Answering your questions: Amazon ‘on stock’

We often get asked why some Calvendo products are listed by Amazon as ‘on stock’ and others not. Based on the Calvendo digital print-on-demand set-up, the latter will then have  a longer delivery time because they are only produced upon customer order. Admittedly, the ins and outs of this gargantuan online retailer are pretty much unfathomable, however, there’s a bit of background we can give you about the ‘on stock’ issue:

First of all, if Amazon (or other online platforms, for that matter) pre-order Calvendo products and stock calendar copies is solely at their discretion. Calvendo can’t influence this. Retailers base this decision on their market assessment and how customer demand develops.

So, if you want your calendar to be put on stock, it is important that new releases swiftly achieve initial sales. Certain online mechanism will then take effect so that visibility and availability in online catalogs will be increased and improved for further customers. If customer interest in your product persists, it will become even more visible online.

Successful products are then in a kind of ‘upwards spiral’ which is on Amazon, for example, reflected in a product’s ‘Bestsellers Rank’. And sometimes it’s little things that you yourself (or friends and family) can do to move things in the right directions, such as repeated clicks on your listed product on Amazon. ‘The machine’ will register this interest and sent the right signals onwards then …

The nitty-gritty of author payments

How many calendars did I sell? Where can I find information? When will I be paid? These are questions that always crop up in conversations with our  self-publishers so here’s a short overview of all things sales and royalties:

First of all, Calvendo is not a B2C retail platform. We’re not selling your Calvendo calendars directly to consumers but to business customers, i.e. retail platforms and retailers such as Amazon, Hive or Speedyhen. Customers are then buying our (your) products from these retailers. As a consequence, reliable and accurate real-time information about sales is, unfortunately, not available to us and hence not to you. Because of the complexity of the supply chain, things simply take a bit longer in the publishing industry.

With our specific digital print-on-demand system the procedure is as follows: A calendar is ordered by a customer, the order is taken and processed by the retailer, the calendar is printed and then dispatched. However, the retailer that has taken this specific customer’s order has at that point not paid Calvendo for the calendar yet. We carry the production risk, and then have to wait for sales reports from retailers and wholesalers. Since our products are sold on a multitude of platforms, in the UK and other countries such as Germany and France, the amount of data that has to be processed is considerable and while some partners are fast in reporting their sales data, others aren’t. In the end, we always have to wait until we receive all the sales information in its entirety. Otherwise, we can’t prepare a correct royalties statement for you.

In your personal Calvendo account, you will therefore find preliminary sales projections starting from the end of each quarter and over the weeks following these cut off dates. However, this data is not final and is based on information we’ve received up to this point which is, see above, not complete and still subject to a lot of adjustment. It’ll take at least another eight weeks after the end of a quarter until your final statement can be prepared based on the complete sales figures of every retailer who’s sold your calendars. Your statement will then be available for download and you will be paid, as long as your share is at least EUR 30. Otherwise, the payment via bank transfer from our head office in Germany is being deferred to the next quarter. You’ll also find a short summary of the payment cycle and general information about author’s shares in our FAQs for further reading.