Time for a re-think, PR wise

There is such a lot of old clutter on Amazon if you care to look - because Amazon continue to offer old paperbacks for sale and there's nothing authors can do about it if the rights  belong to a publishing company - even though the company has gone forever. Old covers, old editions proliferate, plus reviews. Hopefully, most people look only for the new stuff and don't see all the dross!

While wishing everyone a Happy Christmas, I am thinking of updating my books and bringing titles together where I can. For example: I have 4 books that I uploaded to KDP as I finished writing them  -  several years apart. They should really be brought together as one complete package. I called it the Scots Queen Series but really the hero, and the thread throughout the four books is, Matho. I aim to PR them under this sort of banner now:

THE MATHO SPIRSTON SAGA

Love, loyalty, and survival across the Borders of England, Scotland, and France.

From the blazing borderlands of Tudor England to the storm-lashed castles of Scotland and the treacherous courts of France, one man’s courage is tested against impossible odds.

Matho Spirston begins as a humble guard, but fate thrusts him into the heart of history—caught between kings and queens, ambition and betrayal, love and loss. Whether aiding a doomed romance, stealing a queen for England, or carrying secret letters across war-torn Europe, Matho must fight not only for survival but for the chance to protect those he loves.

This sweeping saga blends romance, adventure, and political intrigue in the turbulent mid-sixteenth century. Perfect for fans of historical fiction who crave daring heroes, feisty heroines, and the perilous dance of duty and desire.

Start with Fair Border Bride, the gripping prequel, and follow Matho through Abduction, The Queen’s Courier, and Queen’s Letters for a journey you won’t forget.

Lady Phee's Scandal

 Finally - it is finished!

The e-book is now for sale on Amazon. I shall be watching to see what happens for the internet is awash with rumours and people telling the world that the Amazon algorithm has changed recently which is the reason  so many authors are finding their sales dropping. 

At the same time more and more self-professed gurus are claiming they know the secret and will tell what it is - for a small fee, of course. I have not succumbed. 

I will wait and see what happens and believe me I shall be watching with interest! Just let me say I think Lady Phee is worth a read. (But then I would, wouldn't I? ) 

I am considering making it free for the first few days to see if that helps spread the word.

LADY PHEE’S SCANDAL A Regency Romance

Submitted 2 Dec 2025 $3.99 or £2.99

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0G4RSYN6S

New covers, new titles

Changes have been made!

So far, I've put new covers/titles on 3 books

New titles are: Sold into Wedlock (Unblissful Wedlock)

The Richest Heiress (Gybford Affair) (see previous post)

Escaping her Guardian (Styford Affair)

Along the way I've adjusted the Keywords, Categories and the blurb.

I brightened the cover of The Elsdon Affair and may leave that title as it is. 

I've come to the conclusion that paperback copies don't really pay off the hard work, but since I made them, I think I shall keep some of them. One or two I have "unpublished" if I couldn't face the task of re-editing them!

I've printed out facts and figures so now I shall wait and see if  anything pays off with better results. I suppose control is one of the joys of indie publishing!
 

Only dimwits forget the market

Every so often I trawl through my documents file and get rid of stuff I don't need any more. Sometimes I find little gems - here's one, written a long time ago by Stephen King. I've shortened it a good deal  but you can find the original if you google it. The comments in italics are mine

Tips for writing from Stephen King

Type. Double-space. Use a nice heavy white paper. (I wonder if he does the equivalent on a computer?)

Be self-critical. (Sometimes I think I'm too self-critical)

Remove every extraneous word. (And by do they creep in....)
You want to write for money? Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new. 

Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft
When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off. 

Know the markets
Only a dimwit would send a tender story about a mother and daughter making up their differences on Christmas Eve to Playboy … but people do it all the time. If you write a good story, why send it out in an ignorant fashion? Would you send your kid out in a snowstorm dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tank top?

Write to entertain
Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and serious ideas do not overlap. This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud, and hundreds of others. But your serious ideas must always serve your story, not the other way around. (I think serious ideas survive in the UK fiction. Not that they are always an entertaining read.)

