Insecure Wednesday: PayPal is No Pal of Mine

 Since book sales and especially Kindle Unlimited money have been down in recent months, me and other similar authors have been looking for other revenue streams:  Patreon, Ko-fi, Substack, and even a video game.  One author whose newsletter I follow mentioned she was selling books through a site called Payhip.  So I gave it a look since again I could use a new revenue stream.

The site itself is OK.  You can sell products like ebooks but also subscriptions like Patreon or Ko-fi, courses like Masterclass, or a coaching service.  To see how it worked I took an old book called Photobomb that Amazon had banned and put it up for sale for $1.  No takers, but I found the setup pretty easy.  All you need is a cover and a formatted file in whatever formats you choose:  Mobi, ePub, PDF, or whatever.  Unlike Amazon, Draft2Digital, or Smashwords it will not format a DOC file for you.  But it's easy enough to go to Draft2Digital and create a draft of those formats.  Or there are other ways to save those formats.

Next I decided that I should write a new story to load there.  Since Amazon had banished pretty much all my age regression gender swap stories about 3 years ago, why not do one of those?  So I came up with a story that's sort of a take off on a fairy tale.  In World War II, an American pilot crashes in the Black Forest and is lured by the smell of gingerbread to a witch's cabin, where she makes him into a little girl to do chores and stuff for her.

Then the story takes a turn and the pilot learns the witch is not really evil when she cures a small boy from a fever or something.  The pilot then starts learning from the witch about how to make potions and stuff like that to help the people who live in the area.  But when a Nazi patrol shows up in the area, things take a turn...

It was a fun story and not all that long.  I put it up for sale without much hassle for only $1.  I spread the word through my newsletter and blog and not long after got my first sale.  Hooray, a whole dollar!  Well, not quite.

The next morning I found out why the title of this entry is what it is.  Of the $1 someone paid for my book, I got about 40 cents.  Only about 5 cents I think went to Payhip.  The other 55 cents went to fucking PayPal.  55%!  

It makes me livid.  I mean PayPal didn't write the story.  They don't host the story.  And yet they think they should get the biggest cut?  What kind of bullshit is that?

I'm aware that for a story under $2.99 Amazon takes 70% but at least Amazon hosts the story and processes the payment.  Plus the privilege of having it on Amazon and if you're lucky they might even send an email to your "followers" and so forth.  You're getting a little more for the money they take.  PayPal isn't doing much for me except processing the payment.  They aren't hosting it.  They aren't advertising it.  But they get over half my sale?

So for the next book, Regression (Gender Swap Therapy #4), I decided to raise the price to $2 because I'd seen the last time where if someone bought two books it would charge me less.  And basically Paypal still took like 55 cents but because I charged more, I got to keep more.  So instead of them taking 55% it was more like 30%.  The sad thing then is I sold two copies pretty quick, which made about as much money as 7 of the previous book.

It still annoys me they take a big chunk of my profits because then I have to pass that cost onto the readers.  It's not fair but that's capitalism for you.  I don't know if somewhere in the fine print on Payhip it mentions how much they and Paypal take or if you use Stripe if it's a different rate.

One advantage over Amazon is you don't have to wait 2 months to get paid.  You can take the money from your Paypal as soon as you get it.  If you want to spend a quarter or so you can get it transferred instantly or you can wait a day or two to transfer it to your bank.  I assume they do any currency exchanges too if someone outside America is buying your stuff.

Anyway, that's something you can try if you get tired of Amazon's bullshit or just if you want to sell something other than books without all the hassle of buying a whole website package.