I'm very new to the publishing industry, so please forgive any stupid questions I may ask or naive comments I'll probably make! My first novella was published in February 2013 by a very small ( I get the impression it is a one man band) publishing company and since then I have only ever received one royalty payment. The book is far from a best-seller, but I know that it has sold more copies than my publisher is leading me to believe. When I first signed the author agreement, things moved very quickly and the publisher was enthusiastic and in regular contact, however things rapidly declined once the book was actually published. Now when I contact the publisher regarding the payment of royalties, it takes him months to reply and he avoids actually answering any of my queries. I have recently contacted two other authors who have been published with the same company and they have never received any royalty payments. Becoming a published author was never about the money, but it would be nice to earn more than a fiver! Due to the fact that any legal fees will probably be more than I have actually made on the book, I am tempted to just put this down to experience and use the fact that I am now published to contact established publishing houses when I have completed my next book, however part of me also feels that I should attempt to get the money that I am owed. Any advice?
Amazon are notorious for not revealing sales info, unless (as far as I know) you register under their Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) programme. I am and the sales info data is great - you can see how many units are sold, in what territories and how much revenue has been generated. I'm not sure if this will be available if you've published via a third party.
CreateSpace is an Amazon company and you can self publish with them in print form but you have to do all the work - formatting, arranging cover art, determining book size etc. Again the sales data is pretty detailed and you can see exactly what, and how many, units you've sold.
What a good facility via Amazon - can't wait till I'm published so I can log in and check sales! And to list it by location too - excellent!
Check your contract and see what it says. Some publishers have a clause which says you need to reach a certain threshold to get the royalty payments and if you don't get to it they roll it over to the next one.
You'll probably also only get one or two payments a year - mine is six monthly.
Either way, there is no good reason why he shouldn't be in touch with you. Again, check your contract. If you aren't getting what's promised you might be able to pull the book and publish it elsewhere (or self publish)
You can check your sales by registering as an author on Amazon, if you go into your author page it will tell you how many people bought the book that week, and if I remember correctly it also says where the buyers are in the world too.