Ask yourself frequently, “Am I having fun?”
The answer needn’t always be yes. But if it’s always no, it’s time for a new project or a new career.

How to evaluate criticism
It doesn’t matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with your piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I’d still suggest changing it. But if everyone – or even most everyone – is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.

An agent? Forget it. For now
Flog your stories around yourself. If you’ve done a novel, send around query letters to publishers, one by one, and follow up with sample chapters and/or the manuscript complete. And remember Stephen King’s First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don’t need one until you’re making enough for someone to steal … and if you’re making that much, you’ll be able to take your pick of good agents.

If it’s bad, kill it
When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

Self-publishing loses it s appeal

The saga of publishing a paperback copy of The Queen's Letters goes on and on.

After receiving a proof copy I have redesigned the inner content, and thought all was done. Set to Publish. Back comes an email saying I have loaded the barcode in the wrong place. So I redesign the back cover, which means rejigging the whole back, spine and front cover and carefully re-position the barcode and send it off. Now they are telling me the barcode is not there. What do they want? I can't stick a real barcode on the cover when I'm working online, now can I? It seems an impossible task.

I don't recall having this problem with Createspace. And now this morning they have decided that I need to update tax information because I have relocated from Createspace to KDP. Suddenly self-publishing loses its appeal.

Future of self-publishing

Major re-work on the Paperback copy of my latest : the font and margins have been reduced and now my book looks less like a Large Print edition and comes in at 317 pages instead of 410. Which means the price will be a reasonable £7.95.

So, not many days to go to Christmas. I'd better pick a date and work to getting it released instead of enjoying myself tracking my ancestors via FacemyPast. Who knew there could be so many people called Thomas Dixon in the country?

I am wondering about the future of self-publishing. Sales are the lowest they have ever been, and though people rushed to download the free Kindle version - no one seems to have read it yet. I know I am not alone with this because other witers are reporting the same facts. For me it is only worth the effort  if someone somewhere is reading what I write.

Confusion sets in

I am about to confuse myself utterly in the next couple of days. I have (almost) finished The Queen's Letters and have the original Word Document saved; I also saved the Kindle Create version of it, marked by a little brown circle. Then I have a PDF version of the Word copy, which I have sent out as an ARC to people who cannot use MOBI versions.  I tried  to be too clever by uploading the Kindle Create version to KDP to create a paperback version, but that doesn't seem to suit. I should have uploaded a PDF formatted copy. Consequently, my e book version is fine, and now available for pre-order, but the paperback version has so many errors is quite depressing.

So, I am waiting for comments on the ARCs I sent out. If there are any suggestions, I can still make alterations. Spotting a comma instead of a period, I went back to the original and corrected it. That led on to making more "corrections" .... which task could go on for ever.

I am busy amending a Word copy for the paperback by altering the margins, the font, the placing of things on the page - almost everything, in fact. So now I am going through the whole thing one last time. The cover needed changing too, but I half expected that.

As I said - lots of room for confusion!

Amazon Author Academy

Amazon held an event in Newcastle yesterday in the newly built Crown Plaze Hotel in what is fondly named the Stephenson Quarter. (Because of the railway Stephenson, I presume, since the hotel is very close to the railway tracks. Behind it, in fact.)

Scheduled as 9am-3pm, I arrived at 8.50 and spent 40 minutes kicking my heels until the event began at 9.45. I saw no one I knew in the milling crowds, almost too many for the space allocated and I kept moving around the halls and corridors as I knew I would be sitting for a long time.

Darren (I never knew his surname) kicked off and introduced panelists - Louise Ross, David Leadbeater, Paul Teague and Margaret Skea.
Paul represented The Alliance of Independent Authors and Margaret the Society of Authors. David and Lousie represented highly successful authors to tell us "how they did it."

