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I'm writing my first book now and my idea is to publish it on Amazon KDP as an ebook. Let's be real, I'm no Shakespeare, so I'm expecting modest sales.

I want to maximize the profit and there are a few things I haven't figured out yet. For example:

  • how do I get paid? EFT is the simplest way that works for me but it can accumulate quite some taxes for small transfers. It would help to have few large...ish value transfers than many small value transfers. Can I control when I can transfer the money from Amazon to my banking account?
  • are there restrictions on locations (i.e. not being able to transfers to some country)? For example, I'm located in Europe, Romania.
  • is it mandatory to have an USD account?
  • are there better ways to maximize profit?
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  • Hi, and welcome to Writers. We are not Amazon customer support. Amazon has its own forums where you can ask questions.
    – Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum
    Jul 24, 2017 at 11:04
  • hi! As Lauren stated, this would be better if you called Amazon and spoke to them directly about it. A lot of these questions are just too business specific to get a general answer from a Q&A site, especially one that isn't specifically about Amazon. Someone here may have experience with this, but ultimately you should call Amazon or post this set of questions on their forums for help. You will get much better answers.
    – ggiaquin16
    Jul 24, 2017 at 16:46

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I'm in the UK and get money deposited directly into my bank by EFT. It's infinitely preferable to getting paid by cheque/check because there are no hefty currency conversion charges levied by the bank.

Amazon will deduct 30% in tax from your royalties unless you provide them with a Form W-8BEN - Certificate of Foreign Status of Beneficial Owner for United States Tax Withholding and Reporting (Individuals) They'll guide you through obtaining this document but look it up online also. Delays will cost you - they still owe me over $1,000.

You don't need a USD account normally - certainly not in my country (UK)

If you have a website you can get up to 9% extra payments from Amazon (4% is more likely) by setting up as an Amazon Affiliate and using affiliate links for your books. I use a link shortening service to make these links more type friendly. Smarturl.it works well for Amazon links. Books2Read.com is also good and will make links that automatically select the right retailer even if you publish at sites other than Amazon.

Don't forget that writing the book is easy. Editing and publishing is harder but the most difficult of all tasks is book promotion. This last task makes the difference between success or not.

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