Tag Archives: Kindle Unlimited

Welcome to 2022

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Photos of Waikawa Bay, Picton. Palm Tree on the left looking out to the Sounds.
Picton, New Zealand looking out over Waikawa Bay

Hurray, 2022 is here, well in New Zealand and a few other countries… Looking forward to you all joining us and celebrating a brand new year where positivity will move us all forward in leaps and bounds. At least I hope so.

Lots to do and a business plan for this year to sort out before work commences on the 6th Jan 2022. We have five books to work on over the next couple of months with another touching down in April. It is going to be great fun working with these clients, they are awesome writers and people.

Business

Part of the plant this year is to take Monday’s off and do a course on Marketing. Though I have some marketing skills, I need to up my skills to move this business forward to the next stage. As many of you not, our business says Publishing House in the title. At this stage we don’t actually publish any client’s work, we only prepare work for distribution. I work as an Author Consultant and Formatter. This is due to the fact, USA business tax is complicated (to say the least) With saying this, we will eventually look into publishing in New Zealand, though the costs are much higher than KDP, Smashwords etc. This is because printers in New Zealand don’t understand the POD (Print on Demand) system or don’t use the system the same way as overseas. They have a single price for one book, it is set out… the more you buy the cheaper the books are. This means it can cost thousands to print books and is sadly out of many writers pockets, which is why we use places like KDP.

Sadly KDP can be tricky and terminate accounts and not pay-out royalties whenever they so choose. Considering those of us living outside an Amazon area/country, we only get paid after we’ve earned $100 USD, POUNDS, EURO etc. With this warning, please be careful out there and read all the policies of the places your distribute your work through.

As well as up-skilling my marketing, I am also updating my graphic art skills, mainly on GIMP, learning to do layers etc. I had a blast about ten days ago with a new client and their book cover. Slightly frustrating, though enhancing my skill.

New Clients

I have several new clients coming up this year, though will blog about them at a later date, when they are ready for publishing. An interview is a great way to introduce you all to new writers. Along with this I am hoping to have an Instagram day, where I will post about books once a week… first though, I need to learn how to use Instagram a bit better than I do. I’m not good with a phone and wish we could post via computer. I’ve heard some can, so will see what happens this year. We also need to finish updating this website and adding the links we are missing. If you see a broken link, please let me know.

Lots of learning. Weekends will be for family. We will have set hours, though we will also always answer Fb messages when we see them due to the time differences around the world.

Reviews

If you have books on Kindle Unlimited and they are in a genre we read, then please let us know and we will read and review. Reviews will be fair and only done if we can give 4 or 5 stars. Anything less and we will message you… the author, instead and let you know what issues we’ve found, be it formatting, or editing, etc.

Amazon Review Privilege by Guest Blogger, May Dawney

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Introducing May Dawney you recently put this post up in a group on Facebook. It is a good read and it certainly makes you think.  Please remember nobody is picking on anyone. It is an observation made which affects those writers and businesses – like me, who live outside the USA.
Thank you, May Dawney, for this great article.

Amazon Pulls Another Stunt.

Amazon has decided that anyone who wants to leave a review on a book or other article has to have spent a minimum of $50 in that store, in a 12 month period. I’m not happy about it, but I get it. That’s not what I want to discuss. We all have our opinion on the topic and all are valid and appreciated. I have, however, noticed something I would like to address: please check your privilege before you post on these topics.
#1 Maybe $50 is not a lot for you. Great! Some reviewers had to scrape by to get that money for weeks, or months, or years, and they are devastated they’ll have to do it yearly now. Having $50 to spend on non-essentials like books is a privilege. Please, keep that in mind.
#2 Not all reviewers are in the US. If they want to review on .com and their home store like before, they now have to spend $ 100 a year. See #1.
#3 Non-US reviewers can’t buy e-books in the .com store. They have to buy something physical over $50 and have that shipped over (usually at ridiculous costs) to meet the $ 50 requirement. For them, $50 is not $50. It’s a hassle and it’s frustrating. Also: see #1--if you’re already scraping by and $50 becomes $70 because of shipping, it’s tough. People outside of the US also pay an import tax of 10 – 21 percent, depending on the country, on any purchase over a certain value, so a $ 50 order can quickly turn into a $ 100 one.
#4 Not every author gets a ton of reviews, period, let alone in the US store. If you do, that’s a privilege. Saying “Oh, I can stand to lose a few” is not true for everyone. Please, keep that in mind.
#5 Not every author is most popular in the US. Some have predominantly UK (or EU, or NZ, or Asian) readers. Promo sites look almost exclusively at the US store to see if a book qualifies, and this new rule thus skewers the odds of a good promo like Bookbub in the favor of authors with a US reader/reviewer base. If you are one, and you won’t be affected by the changes in this way, then please check your privilege again.
#6 .com reviews are pushed out across all Amazon stores as “Reviewed on amazon.com” reviews until that store gathers five reviews of its own. It does not work the other way around. Say I have twenty reviews on UK, they won’t show up on .co if I have less than five there. See #5 about why this is a problem and the disadvantages enforced by the new system.
If you’re an author with a predominantly Us-based review base, please realize that you have been given an advantage by this new rule. If you are an author with predominantly US-based readers, please realize you have been given and advantage by this new rule. Please also realize that if you fall in either of these categories, you had a head-start to begin with, because Amazon hasn’t rolled out Kindle Unlimited or AMS ads in all areas. You were already ahead of the pack and now you’ve been given an even greater head-start. No one is saying that people who fall into either category haven’t worked hard to get there, nor that reviews are the pinnacle of authorship. Lots of things sell a book. What is important is that to some people, reviews are very important and Amazon has instituted a rule that makes it harder for some to get .com reviews than others in a system where .com reviews are more important. This matters, and it matters to some more than others.

Please, check your privilege!