So, A Thing Happened

So, a thing happened.  I can't remember if I talked about it here or over at The Writing Spectacle, but this is the gist of it...  Earlier this month, I got a letter from Amazon.  It talked about illegitimate page reads and how they weren't paying for those or some such nonsense. I read it, thought it was a general letter to authors in the KU program, and filed it in the Archives.  Then I dilly-dallied checking out my September numbers until a few days ago.  Imagine my surprise, when the report showed a big fat zero in the place where it should've shown money for my page reads.

Then I remembered the letter.

I went into the Archives and pulled the letter out.  I guess it wasn't for everyone after all.  At the bottom, it said if I had any questions to reply to the letter, so I did.  I got an auto-gram stating it could take up to 5 days to research my case.  This morning, I got a new letter telling me basically nothing.  It did assure me that my account is still in good standing, but reaffirming the fact that illegitimate page reads were not going to get paid for.  But not actually saying my page reads were illegitimate or what have you.

Basically what I took from the reply was that those page reads I had in September are gone and I have no recourse to get my big whopping $3.79 from Amazon.  Sort of a 'so sorry, Charlie, but you're screwed.  Thanks for playing and we appreciate your business.' kind of thing.

Except now I don't feel like I can trust Amazon to give me a definite accounting of what I'm getting paid.  I mean, it's always been a case of trust.  Authors have to trust all of their sales outlets to give them the right numbers and then to put the right amounts into their bank accounts.  We have to trust the booksellers to not screw us royally.  And I can do that.  I have done it for over 6 years now.  Except now I can't.

Amazon wants me to continue to trust them, but they don't trust that my sales are real sales.  As if I somehow got someone to make up page reads somehow and risked my account in order to bilk the big 'Zon out of less than $4.  I'm the chick who found a pricey cell phone at the lake and then did my damndest to find the owner, including waiting around at a safe location for someone to come pick up the thing.  I'm the gal at the Walmart who stops the dude whose dollar just fell out of his pocket.  I couldn't have been in on it.  And since I wasn't in on it, they have got to be somehow thinking there's a Robin Hood character randomly faking page reads so the little guys like me can have pennies out of the big KU pool.  I can't parse it any other way.  

And they want me to remain exclusive with them throughout all this.  Except if I can't trust them to report the right page reads to me, how can I trust them to report actual sales?  How can I trust that tomorrow they won't tell me my book sales are illegitimate and they aren't paying for those either?  =o\

I've been a good little author.  I was on the frontlines defending Amazon when anyone would say anything negative about them.  And they thumbed their nose at me.  

Now, taking my books off Amazon would be stupid.  They're still the biggest fish in town and cancelling my books on there would be like cutting off nose because I ran afoul of a skunk.  Still need my nose, even if sometimes it encounters something that stinks.  But I am taking my books out of KU.  I can't see any other way around the lack of trust there. 

Unfortunately, a whole bunch of my books just re-upped for a 90 day stint.  If you're a subscriber, and you still want to read my books through KU, you'd better get cracking.

I managed to get Ugly and the Beast out just as it was renewing.  And Cinder Ugly a day before it went.  Sleeping Ugly should be out on the 1st.  That's one series.  As for the rest of them, they fall out eventually.  

I had hoped to do some kind of sale thing, but right now, I'm too meh.  I need to start thinking about going wide with all of these, which means changing back matter, etc.

It sucks.  Truly.  And you might think 'All this over $3.79???', but what if it was $379?  Or $3790?  Put it another way... What if it was $4 from me and $4 from you and $4 from every author in the KU program?  Why are we even in this thing if they can do this to any of us with no reason, no explanation, or anything?

They kicked me, who's no bigger than a guppy in the grand scheme of publishing.  I wonder how many other guppies they kicked this month.  

So, I'm out of it.  As soon as I can be out of it.  It was good while it lasted.  Time to dust off my Draft to Digital account and see if I can't pick my sales up off the floor.  A MODEL CURSE will be the first series to launch there.  I'll let you know about that and about the other series and singles as they become available widely.

By the way, don't look for me to do NaNoWriMo this year.  Maybe it'll be a NaNoEdMo if I can get my head out of my as... armpit long enough to get back to work on Untitled Fantasy, but there will be no new words.  

Release News!

In the midst of all this crap, I published a book.  Book number 14, to be exact.  Sure, it was delayed about a month because of the crap, but hey, it's out there in the world now.  The long awaited sequel to Sleeping Ugly is finally here...