Entertaining, informative and interesting. A lot of people were already published but many were not. I met some people I know at the coffee and lunch breaks, observed far more men in the audience than I expected and happened to be sitting next to someone for 5 hours who never volunteered a word, never shifted from her seat and made copious notes in miniscule writing on a clip board. Some authors are just loners. I first saw her sitting  on the floor in a corner, writing on her clipboard and that was at 9am while everyone else milled about talking and scoffing breakfast.

It seems that to be mega successful a writer also needs to ne a technical wizard these days, or be prepared to pay lots of money for outsourcing. £800 pounds sounds a lot of money to me for editing, and I hate to think what might be paid out for designing and establishing websites. There seems to be an industry following indie writers now. Cover artists, web designers,  societies that charge a joining fee; ISBNs, formatting charges to convert an ms into a Kindle book; some people claim several different kinds of editing are required, all at a cost.There are pitfalls, too. Some editors charge £200 and are not good at what they do. I suspect that cost is as much a gatekeeper these days as agents ever were. Not everyone can afford such costs when there are no guarantees a book will ever sell.

First re-draft

Pretty soon I shall be at the end of my first re-draft of Banners of Alba. Then it will be time for a read through to see if it makes logical sense and the transitions are smooth. At that point it will probably be time to decide where I am going to make further cuts to bring the story down to 100,000 or less ( if I can). 

Have I begun the story in the best place? 

Have I made motivation clear? 

Have I shown their loves, their hates, their faults? 

Why things happen? (Do I need to do this? should it not be clear without that?)

Does each scene make a point? 

Does something important change? If not, should I cut the scene?

Have I conveyed necessary info in narration?

Can I lose secondary characters?

After all that, I'll need to go through and check for those terrible habit words - the ones that keep cropping up but are really not needed.

Editing is hard work. I can only do it in snatches before my eyelids begin to droop.

Free promos

Free promos on Kindle have certainly changed in four or five years. The first time I got one organised was back in March 2011, and nearly 18,000 downloads went out on one historical romance. The numbers changed on the screen as I watched it, which was one of the most exciting things I've ever seen. Even Germany downloaded 93 copies, and France, Italy and Spain all participated. A contemporary story proved much less popular, but compared to the figures today, did very well.

Now, from my perspective at least, downloading free books is much less popular. Perhaps, like me, people have kindles full of free titles they haven't yet read. Perhaps readers have discovered how much dross there is out there. Maybe they think my stories are part of it! Whatever the reason, free promos have changed. Maybe the pendulum has swung and we're all going back to print books.

We've had rain and wind for days which means most of the leaves have disappeared now. They clog up the streams which are roaring down the valleys, scouring them clean after being dry for a good part of the summer.

MacGuffin and Open analytics

Autumn is on its way

James Bridle reports that Manchester’s Comma Press, which specialises in short stories, has launched something called MacGuffin. It is a self-publishing platform that gives detailed analytics showing when readers get bored.

Read the whole article: here

“The clean, minimalist interface echoes popular blogging platforms, and visitors are encouraged to search for something to read by theme and length: trending tags at time of writing included #crime, #humour and #10minuteread. Currently in beta on the web and launching mobile apps in the next couple of months, the site already contains plenty of stories from Comma’s own authors.

Alongside every story published are its open analytics, visible to both author and readers. Mercilessly, these detail the exact number of people who have opened a story, and the number of people who actually finish it. They even display a chart of exactly when each reader stopped reading: which, while painful, does give writers the chance to test their narrative structure. Whether this will prove a digital innovation too far for more sensitive writers remains to be seen, but if MacGuffin does take off, mining this data for insights into human attention might be one of the smartest things any publisher has done in some time.”

I’m half-tempted to try it.... except that I might not like what I see!

MAGICIAN'S BRIDE

Here's a link to an article about a very important sequel - not mine!
jojo-moyes-interview-310196.

Plus a picture of me taken when outdoors in the winter time which I think is fast approaching. Leaves are falling  and starting to turn already, and its not September yet.

