Category Archives: Amazon

Reality Bites: Visibility isn’t Conversion

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Blog graphic with a dark charcoal background. On the left, a cute cartoon blue shark wears a black business suit, white shirt, and red tie while carrying a tan briefcase. On the right, beige brush-script lettering reads, “Reality Bites: Visibility isn’t Conversion.”

1,160 words
6 minutes read time

The writing/author community is pretty small, or at least, it feels like it is. You write a terrible review of an author’s book (in the name of honesty, of course) and six months later you’re sharing a lunch table with them at a book con and you’re embarrassed to introduce yourself. Or you mention them in a blog post and they DM you on Facebook and ask you to take it down. (That’s happened to me twice–true story!) It’s very, very easy to think that there are only hundreds of authors around, when, in fact, there are thousands of authors in the world, publishing books every year.

So, after I saw this author accusing Amazon of withholding sales after she had a Reel do moderately well, I thought it was time for a reality check. (Names hidden to protect the entitled.)

Screenshot of a social media post with the author's name and profile picture obscured in purple. The author angrily criticizes Amazon KDP, writing, “If KDP had a face, I’d fucking decimate it,” and questions how KDP can claim there are no reporting issues when one of their Instagram Reels received 10,000 views in 24 hours. The post ends, “I’m so FUCKING sick of their bullshit.” Below the post are 97 likes and 26 comments.
Not even gonna get into how many people sided with her in the comments.
I saw this one after I wrote this blog post, and I. Am. Speechless.

I think, while we write and publish in our little bubbles, that we forget how many books there are on Amazon at any given time.

According to profitable.app, there are approximately 12 million books in the Kindle store right now. While you’re reading this. This stat doesn’t include paperbacks or hardcovers or other marketplaces such as Kobo, Google Play, or Nook. That’s 12 million books your book is competing with if you publish on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. And if you’re enrolled in Kindle Select and your book is available to Kindle Unlimited subscribers, your book is competing with more than 4 million titles.

It’s actually kind of hard to wrap your mind around that. Especially if you’re wide–your book may be available in more places, but you’re dealing with that competition too. To the tune of:

Barnes & Noble / NOOK 4.5 million Ebooks available for sale
Google Play Books Over 10 million Ebooks and audiobooks combined
Apple Books Millions Ebooks and audiobooks; no precise count disclosed
Rakuten Kobo Over 5 million Ebooks and audiobooks combined

What exactly was that author, and many others like her that I see practically every day on Threads, complaining about? That her marketing wasn’t turning into sales and blaming Amazon for it? After reading those numbers, it’s not hard to see why. Readers have an enormous amount of choice, and it only gets larger every day.

When you put a piece of marketing in front of a potential reader, lots of things happen behind the scenes. Readers can fall in love with your quote/snippet, your character’s bio, your trope list. They can look up your book and buy it or borrow it in KU. I agree that’s the optimal outcome and the one I prefer too. But lots can happen besides that. A reader can fall in love with your piece of marketing, look up your book, and decide the blurb is flat or the price is too high. (That actually happened to me the other day. I saw a quote graphic on Facebook that I really liked, looked up her book and saw that her ebook was $9.99. I can’t afford that and clicked away.) Or your book is part of a series and they aren’t looking for a series to read right now. Or the opposite is true, and it’s a standalone and they were looking for a long series to read to get them through to the end of the year. Or, which is brown sadness water like a cup of decaf coffee, a person sees your piece of marketing . . and scrolls by.

Instagram doesn’t discern which of those actions a reader participates in, only that someone saw what you posted. There are no guarantees there or anywhere.

Especially since–and this is the part we don’t like to talk about–you could have a fabulous piece of marketing and your book just isn’t up to snuff. Bad cover, confusing title, the “look inside” full of typos. I mean, we really don’t like talking about that because that brings us around to AI books or trad books that are super popular that authors say sound like garbage. But when you’re looking at YOUR catalogue and wondering why readers aren’t buying YOUR books, it’s worth it to take an honest look at what you’re asking people to buy.

Nonetheless, I understand why we want someone to blame. It’s really, really hard out there right now. There’s too much choice, people are broke, and if readers are like most of us, they already have TBR lists that are so long that they could read until they died and not have to buy another book. So it’s easy to blame Amazon because they’re letting the AI books on their platform, Amazon acknowledges reporting delays and that KU page-read totals aren’t finalized until around the 15th of the following month, and everyone already hates them anyway because their slice of the pie is too big and there isn’t anything we can do about it.

But, despite all that there is wrong with Amazon–and I’m not blind or stupid, I know that there is a lot–I think it’s worth remembering that even though only something like 2% of people who say they want to write a book actually do, 2% of that number is still a really big number.

If you’re lucky to get the kind of visibility that author is getting with her Reels, remember that visibility isn’t conversion, and that sometimes you can do something about it (change your cover, refresh your blurb, put your book on sale for a bit and see what happens). Not always, and I understand that. I’ve experimented with a few other books on Reels, and some of them did well but the views didn’t turn into sales. If you have a large backlist, you have the luxury of experimenting. If not, all you can do is keep trying and hope the books you’re marketing eventually catch. No one said publishing is easy, and it really does seem to get harder every day. Keep trying and keep writing. It won’t be a consolation, but Wicked Games, the romantic suspense standalone I published in May of this year, has started to sell okay since I started sharing snippets on Reels. But that book only exists because I still wrote it and published it even when my other books weren’t selling. You can tell me to fuck off. That’s okay. I would have said the same thing to myself last year too.

