphic costs: At the very least, you'll need a high-resolution cover graphic for your book having at least one dimension of 1200 pixels or more, and one internal gray-scale cover image compatible with a Kindle tablet. If this represents all the graphics involved, plan on between $10.00 and $20.00 for us to massage your high-resolution color cover into a suitable Kindle graphics, leaning toward the former in most cases. If your book includes internal graphics, tables, equations or other graphic elements, we’ll charge $20.00 per hours to format your graphics. Once again, you don't have to use our graphic formatting services if you wish to provide your graphics ready to upload.
- Upload fee: There's a one-time upload fee of $19.99 per book.
Once again, we invite you to submit your manuscript for review so we can provide you with a firm quote before anything gets charged to your plastic. Please contact us for more information.
Publisher Accounts: Publisher Accounts are intended for authors or publishers who have more than five titles to release as e-books. Note that you don't have to be a genuine publisher to open one.
Within thirty days of Amazon paying us for sales of your books, we'll pay you.
A Publisher Account costs $19.99 per month. This fee will be payable whether you have accrued no sales at all, or sufficient royalties to enable you to buy your own country. You can manage up to 36 titles under a Publisher Account. The additional costs for books managed under a Publisher Account are the same as for an Author Account, above.
All accounts: Except as stipulated in our account agreement, we will not keep a percentage of your royalties.
Once the money for your royalties has been transferred from Amazon to our bank account, we will either:
- Send you a check — or a cheque, if you prefer. In fact, it will probably be a bank draft or an international money order, as these devices are less likely to confront you with a substantial delay in getting them cashed.
- Transfer the money to you by PayPal.
We'll also e-mail you a statement which will detail what was sold and how much you can expect to receive for it.
Please note that royalties are paid based on the sales agreement of Amazon, which you should read and understand before you get involved with us. We'll provide you with a link to it before you click on anything legally binding.
We should also note that while our experiences of getting paid by Amazon have been problem-free, it's possible that they won't pay us exactly when they promise to at some time in the future. If we don't get paid, neither will you.
As you might imagine, the actual details of transferring your funds has a lot of fine print.
In answer to a frequently asked question, we can arrange to wire-transfer funds directly to your bank account if you wish. This is something that's very inexpensive in some parts of the world, albeit not in ours. As a rough guide, we'll need to charge you about $35.00 to complete a wire transfer, depending on where you're located and who you bank with. Please contact us for a more definitive quote.
We would like to point out — in the interest of the fairness referred to earlier in this page — that with the exception of a Novelist Account, our price structure for formatting, submitting and paying for electronic books consists of a number of small charges, rather than a large "one-size-fits-all" price. We've set it up this way such that those of our clients who need a lot of our services can buy them, and those with relatively simple projects that don't require much of our input won't be forced to pay for services they don't need.