A New “Amazon Kindle Direct” Report

Amazon Pricing

After creating considerable confusion earlier about how I could sign up for a 70% royalty rate for my two books, I returned to my site to change my settings to the higher rate. I seem to have succeeded, but not without a further bit of confusion, which I now hope I have clarified.

This time, more intelligently, I queried the support team via the email option, and received a  helpful and timely reply. (One of my hoped-fors for my online ventures: a quick “help” response process.)

Who, exactly, is Amazon.com”?

Here was the problem: When you pick “70%,” you receive a chart showing in which sales territories you will earn 70%. For some (e.g., Brazil, Japan), a small box informs you that in order to earn the higher amount in these countries, you must enroll in Kindle Select, which, you may know, requires you to give Amazon an exclusive for several months. Because I had already uploaded to Smashwords, I couldn’t easlly make this choice, and I’m not sure I would want to.

The confusion for me arose because sales made at “Amazon.com” were shown as paying only the lower rate of 35%. So what sales, specifically, were these? In my idiom, items bought at “Amazon.com” include books bought by U. S. buyers. Did this chart mean that books bought in the U. S. would never earn more than 35% royalty?

Here’s the reply to my query:

“Hello,
You’ll receive 70% royalty for books sold to U.S customers from Amazon.com.
However, customers outside of the U.S. often purchase books on the Amazon.com Kindle store. The books sold to customers outside of the applicable sales territories will be calculated at 35% royalty rate.
The 70% Royalty Option is only applicable for sales to customers in these sales territories:

[I’ve cropped the long list of the countries in which the 70% option is available.]

*70% Royalty in Brazil, Japan, Mexico, and India: Digital Books enrolled in KDP Select are eligible to earn 70% royalty for sales to customers in these countries as long as the 70% List Price requirements are met. Otherwise, you will earn 35% royalty.
Sales to customers in all other locations will receive a 35% royalty and are recorded separately in your royalty reports at the 35% rate.
For more information, please visit our Help Page:
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A30F3VI2TH1FR8
I hope this helps. Thanks for using Amazon KDP. Have a nice day!”

Therefore, it looks as if I was successful in making the change, and as if I’ll earn 70% in most cases.

Questions I had about Logging into Amazon Direct Publishing

I had some difficulty figuring out exactly how to return to my KDP account. When I signed in using the account I had created to associate with the books, I could find no links to my KDP account. The customer-service representatives with whom I initiated a chat for help had no idea what to tell me. Finally they directed me to the “contact us” link for KDP, which is apparently a separate section of Amazon. I know now to log in at kdp.amazon.com/bookshelf, where I then sign in with the email address I created.

I hope this help others easing into the process. I assure you, the Smashwords process was less complex, almost certainly because of the complex royalty and distribution components of Amazon.