UGLY AND THE BEAST: A Model Curse, Book Two.

It's currently $2.99 (and available in Kindle Unlimited now)*.  And I put Sleeping Ugly down to 99c (or whatever comparable price that equates to in your country) and will leave it there until 5/31.  At which point, both books will go up to $3.99, so get your copies in the merry month of May.

Hopefully sometime this month, I'll have a better idea of when Cinder Ugly (A Model Curse: Book Three) will be released.

Thanks to everyone who helped, supported, and encouraged me through this process.  I couldn't have done it without you.  Literally.  Because without you guys, I would've continued to wallow in my uncertainty.  Thanks for kicking my butt. 

*Due to a massive brain fart, it was not in KU when it first went live.  That has been rectified.  Read on, my friends.

The Best Laid Plans

If you're in the Kindle Select program (the Amazon exclusive thing), you know that you have 90 day windows in which to use their prezzies to market your stuff (i.e. free days or Kindle Countdown Deals).  Each book has a start date and an end date to show you your window.  It's all cool.

Except when you have a series and all of their dates are staggered around. 

My Once Upon a Djinn series is staggered because I wasn't planning anything when I did my releases, so there's no cohesion within the series for Kindle Select purposes.  WIOH, IDW, and WHTF are all kind of close together.  Poor UWC is hanging out there alone.  Which makes marketing a little sketchy sometimes. 

So, I figured I'd take it out of the program until it got closer to the others.  And that's where the issue came up.

Right after I set UWC to not be in the program - a program you have to be in to garner page reads through Kindle Unlimited - someone in the UK started reading the series in KU.  They went through WIOH in a couple days and started IDW, which meant that they'd be getting to UWC shortly.  Except UWC wasn't in the KU program anymore.

Blerg.

So, despite my idea to have the books be together as a series in the program, I had to put UWC back in right after I took it out.  Don't want to disappoint the reader.  Lucky for me, the whole thing is automatic.  Once you click that you want it in Kindle Select, it's available for KU subscribers to read.

I guess there are worse problems to have than the one where someone is reading my series so I can't be all anal about dates and junk.  I'd still like to have them be uniform, but c'est la vie.  Wishing for the ability to do so is like wishing for no page reads.  And that's just silly.

Do you get anal about stuff?  Or is it just me?

Sales and Kindle Unlimited

Here is a look at my Amazon 30-day sales graph as of yesterday

If you haven't seen one of these, the top graph is the quantity of whole books sold and the bottom is pages read through the Kindle Unlimited program. 

The spikes you see in the first graph directly correlate to paid advertising.  There's a little residual sale activity after the ad, but beyond that, crickets in the whole book sales area. 

What's notable is the continued page reads after the sale is over.  Two weeks after the ad went live for Dying Embers, I'm still seeing people in the KU program reading books even if nobody is buying the whole thing all at once. 

Sure, these numbers aren't going to wow anyone and I'm nowhere near making the list of top sellers in KU, but to see residual pages reads at all is always welcome.

This is why I keep my books in KU.  As I've said before, the times I've taken my books to a wider distribution, I do not see enough sales to make up for the page reads I've lost.  Of course, your mileage may vary.  We all have to do things that work best for us.  I just don't have a wide enough reach to bother having my books available everywhere.  And I don't have a large group of people out there telling me they'd buy my books if only they were available for Nook or Kobo or whatever.  (I used to have a couple people who asked, but one sale here or there wasn't making it worth my while.  If you don't have a Kindle and want to read my books, Amazon has an app for that.)  My stay in Kindle Select could change, but for now, this is working for me. 

Any questions? 

KU, Page Read Vacuum, and the Timesuck That is Writing Forums

As you know, I had the Once Upon a Djinn books on sale.  And this is the point at which I should be seeing residual Page Reads mounting.  Except I'm not. 

So, I says to myself this morning... 'Self?' I says.  "I wonder what the hell is up with Kindle Unlimited?  And finding no answer in my head, I went in search of people who were perhaps in the know about such things.  And the only place I know of to go is the KDP community forum.

Yeah, yeah, if you know me, you know I don't do forums.  At least not in any participatory way and rarely in a read-and-learn way.  (Long story... old story... blah and yawn.)

Anyway, I was scrolling though the forum, trying to discern the answer to my question.  I clicked on a post that I thought might help.  Nope.  Someone asking a question that might've been answered by doing what I was doing, and then getting a 'well, duh' answer and then getting her undies in a wad because she felt like she was being bullied.  Clicked on another... Same same.  Then I clicked on a thread because I wanted to laugh at the responses to the question of 'why is everyone so vicious here?' (and they spelled vicious wrong... on a writing forum... derp.)  Then I got sucked into a post that's subject was so horribly written it made me want to gouge out my eyes.  You know, just for kicks.

