The First Royalty Cheque
Published on 8 April 2011 in Life, Amazon Kindle, Amazon.co.uk, books
Last summer I had an idea. As well as writing up my trip walking Wainwright’s Coast to Coast walk, why not make a downloadable version available as well?
Photo by thekellyscope. Creative Commons licensed.
Whilst walking the hills, I thought about it a bit more. I already knew that you could self publish books for the Amazon Kindle using Amazon’s own website. So why not make the the whole thing available to buy for the Kindle?
One Coast To Another was eventually published in December 2010, quickly followed by Doing The Dales Way and today, in a mysterious envelope sent from Slough, I received the first royalty cheque.
The value of the cheque certainly isn’t going to pay my mortgage for the next year – even less so once Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs have had their slice – however it’s a pleasing sight.
When I first published One Coast To Another, I really did have no idea whether anyone would ever buy it. Amazon don’t send out the cheques until you’ve built up a certain amount of cash (£75 for UK sales, which I just managed to scrape together) and I had this image of having sold around three copies and having a tenner in the account that I could never access.
What I do with my royalties is another question. It does occur to me that there may be something I should buy. See, rather ironically, I don’t actually own a Kindle…
4 Comments
Hi there,
I was wondering how satisfied you are with Amazon’s publishing service, as I might want to use it as well.
Any help is appreciated 🙂
Best Regards
Bastian
I’ve been meaning to do a blog post on that very subject. It is quite good and flexible, however you really need to know some HTML in order to format books properly. It says it can cope with Word doc uploads but the trial I did didn’t work very well at all.
Ah, ok. May I ask how you sent it to them then? Was it in HTML?
As far as I understand you only used the Kindle service and not the printing one?
Thanks for the help 🙂
For the Kindle you upload the HTML (or a few other formats) at http://kdp.amazon.com/ and once you’ve done, there’s a little preview tool that shows how it will appear on screen. It’s a little klunky but it does the job.
And yep, I haven’t used the paper version printing service – when I looked, it seemed a bit US-focused although they might have improved that since then.