Wow, 170 units would be a lot of money--provided some asshole didn't just refund them all, though have fun refunding 165 books. Since most of my books are $2.99 you have to figure that would be like $300 in the US, maybe less if some were overseas.
Yet when I checked the next day and days afterwards it was only $75. That's nice but a lot less than it should be. There had to be an explanation, right?
Well here's a partial explanation: the sales chart isn't really your actual SALES. It's ORDERS. And apparently there can be orders that aren't actually sales. If you don't believe me, here's the Excel chart for June 28th. On the left are the royalty-paying SALES and on the right the ORDERS from the "Orders" tab on the workbook.
Now you see the SALES are only 39 units, which if you do the math actually makes sense. 39 x $2 would be $78 so if a few are less than $2 royalties then that would make the $75.
The interesting thing is when I lined them up. You see a lot of them are the same but where there was 1 or 2 SALES there were 6 or 7 ORDERS. There were also two books in the SALES that aren't in the ORDERS and vice-versa, which is weird.
The only explanation I can think of is someone placed an order for those books that have 6-7 orders and it didn't go through the first five times or they accidentally hit the button a few times or it was just a system glitch that caused it to be repeated for the chart.
Asking Amazon seemed pointless, so I didn't bother. I asked the Kindle Boards and someone else had noticed a similar problem and never got an answer from Amazon. But no one could really explain it. Of course you get one or two "geniuses" who have to Amazonsplain to me that different countries have different rates and stuff. Like I haven't been selling on Amazon for 9 fucking years now. Also you can see on the chart they're all US and UK and only one has 35% royalty. Hence that's not the reason.
We'll probably never know the exact reason. But I guess it's a good reminder that just because that bar graph shows a number, doesn't mean that's what you're actually going to be paid for. What a gyp.
1 comment:
Yes, I've had this happen. Orders that don't ever show up as Sales. Something happened so the sale never went through on the buyer's end. Like an expired credit card. Maybe it was one person who doesn't realize the sales never went through. Sometimes the sale shows up later when the buyer fixes the problem.
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