Hi all,
Patrick, you weren't paid because your sales weren't payable yet.
We've always been transparent about how payments work. You'll find the policies and payment schedules here in our FAQ: h
ttp://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq#Royalties and you'll find further details in your Sales & Payments management screen here:
http://www.smashwords.com/dashboard/salesReport
We pay quarterly, based on all proceeds we've received on your behalf as of the last day of each calendar quarter. These proceeds come from sales at our small Smashwords.com operation, and also sales from our distribution network. The vast majority of our sales come from our retail distribution network because ebook distribution is a primary focus for us.
All of our retailers pay us on different schedules, but they all pay on a timely basis. As noted by David, retailers will report sales to us before those sales become payable to us. We report these sales to you before they're payable to you.
For those interested in the nitty gritty, we load two types of reports into your sales & payments manager. The first is the sales report. The second chunk of data we load reflects payments that have been received on your behalf and credited to you.
Here are the most common reasons authors are NOT paid in a quarterly payment round:
1. They're signed up for paper checks, and their balance owed to them (which means retailers haven't paid us by end of quarter) doesn't exceed the $75.00 threshold
2. Authors gave us the wrong mailing address, or wrong PayPal address. These unclaimed payments are credited back to you for the next payment period.
3. You'd not owed the money yet.
4. The US author hasn't provided us tax ID information
5. The author outside the US hasn't opted in to a specific payment option (30% IRS withholdings; defer until W8BEN submitted to qualify for reduced or zero withholdings)
I agree with some of the ideas here for where we need to improve, specifically:
1. Faster sales reporting: For certain retailers who can support it, later this year we'll start reporting sales information much much faster. Timely sales information is important so you can gauge the effectiveness of your marketing, pricing and promotions.
I somewhat agree with faster payments. The upside of faster payments is you get paid faster. We like paying authors because it makes authors happy, and happy authors keep us in business. The downside is that the payment processing is an incredibly complex endeavor. We have multiple retailers, each of which reports sales differently and on different schedules. Some have VAT, some don't. Some pay different percentages based on location of sale, or price of book. Their sales report spreadsheets are all different. It's a time consuming process (i.e. expensive manual manpower) to integrate the data, normalize it, fact check it, and then report it back to you quickly and accurately. We process these payments in batches. It requires weeks of collective man (and woman)-hours to pull it off. I think we do a great job of it. It takes us the same amount of time to process these batches whether we do it weekly, monthly or quarterly. So from a resource point of view, we can do it four times per year or 12, yet 12 is triple the work, which equals time not spent doing more important things that will yield you greater benefit.
There's another downside to monthly payouts, and that's fraud exposure. We've been able to limit fraud on Smashwords for the sole reason that we have three months to catch the fraudsters before they're paid. Fraud is a threat to authors as well as Smashwords.
Like any profitable business, large or small (and this includes self-published authors, since you're a business too), we are resource-constrained. We make resource allocation decisions every day. Our guiding principle at Smashwords is: "what can we do today that will yield the greatest benefit for the greatest number of Smashwords authors and publishers?" We balance short term and long term. We have nearly 500 items on our development roadmap, so we're constantly re-prioritizing as new opportunities arise. If we were to divert resources to monthly payments so some months you get paid a few weeks weeks earlier (a good short term benefit), it would limit our ability to do other (I would argue) more important tasks, such as faster sales reporting, opening up new distribution opportunities so you can reach more readers, working with our current retailers to help them ingest & update our books faster & more accurately, and as another poster noted here, faster Premium Catalog approvals (this is our next big priority: doubling the size of our vetting team).
That said, I wouldn't rule out the possibly of faster payment cycles in the future. As we develop systems to pay faster and more efficiently, this becomes an option. For anyone who's been following Smashwords for the last two or three years, you know we're always working to enhance our service for the benefit of our authors and publishers.
