KDP Now Paying ALL Royalties By EFT
From Catherine, Caffeinated:
We don’t normally have posts with such newsy, matter-of-fact headlines on this blog, but last night Amazon KDP announced something important and I wanted to make sure you all know about it, although if you’re a KDP author and this affects you, you should have received the same e-mail I did. It’s bye-bye to foreign currency cheques and hello electronic funds transfer because KDP is now offering to pay all royalties, be they dollars, pounds or euros, into your European bank account.
Up until now, I got three different payments from KDP each month: a US dollar cheque for sales from Amazon.com and a British pound cheque for sales from Amazon.co.uk, and royalties from Amazon.de sales (which were minimal; I think my best month ever there was €50) were paid directly into my bank because, being in Ireland, my bank account and Germany shared the same currency, the Euro.
. . . .
I’ve been getting these cheques for three years now, and they do have their disadvantages. With one of them coming all the way across the Atlantic, they can take a while to arrive, and once, one got lost. (It was quickly cancelled and replaced by Amazon.) When I lodge them in my bank, it’s a bureau de change transaction, and sometimes they can take up to 5 weeks—5 weeks!—to clear.
. . . .
And I couldn’t switch to EFT, because Amazon would only do that when there was a currency match, i.e. my earnings were in the same currency as my bank account, which is Euro.
Until now.
Now they will convert my US dollars or UK pounds in Euro, and then pay them directly into my account.
Link to the rest at Catherine Caffeinated and thanks to Russell for the tip.
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
Thank you, Amazon. Now we won’t have 20 people a day in the KDP forums asking why they can’t be paid via PayPal. =)
You will if this only applies to Europe.
Brilliant. Thanks for telling us.
Excellent news. Thanks for letting us know this.
(I had to go to my account page and change the payments for US sales to go to my UK bank account in pounds sterling. That means I might actually get a payment out of them next month
The title of the article is a little misleading. As Edward points out, this only applies to Europe. I wonder why Australia hasn’t been converted to EFTs yet.
Or Canada.
It’s probably in the works, it just takes time to change over.
We’re actually lucky. Canada is also one of the lucky countries that can accept EFT for all payments (except .com.br, for some bizarre reason).
Just hanging when I try to set it up for here in Canada, but at least offers the option. Not sure why its hanging though.
I was not aware of that.
Just goes to show, you can always learn something new,
if you’re not careful.
I’m also up in Canada and I can’t get it to accept the bank information either. It hangs and then reverts back.
Maybe it’s not available here in Canada yet?
I finally switched browsers and tried it in Safari this morning and that worked. I’ve had problems before with KDP and had to switch browsers to read a report so I should have thought of it earlier.
Interesting. I tried on IE. I’ll have to try it on Firefox later. Thanks for the info!
It will be interesting to see how this impacts Smashwords. There are a lot of writers who use SW because of Amazon’s insistence on checks.
Unless one wants to go Kindle-exclusive, Smashwords is still the entry-point if one wants to get on B&N, maybe on Apple, and possibly on Sony and Diesel. I doubt there will be much impact on Smashwords, unless some of the hand-’ported authors there are also not American.
While it would be nice if Smashwords would start paying monthly and by direct deposit (Kobo pays monthly be direct deposit, too), I seem to recall them trying out direct deposit one quarter last year (with their US authors). I believe their words afterwards were: We won’t be trying that again any time in the near future.
Hell, if I were living in the US I would choose to be paid by cheque instead of PayPal. Alas, I’m Canadian.
Not reached us here in South Africa yet, either. Hope it’s just a matter of time…
This is definitely an improvement for me. Still I will sort of miss taking my cheques to the bank each month.
Fantastic! I wonder if they managed to send December cheques before the change…
The email said it was only going to kick in for the April payments.
I started reading this article and threw my hands up in the air and said ‘yes’. Luckily it was quiet as I’m currently in my day job and surrounded by people. Also I realised it was only for Europe. Fugnuts >.<