Using TransferWise for Global KDP Royalties
One of the greatest things about publishing on the Amazon Kindle store is the globalised nature of the business — without any additional effort on my part, all e-books that I’ve published are made available wherever Amazon has an active storefront (effectively, most of the world).
On the other side of this benefit is the payment of royalties, which is slightly more difficult when you are selling books in various currencies.
When I first set up my Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) account, I registered a single Australian bank account for royalty payments, as I was living in Australia at the time. I quickly found out that while this made it easier for any sales made on the Australian Amazon store, when it came to the larger markets of the US, EU and UK, there were all sorts of small and annoying caveats — things like royalties having to hit a certain minimum amount in a particular currency before Amazon would transfer the money.
One solution could be to use a traditional banking institution to open accounts in various currencies, but that’s starting to get quite complicated — some banks won’t offer this kind of multi-currency service, and it’s not easy or quick to set up. And then, of course, when you receive the money, you’re stuck with the (mostly) inferior bank exchange rates to get them into the ultimate currency you prefer. So, I thought I would just have to live with the caveats of a single currency.
That is, until I discovered TransferWise and their Borderless Bank Account.
I’d heard of TransferWise before, but only in the context of international money transfers. I even had an old account from one time a few years ago when I needed to move some pounds across to Australia. But it wasn’t until I read about their Borderless Bank Account that I realised it could be the answer to my royalty conundrum.
What happens is that once I have a TransferWise primary account set up, I can easily add sub-accounts in a specific currency — such as UK pounds, US dollars etc. This generates a new account with all the proper information such as account numbers, sort codes, IBANs, and any other country-specific data. This account is under your name, and the address is the local TransferWise address for that country. In effect, it’s a local bank account and can be used as such.
Which means that Amazon is also happy to use it as a local account for royalty payments. And even better, when you start to receive all these royalty payments in various currencies, because they are all inside a single TransferWise Borderless Bank Account, you can easily shift the money around with very competitive exchange rates (much better than the bank).
So for example, I mostly receive royalties in Australia dollars, US dollars, EU euros and UK pounds. Correspondingly, I have four sub-accounts in my Borderless Bank Account — Australian, USA, EU and UK. Each of these has their own account numbers and information specific to that country, allowing me to connect them to Amazon as if they were local bank accounts.
Once I receive my royalties, I convert them all into UK pounds (since that’s where I live and pay tax) where they sit in a ‘container’ — this is a special account type that can simply hold money in one particular currency, and not act as a regular account — think of it like an online savings account. This makes it easy for me to see my total revenue for tax purposes.
I’m pretty sure that TransferWise isn’t the only company that offers a service like this, but it’s what I personally use, and I’m very happy with the outcome. To be honest, I couldn’t quite believe it all worked so smoothly. So much so that I’ve been in Scotland for a few months now and haven’t even bothered to open a local bank account, because my TransferWise account works so well.
Highly recommended.