And then I remembered I was supposed to be trying to answer a question and I left because being in there is suck a huge waste of time.  Which is pretty much what happens when I go into any forum lately. 

Yes, I could've tried searching the topic.  I've done that in the past and get more useless hits than useful ones.  Sometimes it's better to just scroll down the list and hope for the best. 

Anyway... again... I did find that other writers seem to be in the same position (i.e. Kindle page reads are down), but no real clue as to why.  It could be that so much drek is floating around in the program and readers are being so consistently burned by crap that they're not using KU as much as they used to.  That's my guess anyway.  Not sure what the answer is.  I know I don't want to go wide, but it may be the only answer. 

The problem with even exploring that is my Kindle Select dates aren't up for an entire series any time soon.  And it's such a pain in the ass to go through all my books and change all the links so they don't point to Amazon.  Ugh.

I also noted, in the forums, that the general consensus is ads are paying for themselves, but no one is seeing sales like they used to.  So, I guess we're all in this together.  I'm guessing again but I think it's the glut of  potential reading material. 

Imagine you're in a stadium full of people and you're trying to find one person you might want to be friends with but you've never met them and you aren't sure what any of them are like.  That one is wearing a brightly colored shirt, but when you step up to him, you discover he's boring.  You overhear a woman talking and she sounds interesting, so you step up and find out she's kind of repeating the same things you've heard over and over.  There might be a good one in there somewhere, but finding them is hard and the harder things are the less likely we are to do them.  And so you get a headache and you go home.

I imagine that's kind of like what being a reader these days is like.

Wish I had better information for you this morning.  Like I said, I tried.  I may try to research this more after I've had some more coffee and the memory of the forum timesuck has faded a bit.

What say you?

Kindle Unlimited and Reviews

I don't know about the rest of you, but I never seem to see reviews from Kindle Unlimited readers.  I can see them reading my books, sometimes one after another, but there never seem to be any reviews left afterwards.

Maybe it's just me.  :shrug:

Still, one would think that KU subscribers are hard-core readers.  I mean, I'm an avid reader, but I can't spare the scratch to subscribe, so them that do must be really into reading to spare $20 a month.  And one would think that being hard-core readers, they would want to see the books they read succeed.  And in order to succeed, books need reviews.

Again, maybe it's just me.  I review pretty much everything I read - especially when the book I finished needs reviews.  (Not so much on books that don't need reviews - big name authors, famous books, etc.)  Might not always be an Amazon review (I'm working on that) but almost always a Goodreads review.

Now, my reviews probably aren't the best.  I usually just write a review with my reaction to the book.  I don't summarize the stories.  But you don't need to write lengthy reviews.  It's not the size of the reviews, it's the quantity of them that propel book sales. "Loved this."  "Cute and fun."  "Super thrilling."  Takes like a minute and you make the writer so happy.

I'm typically loathe to ask for reviews.  One time I did that on Twitter and the next day I got my wish - a low-star review left by someone who obviously hadn't read the book.  So nice of them to stop by.  Sort of a 'that'll teach her to ask for reviews' thing.  Well, it sure did teach me.  Bleh.

So, I'm not asking for reviews here*.  I'm just pondering why KU subscribers seem to be the last ones to leave them.  (Present company excepted, of course.)

Any thoughts?  Is it just me or do you see reviews after you see a bunch of page reads?  If you subscribe, do you leave reviews?

Just trying to figure things out here.



*Although I certainly wouldn't be adverse to getting reviews if you happened to read and enjoy my books.

Stuffs and Junk

I got a glimpse of the cover for Sleeping Ugly last night.  SQUEE!  Can't show it to you guys yet because it needs a eensy bit of tweaking.  But squee.  And soon, I'll be able to share it all over the place. 

Ugly and the Beast is coming right along.  Not sure if that's the right title for it yet.  I took last night off because I was pooped... okay, and because I'm not quite sure what the next scene is going to be... but I should be back to it tonight.  As of now, it's sitting at 12,700 words.

The sale and the ad for this week is coming right along, too.  There's still today to go on the sale.  All three SCIU books are 99c each.  Get 'em while they're hot.

