It turns out I was wrong – it takes only two months to get paid for e-book sales, not six as I previously thought. For example, in a couple of days I’ll receive my royalties for March. It still feels like two months too long, but it could be worse.

For those who are curious about this sort of thing, my book sold 119 copies in April. Its rank in the Kindle store is anywhere between 12,000 and 16,000, depending on the day, and it’s usually ranked 13th in the Kindle section on atheism. The royalties for those 119 copies amount to a total of $225.82 after Amazon’s commissions and fees. That’s not too bad, since it’s enough to pay for my student loans and there’s even enough left for a cheeseburger. (Not bad for five hours’ work!)

I’ve decided to expand to other e-readers and uploaded a copy of Atheism-101 to Barnes&Noble. I should have done that a long time ago (ideally back in January), but better late than never, right?.. After that, I decided to scout other, smaller e-book platforms such as Kobe and Apple, but their self-publishing process was a bit too complex for my taste. I ended up setting up an account on Smashwords instead. It’s quite a brilliant service: once you upload a book, they help you format it and then set it up for sale on every single e-reader platform. (I’d never even heard of some of them before.) In exchange, they take a modest cut of your profits. The upside of Smashwords is the ability to manage your content fast, as opposed to dealing with seven different publishers. The only downside is that the payments are made on a quarterly basis. For example, all the proceeds for the sales made in April, May and June will be deposited at the end of July. Sure, it makes for one lump sum, but I’d much rather have regular monthly deposits. If nothing else, it makes budgeting easier. (And yes, I’m well aware that I may be the only 20-something guy that budgets for things.)