Why the file, the price, and the payment all work the way they do
Occasional writing on DRM-free publishing, selling direct, and the arithmetic of selling a book without a middleman. RSS.
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You fixed the chapter. Amazon won't send it to the people who already bought the book.
KDP pushes a revised ebook to past buyers only for "critical quality issues", and it refuses rewritten chapters, changed plot, new links and new back matter by name. Here's what that means for a book you keep improving, and what the alternative looks like.
October 14, 2026 · 4 min read
The VAT on your first European ebook sale, if you live outside Europe
Sell an ebook direct to a reader in Germany and the VAT is yours to collect, at German rates, from the first sale. There's no small-seller threshold for anyone outside the EU. Here's what that actually involves, and what's automatic and what isn't.
October 14, 2026 · 5 min read
What a buyer's name in the file actually stops, and what it doesn't
A watermarked EPUB has no lock on it. It carries the buyer's name instead, and that changes who shares it. An honest account of what social DRM prevents, what it can't, and why it beats a lock for a book you sell yourself.
October 14, 2026 · 4 min read
When you are the merchant of record, the chargeback is yours
Keeping the whole price means your name is on the buyer's statement — and you are the one who answers when they dispute it. What a chargeback on a $9.99 ebook actually costs, and the four things that stop most of them being filed.
September 3, 2026 · 5 min read
The Kindle question, and why it stopped being a reason not to sell direct
The objection that ends a direct sale is "I read on my Kindle." Since 2022, Amazon's own Send to Kindle takes EPUB, which changes the honest answer to that objection. Here is the whole path from your checkout to a reader's device.
September 3, 2026 · 4 min read
Amazon's 70% is not 70%, and the difference is your cover art
KDP deducts a delivery fee of $0.15 per megabyte from the list price before it applies the royalty rate. On a plain novel that is 30¢. On an illustrated book it is the difference between 70% and 59%.
August 31, 2026 · 4 min read
The royalty band your price falls into, and the dollar that halves it
Amazon pays 70% between $2.99 and $12.99 and 35% outside it. Not a taper — a cliff. Pricing a book at $13.99 instead of $12.99 takes about $4 a copy off you, and nothing in the pricing form mentions it.
August 31, 2026 · 4 min read
Your bookshop should be on your own domain, and here is the unglamorous reason
Not branding. A platform that lists its sellers' storefronts in its own sitemap is competing with them in search results for their own book titles — and every link you earn is credited to whoever owns the hostname.
August 26, 2026 · 4 min read
Direct sales versus the retailers, without the cheerleading
Selling from your own shop keeps roughly three times as much per copy. It also sells fewer copies. Here is the arithmetic on both sides, and the point where the crossover actually happens.
August 23, 2026 · 4 min read
How to sell ebooks from your own website, end to end
The whole job is four decisions — where the money lands, what the reader gets, what happens when they lose the link, and whose domain it all happens on. Here is each one, with the trade-offs nobody puts on a pricing page.
August 20, 2026 · 5 min read
What the royalty split actually costs an independent author
Run the arithmetic on a $9.99 ebook through a retailer, then through a shop that takes nothing but the payment. The gap is about $2.62 a copy — and the delivery fee that causes half of it is charged by the megabyte.
August 13, 2026 · 4 min read
What actually happens when a reader pays for a book in bitcoin
The ninety seconds between a reader clicking checkout and the coins arriving in your wallet — one address per order, a rate locked for thirty minutes, one confirmation, and no account at either end.
August 10, 2026 · 5 min read
You are renting your library and calling it a purchase
The button says Buy. What you get is a revocable licence tied to one account, one app, and one company's continued existence. Here is what changes when the button means what it says.
August 4, 2026 · 4 min read