coinsAmazon is moving toward electronic funds transfer payments (EFT) for all Kindle authors, as noted earlier. I set up my bank accounts just last week. But Amazon has already shared some glad tidings—word of my first payment.

I signed up as a Kindle Direct Publishing author about a year ago, and now have four books up. Two of them have sold just a handful of copies each. One seems to go in seasonal waves, and I will get a chunk of several sales periodically, then nothing. The other sells regularly, a few copies a week. This is with very minimal on marketing, promotion and so on. I could be doing much better and, for example, creating product funnels with other products. I haven’t done that yet, but I should be.

The difficulty has been in collecting profits created prior to the shift toward EFT payments, Amazon was only able to pay me by cheque; and each portal (Amazon Canada, Amazon UK etc.) was running its own system. So I had to accumulate $100 in sales at each one of them before they would individually issue me the cheques. I did have $100 in profits when all was said and done, but this was spread amongst several of the Amazon sub-stores so I had yet to see a cheque.

The first fledgling year

So how did I do in my first fledgling year? Here were my payouts today. I have not converted all of this to Canadian currency yet. All amounts below are listed in the local currency for that website.

$1.47 from Amazon Estonia
$8.49 from Amazon UK
$4.04 from Amazon Canada
$80.98 from Amazon US

This is hardly enough to get rich and retire on yet. But here’s money from publishing books that I never would have had under any traditional publishing model. And there are a lot of things I did wrong, too. The product funnels idea, where one purchase guides the reader into a subsequent one, is something I have not implemented yet. And three of my titles were passion ones, published because I personally wanted to. For some forthcoming projects, I plan to pay a little more attention to topics that might actually sell. And I never quite got the hang of Twitter, and promotion.

When I am off work this summer, I plan to work this thing. It’s been hard to build a business while I am working full-time. I underestimated how hard that would be, especially once I started dealing with pregnancy fatigue. So we’ll see what Year Two as a Kindle author brings. I have to admit, it’s a lot more exciting to put work into this now that I actually can get paid for it regularly. Thanks for moving to EFT, Amazon!

Image credit: Here.

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"I’m a journalist, a teacher and an e-book fiend. I work as a French teacher at a K-3 private school. I use drama, music, puppets, props and all manner of tech in my job, and I love it. I enjoy moving between all the classes and having a relationship with each child in the school. Kids are hilarious, and I enjoy watching them grow and learn. My current device of choice for reading is my Amazon Kindle Touch, but I have owned or used devices by Sony, Kobo, Aluratek and others. I also read on my tablet devices using the Kindle app, and I enjoy synching between them, so that I’m always up to date no matter where I am or what I have with me."

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