My good news is that I have just published THE MAGICIAN'S BRIDE on Amazon Kindle. I've been working on it since I went to France in May right up until last night when I published the last few updates. (One person had already bought it from Amazon US within hours of it going live, so I can only apologise to that person because I made upwards of 25 tiny corrections after I'd bought a copy and read it through on Kindle. I thought it was perfect, obviously, or I wouldn't have gone ahead and pushed the Publish Now button. The corrections were tiny things, like deleting or adding the word 'of' or 'it' and certainly not altering the sense of anything. But we want perfection, don't we?)

So I've done a lot of work on it. The storyline is stronger, with more fantasy to prop up the magician element;  most importantly I have given the heroine a first person POV right from page one. she is now a character who allows readers into her thoughts and feelings. In the previous version she was denied any voice at all; I wanted people to judge her by her actions, but sadly it didn't work at all well. I think the quality of the writing is better too, because once I had the storyline down pat, I found I could embellish the style much more easily. So, there we are; the book is out in the big wide world and now I'll just have to see how it goes.

Is it luck or is it skill?

An article in the Telegraph by Arts Correspondent Hannah Furness, gives me hope.

Rachel Abbott has been named as the 14th bestselling author in the last five years on Kindle, after having her book rejected by ten agents.

She joins a list that includes  E L James’ Fifty Shades series, Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn and cult authors including George R R Martin, Suzanne Collins and Stieg Larson and has beaten Yann Martel, Jojo Moyes, and Jeffrey Archer, after releasing four novels on the Amazon e-reader.

 She retired in 2010 and decided to write a book for her own pleasure. Her first novel was priced at £1.99 – not cheap by Kindle standards – and began to get noticed after Abbott used her marketing experience – she ran an interactive media company, developing software for the education market - to get exposure through social media and forums.

She is one of hundreds of thousands of authors who have chosen to self-publish with Kindle, and is the number one bestselling independent author in its charts.

Kindle is now celebrating its fifth anniversary, after growing from 400,000 titles to more than four million. Analysis of its sales figures, released yesterday, showed Huntingdon, Cambridge, buys the most books per capita, while Yorkshire was crowned “the romance capital of the north”.

H'mmm. Memo to self - must find those sales figures, and must also promote myself though social media. and with reference to the title of this post, I think it is a mixture of both - plus something else - a knowledge of social media!

Fear of Flying

You have to be over 50 to understand the hooha that went on when Erica Jong published Fear of Flying in 1973. It has sold more than 27 million copies and no doubt a new generation will discover it all over again now the author has given Isadora Wing a new outing in Fear of Dying. It is one of the hottest stories at the London Book Fair and goes some way to proving once again that publishers have their beady eyes on what will sell.


Fear of Dying tells of a woman in her 60s encumbered by dying parents, an ageing husband and a pregnant daughter and who feels the lack of sex as something too valuable to ignore. I am not sure that the majority of women in their sixties would prioritize their lives in quite that way, and thirty-somethings and youngsters probably think that the thought of their parents having sex as gross. Will a theme that sounds so depressing be as popular as publishers think?

There is evidence that publishers are scanning the self-published lists. Meredith Wild landed a 6-figure deal with Transworld in the UK and a 7 figure US cheque for her self-published novels about a young businesswoman's intense relationship with a billionaire. (A familiar theme?) A G Riddle gained a 7 figure deal for his self-published novel Departure, which features a plane from New York crash-landing in the English countryside.

Janet Ellis has won a book deal with a major publisher after submitting her manuscript under a pseudonym. A Little Learning is set in the 18th century, and sees a girl taken advantage of by her tutor. (Oh dear; sounds like sex and abuse; how can it fail?) As a friend of mine once said - Sex Sells.

Real Books survive

Articles are starting to appear saying that readers are remaining loyal to real books. Bookshops in the UK, US and Australia are claiming rising sales figures. Waterstones in the UK claims a 5% rise in December against the previous year. Foyles reported an 8% rise. Barnes & Noble report a 5% rise in shares.

Physical books sold in the US rose  2.4% in 2014. In the UK real book sales fell by 1.3% but that is better than the 6.5% fall in 2013.

