I’ve just had an interesting conversation with a friend who’s also an author and written a fair few articles over the years for which he receives affiliate payments. He just told me that his bank charges £7.50 to cash a single US dollar cheque and he’s not alone in paying these charges.
Today Eddie StClare, a long term eBay seller and founder of AuctionChex confirmed this growing trend. AuctionChex was founded in the days when transatlantic transactions were just starting and UK sellers needed to cash cheques from US buyers. Today it’s heading a new wave of transatlantic payments from an unexpected source.
The eBook is alive and well
Once the scourge of eBay, ebook sellers and content creators have moved on from selling links to web pages and info discs to digital downloads, and I don’t mean via a pdf file.!
Amazon’s Kindle is becoming the ebook reader of 2011, yes, it is used not only for books and newspapers but also for what we eBay folk understand as an ebook, and the ebook content providers are doing very nicely thanks to Amazons Kindle !
With my AuctionChex hat on, this last 6 months or so, we have been exchanging a LOT of Amazon generated US$ cheques. (That’s one of the things AuctionChex does, exchange US$ cheques to good old British pounds, saving you those hefty bank charges)
Being curious, I found out these US$ cheques are sent to ebook content providers for Amazon Kindle ebooks sales, with content varying from informational type content to short stories/mini novels, and with the ever increasing popularity of the use of a Kindle and Amazons latest Kindle releases I am pretty sure ebook creators are looking forward to a very profitable future.
The eBook Market
This advice from Eddie is timely, Amazon have just put the Kindle into main street US stores and it’s already available in the UK from the likes of John Lewis. Rakuten have just purchased the Kobo ereader – Kobo ereaders are retailed in the UK by WHSmith.
If you’re an author and receiving affiliate payments in the form of US Dollar cheques (just how outdated are affiliate companies not to pay electronically?) then log on to AuctionChex and get them cashed without paying high bank charges. If you have content or can produce and publish it to ebook format then now’s the time to build yourself a new revenue stream.
One Response
Its not only the Bank Charges. A few years ago I received an Australian Dollar Cheque. I put it in the Bank. I got the distinct impression that they did not know what to do with it and probably held a number of meetings and refered to the Book of Instructions. Anyway it caused them so much trouble that it was nearly a month before the proceeds were credited to my account. The trouble is that anything out of the ordinary and the Banks are totally incompetant.