The perils of GooglePlay

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There are many advantages to being an independent author, like being able to choose your own editor, and having a final say in the cover design but there are some disadvantages. One of them is getting your books onto platforms which sell to customers, such as Amazon.

I load all my books directly to Amazon, which does a pretty good job of formatting them from a Word document. For Kobo, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and a number of less well-known groups, I use Draft to Digital (D2D). D2D is a distributor. Authors upload their books as Word documents which are then formatted and sent to booksellers. I used to distribute through Smashwords but I gave up on that company years ago because of their draconian format requirements. Instead of just loading a Word document, I had to create a completely different format for their interface which was frankly a pain in whichever part of your anatomy hurts most. D2D was actually started by a man who was fed up with Smashwords’ interface and thought there had to be a better way. Believe me, there is.

But neither D2D nor Smashwords distributes to Google Play anymore. Google has made life difficult for them to such an extent they walked away.

Google also made life difficult for authors, discounting prices on a whim and thereby incurring the Mighty Zon’s wrath. Authors complained about the site being a haven for book pirates (aka thieves) and for a time Google Play refused to accept new author accounts. For me, there was one other gotcha. They wanted a business number. I’m just a little part-time author and I haven’t set up a business. Administration of a company would cost me much more than I earn.

But it seems Google has learned from its mistakes. I already tried setting up an account in years past and that still existed. I no longer had to enter an ABN.

But I did have to set up information via the Payment Center.

The first thing I had to do was create a Pay Profile. This is where you set up your financial details. On the screen below you'll see a box entitled "How you get paid". That's where you set up the bank account into which payments are made. It seems you can have more than one, with different sales territories in them. For me it was simple. I have one profile and it sells to the world. I added my bank account so I could receive payments. Google deposited a small amount (less than $1) in the account and I was asked to verify the amount I'd received. That happened over a few days and the instructions are very clear.

I entered my tax exemption information via the Payment Profile. It's not exactly intuitive. You edit the Payment Profile, which shows this screen.

From there you press Manage Settings, which shows the following screen.

From here you edit your tax info, which is presumably straight forward for Americans.

But not for us damn furners.

When I entered my taxation information to tell the system I’m an Australian citizen who pays tax in my own country and should therefore not be subject to the 30% US tax rate, I was required to enter the identifier for the article in the reciprocal arrangement between the US and Australia (it’s 12(2)) and the percentage tax to be charged (5%). Amazon and D2D ask authors to fill in those forms, too, but they’re much much simpler, with the same end result. Essentially, it is a W8-BEN. If you're not from the US, look up this document to find the reciprocal tax agreement.

Apart from the W8-BEN it was reasonably straight forward - after I worked out the navigation. It took several days for Google to check my account and accept the details.

While the verification took place, I loaded my titles. In that respect, Google could learn an awful lot from D2D and even from Amazon. The interface is pretty ordinary. It provides very little help to the poor sod (me) entering the data.

• I had to provide an epub file or a .pdf file, not a Word document. To do that, I downloaded the epubs from D2D. They do an excellent job of creating a good-looking epub that meets required standards.
• I had to trawl through the BISAC table to choose genres (although something like ‘science fiction’ will limit the list).
• I couldn’t enter any key words or tags. 
• No info was given on standards for covers. I uploaded covers around 300-400kb in size. The system accepts 3D files.
• I had to cut and paste my author biography for every book I loaded. In contrast, D2D allows you to set up a contributor bio which can then be added to any book.
• Even though the books would not be loaded for sale before Google had completed its review of my account, I couldn’t delete files loaded in error.

GooglePlay does, of course, have a reporting function but I wasn't surprised to discover it was pretty rudimentary. Essentially, you can enter a range of dates (or all) and a territory to report on. Then you'll be shown an Excel spreadsheet which you can download.

Anyway, after much hard work and a week during which Google verified my books were acceptable, they have all gone live. Should you be so inclined, you can now buy my books on Google Play.