Deloitte are said to estimate 80% of book sales will be real books in 2015.

Ebook sales have slowed and fewer e-readers were bought at Christmas.

 

The growth area is young adult fiction. Teenagers prefer real books, maybe because they can read and share with friends. Also, many don't have credit cards for online buying.

The increase in sales of real books may be small, but at least it is travelling in the right direction. E-books seem to have stalled saleswise, though self-publishing is still increasing and that no doubt accounts for Twitter being filled with adverts for books to the point that I'm thinking of hunting for people not involved in writing just to get some sort of decent content.

Battle lines

Kindle Unlimited (KU) attracted negative press coverage 

as indie authors saw what was happening to their sales. The general bad feeling floating around on the internet since Kindle Unlimited’s launch finally made it to the front page of the New York Times last Sunday“If you’re not an author with a slavish fan following, you’re in a lot of trouble” according to self-published author Bob Mayer “Everyone already has a ton of things on their Kindle they haven’t opened".

“What is now being proven is that market is not infinitely elastic,” publishing industry consultant Mike Shatzkin wrote on his blog on New Year’s Eve. “It seems likely that the low-priced indie authors are disproportionately affected by KU. Who bought indie author ebooks in the first place? The price-sensitive reader! Who switches from buying individual ebooks to the subscription service first? The price-sensitive reader! In other words, the subscription service offering appeals most to the same audience as those who read indie-published ebooks.”

Meanwhile, Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader wondered whether ebook subscription services are only a problem for indie authors or whether they will be a problem for traditional publishers as well. Of course, one of the main reasons that publishers feared ebook subscriptions in the first place was that they worried such services would cannibalize individual paid sales.  

Like all the other self-published authors, I noticed my sales were dwindling and there were few KU payments to compensate. So I unchecked the box that allows my titles to be read by Kindle Unlimited subscribers, only to find that it will take 90 days to become effective. And, of course, I was only 4 days into the next 90 days period, so I can look forward to poor sales until March. 

If Amazon continues to favour the reader over the author, one wonders what will happen down the line. Authors will no doubt pull out of Amazon altogether. There are other places to self-publish. As long as readers seek the cheapest form of reading, they will continue to use Amazon - until the stock available becomes so mediocre they too will go elsewhere.



 

Complaints about Kindle Unlimited

Best selling American writer H M Ward has something to say about Kindle Unlimited.

"Ok, some of you already know, but I had my serials in it for 60 days and lost approx 75% of my income. Thats counting borrows and bonuses. My sales dropped like a stone. The number of borrows was higher than sales. They didn't compliment each other, as expected.

Taking a huge ass pay cut while I'm still working my butt off, well that's not ok. And KU effected my whole list, not just KU titles. At the time of enrollment I had about 60 titles total.

I planned on giving it 90 days, but I have a kid in the hospital for long term care and I noticed my spending was going to exceed my income-by a lot. I couldn't wait and watch thing plummet further. I pulled my books. That was on Nov 1, & since then my net revenue has gone up. I'm now at 50% of where I was pre-KU. During the time I was in KU, I had 2 new releases. Neither preformed vastly different than before. They actually earned far less (including borrows).

This model needs to be changed for it to work. Authors shouldn't be paid lottery style. For this system to work we need a flat rate for borrows, borrowed or not borrowed (not this 10% crap), and it needs to be win win for the reader AND the writer. That is the crux of the matter.

Id like to see Amazon create something new, something better instead of falling in step with Scribd and Oyster.

Example: subscribe to an AUTHOR. Easy, clear. When Author X has a new book it automatically gets sent to your kindle, & the card provided is charged.

As a reader, I'd want that. As a writer, I'd want that.

Amazon, stop following other companies and break the mold.

Ok, I'm done ranting. Back to writing."

I'd notice my sales have gone way down since Kindle Unlimited appeared on the scene, but thought there could be many causes for this. It is reassuring to see other top-selling authors complaining about the same thing. And complaining they are!

