How to Opt Out of KDP Select in Light of New Payout Rules

Kindle Unlimited discontentThe indie author world was aflutter with talk June 15 when Amazon announced it was changing the way it paid authors who joined the Kindle Direct Publishing Select Program. The changes (which involve compensating authors based on the number of pages a reader completes) left some saying they wanted out of the program. Continue reading “How to Opt Out of KDP Select in Light of New Payout Rules”

Kindle Unlimited’s New Wrinkle: Pay by Pages Read

Kindle Unlimited BooksIndie-author-land has been agog this week over Amazon’s latest changes to its payment system for borrowed books. In case you’ve been living under a rock (or don’t have any books in KDP Select), here’s what’s going down.

In the past, Amazon has paid authors on books borrowed from either of its lending programs, Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, only when a reader reached a certain percentage of the book. The amount the author was paid varied from month to month, depending on the size of the global fund that Amazon designated for these payouts. In other words, you wouldn’t know what you were earning on your borrows in June until mid-July, when the Zon announced the per-book royalty it would pay authors for qualifying borrows. Continue reading “Kindle Unlimited’s New Wrinkle: Pay by Pages Read”

Amazon and VAT

Euro_coins_and_banknotesAmericans who publish their books with KDP received an email earlier this month about VAT and how it impacts the prices of their books. If you were a lucky recipient of that email, you might have spent a split second wondering what it was about, just before your eyes glazed over.

VAT is the abbreviation for Value-Added Tax. It’s sort of the same as our sales tax here in the U.S., and sort of not. For the purchaser, it’s more or less a national sales tax. However, for sellers, it’s a tax on whatever they added to the product (or material or service) by what they did to get it in shape to sell. Here’s how Wikipedia explains it: Continue reading “Amazon and VAT”

My Way Or the Highway!

A guest post
by Dick Waters

My way or the highway! You’ve most likely heard that expression, but hopefully you will see that my way is the highway.  Have you ever learned from someone else’s mistake? I have, and I’ve also learned from my own. I’m writing this to help at least one person not make the same mistake I did publishing my first novel.

As I write this I think of Route 66; a great road for a scenic drive, but not the one to take to get where you’re going in an expeditious manner. Super highways were built to provide a more direct route. Publishing is experiencing the same scenario – ‘traditional publishing’ versus ‘independent publishing,’ or self publishing. Continue reading “My Way Or the Highway!”