update: still ain't paid

Last month, after finally making some sales on the Kindle titles I've got up, I finally reached the sum of $10, which means I've finally earned enough to get paid. Unfortunately, Amazon is no longer issuing paper checks for any amount less than $100, so in order to receive my earnings I'll have to give them direct access to my bank account for a transfer. And then it'll take 60 additional days before their system disburses on the monies earned earned thus far.

I haven't entered my bank info onto their system yet, though I probably will despite my unease with having one more hackable place with my private information on it. Or maybe I'll just keep waiting, and hope that in another couple of years I'll actually reach the $100 mark, and be able to request a paper check.

I'm not overly cynical about any of this, though. I've had stories and poems published by more than a half-dozen other groups, and haven't seen money from any of them either. Obviously, I know that writing isn't the best way to use your energy if making money is the goal.

But I do wonder how much money Amazon has made through selling titles on Kindle, and never had to pay any portion of it out, either because the author never reached $10, or wasn't willing to add account info to the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing site. I've heard that over a million titles have been published on the Kindle. If even 10% of those titles never sell enough copies to earn $10 (and I bet the percentage of sub-$10 sellers is a lot higher than that), that's 100,000 titles that have earned money that Amazon gets to keep all for itself.

Other news: despite having 350 copies of ElectroLive Murders downloaded during last week's two free days, the end result has been just one review and 10 additional sales. I've also logged 2 sales of Cool Blue since that drive, so possibly those are the result of people wanting more after having read ElectroLive, but in the end it hasn't started the snowball rolling downhill after all.

I figured I'd put ElectroLive up for free again today, to see how it'd do on a Wednesday. We're 75% done with the day, and there've been less than a dozen downloads so far.

Oh well. None of this is a particularly big surprise, and none of it will put a significant damper on my mood. I'm used to it.