I think I figured out the reason why these ads are not performing like the ads I placed in 2015.  In 2015, there was no Kindle Unlimited.  So people would buy the whole book and it would sit on their Kindle unread and no one would ever know.  Now, they use their KU subscription to get the book and sometimes they read it, but sometimes it sits on the Kindle unread until it drops off or whatever. It's good because people aren't paying for books they don't actually read.  But yah, it hurts the sales numbers. 

I'm still getting a good return on the ads, though, and I'm getting plenty of residual page reads, so it's all good. 

And that's it for me right now.  Any questions?  Comments?  News?

The Big Scary Kindle Unlimited Change - Week One

It's probably not all that well-known outside writing circles, but Amazon recently changed the way it's going to pay authors for books enrolled in its Kindle Unlimited subscription service.  Instead of paying every author the same for their books - after 10% of said book is read - they're going to pay authors by the number of pages read.  Seems reasonable to me - if a little harder to work with in my spreadsheets.

So, if you 'borrow' Accidental Death (on sale today for non-KU people, btw), and you read the whole thing, I get page x-amount for each of the 520 pages Amazon has calculated my book to be.  If you only read halfway through, I still get paid for 260 pages.  Only read 10 pages?  I feel sick to my stomach that I wasted your time but get paid for those 10 pages.

I think this all came about because some people were getting their panties in a wad because the big book they wrote was getting the same amount of fundage as the measly novella someone else wrote.  :shrug:  Conversely, the novella writers are now getting the proverbial wedgie because they probably won't be making what they used to on the shorter books while the behemoth doorstops will be raking in the dough.  And the short story writers are probably having a cow write about now.

Don't even get me started about the people who are complaining about readers who don't finish their books, and how now they aren't going to get paid. :eyeroll:  If I write a book people don't want to finish reading, I failed somewhere.  That's on me.  It would make me really sad, but it won't break me.

For me, personally?  It's not a big deal. I write full-size books, and it seems like people are reading them all the way to the end.  Plus, the only book I have in the KU program right now is Accidental Death.  Besides, whatever the dollar amount, I figure KU sales are still sales.  Those are sales I might not have gotten otherwise.  Therefore, I'm happy with whatever monies float my way.  You don't see me kvetching about the 61 cents I get when one of my paperbacks sells through 'Expanded Distribution' at Createspace.  It sucks that it's so small, but hey, someone found my book, paid for it, and they're reading it.  YAY!  (Do I still want to kick some of those other distribution channels in the gnads for pilfering away my profits?  Well, kinda, but them's the breaks.  A sale is a sale, after all.)

A couple of the positives for me so far is that

1) The first day of this program - July 1st - I got to watch someone read my book is what I would guess is real time.  When I woke up, it showed someone had read 70 pages.  Mid-afternoon, it showed that certain someone had read as far as 252.  Early evening, they'd read to 483.  And I was all SQUEE!  I know it may not sound exciting, but it was for me.  Actually, it could have been more than one someone - several people all reading at the same time - but for me, it was one person and they were tearing through the book in one day.  (Which is kinda what my first reviewer said in her review.  And that makes me inordinately happy.) by the next morning, they'd read another 34 pages - which I assume is to THE END without reading the About the Author. Works for me.

2) My book, which my Word program shows as being like 282 pages and is 372 pages for the print copy, is weighing in at 520 pages for the purposes of getting paid by Amazon.  More pages = more money, so yay.

A negative aspect of this is that it kinda screws up my accounting in terms of books sold.  I dealt with it buy creating a simple formula - pages read divided by total pages - to give me an idea of 'whole book'.

Having said all that, though, I'm probably going to discontinue Accidental Death from the KU program in August.  My decision was made long before the news of this change.  I want to open the distribution up to a wider audience.  True, I haven't really seen much from my expanded channels of Dying Embers through Draft2Digital yet, but I think people still need time to find me at B&N and Apple and Kobo.  Additionally, I plan on launching Wish in One Hand across the board and see how that goes.  If sales are strong, I'll stay out of KU. On the other hand, if I think I'm losing KU readers that aren't being replaced by other readers, then I'll come back.  Simple as that.  The idea is to get as many people to buy and read my books as possible.

Still, if this change ends up really increasing my sales dollars, then I might just have to think about staying in the KU.  Time will tell.

Are you a Kindle Unlimited subscriber?  Do you subscribe to another service - like Scribd or Oyster?  How's that working out for you? If you're an author, what are your thoughts on the process?  (And no negative stuff or Amazon bashing, please.  No one needs that kind of negativity - especially not right before a holiday weekend.)