Here's a link all independent authors using Amazon should read.
http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,202571.0/all.html

There's also a link to this article on the new blog Passive Voice over to the right hand side of this blog.

VAT ALERT!

Usually I find out about new legislation far too late to do anything about it, but this time, thanks to Facebook, I'm up there with the news! There is a fiendish plan afoot to place VAT on digital products - yes, that will mean e-books!

New EU VAT regulations come into force in Jan 2015.

Micro-businesses selling Ebooks direct to customers will forfeit their VAT exemption threshold by doing digital business in Europe.

"From 1 Jan 2015, the new ruling means that should you make a sale to the EU (how one can prevent that with online services is not clear) from the first £1 of revenue your business earns you will need to be VAT registered in the UK and under the VAT MOSS Europe-wide scheme – meaning that you will immediately have to apply VAT to all your services, including those in the UK.

Furthermore, this this means a quarterly obligation to submit VAT returns, increasing the accounting burden significantly; as well as, the cost and complexity involved with meeting the letter of the law regarding the capture and retention of evidence of its customers’ location will bring (which needs to be retained for 10 years)."

In 3 years I have sold less than a dozen books to readers in Europe.

I don't know how I can stop them buying, and I certainly don't want VAT on my other sales in the UK.

Click on the link and sign to petition against it -
https://www.change.org/p/vince-cable-mp-uphold-the-vat-exemption-threshold-for-businesses-supplying-digital-products

Cobwebs and proof copies

My proof copy of Abduction of the Scots Queen arrived on schedule yesterday. I had such reluctance to open it in case I was going to be disappointed, but when dh opened the parcel, he was complimentary. I looked, and was pleasantly surprised. The glossy cover looks good. The text inside could maybe be a tad darker, but the size is OK.

I didn't start reading it until today. In the first 33 pages there are 7 corrections to make. I thought it was going to be perfect! What worries me now is how many more there will be as I read on - and will it be easy to do them? At least three of the faults are where the font has slipped from Garamond to Times New Roman and that might be difficult to change back.

So it is head down, post-its and orange marker pens to hand. I'm using a ruler to keep my attention on the line in question instead of flicking about. It's all work, work work, this writing game. We wouldn't do it if we didn't love it!

I've been using a pedometer (when I remember) as I walk the dog and keeping a record of the number of steps taken in a day. Soon I'm going to add them all up and frighten myself silly. Already today Tim and I have managed 6,500 steps and it is only midday. He'll want to go out again before nightfall. I feel so much fitter than I did before he came into my life. Another plus is feeling in tune with nature and seeing things I wouldn't have otherwise seen - such as the sun shining through a cobweb. A gorse bush down on the riverside was a network of cobwebs like this one, dotted with dew and shining like silver. Another day, a different time, no sun, and I couldn't see a single one.

Self-publishing and praise

Time to turn my attention to something new - or two things - Promotion and A New Story.

As autumn sets in here in Northumberland, the days are growing shorter and the nights longer. The days are still amazingly warm. Yesterday afternoon was 16.5 C and there are flowers blooming among the berries and fallen leaves. Last night I kept moving to a cool spot on the sheets and we have not had the heating on much at all yet, hence clammy towels in the bathroom, which I hate.

But the weather will change, as it always does, and indoor pursuits will become more important - and the radiators will be hot and towels cuddly and warm when I want them.
Promotion will be a necessity, now that I have a paperback out in public. (I haven't, yet, but it won't be long now, and I'm starting to think about what I should do.)

Some people have said I should have begun already, but there was no time. It seemed silly to put the book aside and work on promoting it! Much better to finish the book and get it published first. This, of course, is where traditional publishing wins out. While someone else worries about editing, covers and proofreading your book, you can be off and away doing other things. What a lovely thought. But I listen to authors saying how wonderful it is to have an editor to discuss things with and decide upon alterations and wonder how much of the story changes in those discussions. How big are the alterations? How much is then down to the author and how much to the editor? At least with my story I can only blame myself if it bombs - but on the other side of the coin,  I can take all the praise - if there should be any!