I Sold A Book

I sold a book! Yay! I sold a book. I sold a book. I sold a book. That may seem like an odd thing to celebrate, but it is all I know. I sold a book. ‘A’ as in one. A book but I don’t know which one. I don’t even know if I made any money. I’m guessing J.K. doesn’t have such an issue. Welcome to another reality of writing.

I sold a book. Amazon told me so. I got an email titled: “KDP Royalty Payment Notification – THOMAS TRIMBATH”. That would seem to be a good opportunity for the company to tell me more. No. This is normal.

“This royalty payment notification is for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) sales recorded in the US Kindle Store. Payment will be made to your bank account and should appear in your available balance within 2 to 5 business days after the Payment Date. Details of the payment will be available on the Payment Report (online) after it has been processed by your bank”

I’m reasonably sure that the Kindle Store also includes paperbacks and hardbacks even though Kindle was originally associated with Kindle ebooks. So, I sold a book. It might be a paperback, of which I’ve produced ten. I might be a hardback, of which I’ve only listed on Amazon. It might be an ebook, of which I don’t know how many I’ve made because ebooks can have various formats, which is a separate story.

Payment will be made. Good. Except for a large chunk of 2025 when Amazon got confused and couldn’t find my US Bank account, which meant not getting paid for months. Eventually I found that out and fixed it. 

Payment will be made within 2 to 5 business days after the Payment Date, which sounds definite until the squishiness is revealed in ‘2 to 5’ and ‘Payment Date’. All can be discovered and resolved with some digging, but I suspect Amazon wouldn’t accept such squishy terms with its vendors and suppliers.

“Details of the payment will be available … after it has been processed by your bank.” But why? Amazon has to have clear data on what sold, for how much, and to who(m). They started in the book selling business. I suspect they got this far by being tighter with their data flow.

But historically, data has not flown to authors. It’s not an Amazon thing. I use Kindle, but I also use iUniverse, Lulu, and Blurb. I use iUniverse because there weren’t many options in 2001. I’ve used Createspace/Kindle for convenience. I’ve used Lulu to separate sales so I could track one book outside Amazon, though it still sells on Amazon. (Story there about making ~$15 on Lulu versus ~$1 on Amazon, which is a pity because it is a fundraiser.) I’ve used Blurb to separate sales again, and because prior to 2010 it was a good place to print high-quality hardback photo essays. (At a price that has risen enough to convince me to shift for my next Twelve Month series. More info later in 2026.) None of them excel at customer service, er, author service. 

Few books make money, not just mine. The last time I checked, only 265 authors sold over 100,000 copies. At the time the guideline was that 50% of the industry’s profits came from 20 authors. Note: That is twenty authors, not 20%, just 20 authors. You probably know their names even if you don’t buy their books. I’d give data on more reasonable breakpoints, but could only find data on the big sellers. That’s 265 authors out of millions of titles published every year.

So with so little money and such a purposely arcane system, why write a book?

“Why write a book?” has a lot of answers. Book sales are the easiest things to talk about and are an understandable metric. I like sales, but having written a book can lead to giving talks about it, about the process, and giving classes about it. Being known for writing books has led to writing gigs. Sometimes I’ve written books because I thought someone should chronicle and record some event or moment in time. Most of my books were written because someone said I should.

Friends are encouraging. Some friends even suggest I should write about something, but never get around to reading it.

Friends who bought one or some of my books can proudly greet me and proclaim that they bought my book. That’s great. In addition to them being happy, and me too, I know which book sold, in which format, and if I ask impertinent questions I can find out how much they spent. That’s better than Amazon’s automated service.

I usually don’t know if I made any money unless I get that mostly-vacant note from the company. Full-price sales are nice, but booksellers can discount prices without notice. There’s also that discrepancy between a book sold on Amazon that nets ~$1 and the same book netting me ~$15 on Lulu. Some company is netting $14, unless two of them split it.

But when a friend is happy to announce that they bought one of my books I’m happy too. As a friend I’m happy for my friend. As an author I’m happy that a book found a reader. As a business owner I add it to the list of things to report.

By the way, sometimes I sell books to bookstores or people from the stockpile I have in my car. Except for lugging them around and losing a few to errant raindrops, it is easy to do. Selling a book to a person is personal. That’s worth more than the price of a book.