This post is a little shorter than my usual ones, but they don’t all have to be 2,000 word monsters, either. So I’ll try to be good with what I’ve said here. Take a look at the top 100 books in your genre. How many of those authors do you know? Have you heard of? There are a lot of authors not on social media quietly making bank and keeping to themselves.

I don’t fault you if that’s your dream.

It’s mine too.

I’ll chat with you next week! Have a lovely Monday!

Indie Author News Roundup

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I’d love to write a cowboy romance, but I don’t know a thing about horses!
(Except how beautiful they are!)

1,781 words
9 minutes read time

There have been a couple of interesting things happening in the world of indie publishing, and I thought it would be worthwhile to chat about a couple of them. I don’t have much going on besides editing Bitter Love and keeping in mind the self-inflicted pub date I set for myself, and if you want a more updated version than that, I posted a real update last week. You can read it here: https://vaniamargene.com/2026/10/05/monday-author-update-7/

What’s been in the news? Maybe you’ve heard about them already, but you haven’t been treated to my sparkling opinion of it all, so let’s dive in.

Meta launched Meta One, a paid membership service, and some Facebook Pages are now being limited to two posts containing external links per month unless they pay for a subscription.
What does this mean? Well, Meta is rolling out this restriction, so not every Page is affected yet. But if your author Page is included, you’ll only get two opportunities a month to direct your readers somewhere else, such as Amazon, Goodreads, a Books2Read link, or anywhere else that takes your readers off Facebook. You can pay for more, and according to Reader Radius, the tiers are priced like this per month: Advanced ($49.99) gets 8, Expert ($149.99) gets 20, and Max ($499.99) is unlimited. I doubt many will pay since there were so many people who opposed Draft2Digital’s 12-dollar-a-year fee, and I won’t give Zuckerberg any of my money. He has enough of his own, and I’m not paying for the privilege to post links. Especially since I don’t use affiliate or tracking links and I have no idea how many people really click on them anyway.

News of this change made a lot of authors angry, but I took it in stride like I do most things. Why? Because… Okay, well, let me be honest for a second. I didn’t have many followers until I started posting Reels at the end of August. I was stuck at 229 for years and years. I would get followers, sure, but I almost ruined my page when I was boosting posts and Meta was showing them to males in India who would follow my page. Because of that, I had a lot of followers that would never buy my books and I started blocking them, which kept my follower count very low. I stopped boosting posts, and after I started posting Reels consistently, my followers shot up with people who, I hope, are actually interested in my books.

So, let’s get back to why I don’t care that much. For one, I didn’t really direct people to go anywhere else, and I didn’t want to start. I write about bits and pieces of my books, what I’m working on, mention a quote I like, etc, and those posts have no links. Readers want more than BUY MY BOOK all the time anyway, and I don’t like yelling BUY MY BOOK all the time either. I’d rather post about WHY someone would love reading my book and you don’t need a link for that. For another–and this is the biggest one–people who really want to read your book will find it on their own. I’ve accumulated quite a bit of proof when it comes to that because my Reels don’t have a link and never have. At the bottom of all my captions, I list myself as the author, the title, and where they can find it, like this:


Wicked Games is a standalone romantic suspense novel by VM Rheault, available on Kindle, in Kindle Unlimited, and paperback.

Then I add the categories so they know the type of book it is. That’s all a reader is going to need if they’re interested in finding and reading your book. I promise.

I haven’t found anything to the contrary, but you can still put a link in your post (it won’t be “live”), and if a reader really wants to know where it goes or act on your CTA (call to action) they can copy the link and paste it in a different tab. That would be another version of “If a reader really wants to find your book, they will” and I would do that too, if I ever surpassed the free monthly limit.

I’ve seen a lot of angry authors posting on Threads over this, and yes, it’s okay to feel your feelings, but Meta is gonna do what Meta is gonna do. Like with anything similar, getting mad won’t help. You can try to find loopholes, like posting the link in the comments, having a third party publish your posts for you, or putting all your links in a pinned post, and see how that works, but if you have to work that hard to get around something Meta is going to enforce, it might be better to find an alternative. All your energy could go into writing your book.

And, I mean, I’m not saying this to say “I told you so,” but we all need the reminder. I really think free author services are eventually going to go away, and this is just another example of it happening. We cannot expect things for free. If you use a service to run part of your business, you’re going to have to expect to pay. I’ve cut way back on the things I’m willing to pay for, in all aspects of my life, not just my author business. Learn to go without, but if it’s valuable to you and your books and you want to keep it, fork over that green stuff.

If you want to read more about this you can here:
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-pages-get-charged-for-link-posts/830743/
https://kanorio.com/en/blog/meta-link-limit-brand-response

Goodreads added fraction stars to their rating and reviewing system.
I hate Goodreads and don’t go on there (unless I have a new release and I have to make sure that it transfers from KDP to my author profile), so I didn’t care about this particular piece of news, either, but authors on Threads lost their minds.

I’m not really sure why, except for the idea that readers and reviewers will now go back and adjust their reviews, bringing them lower or closer to the “true” number of stars they wanted that book to have in the first place. Personally, if you’re an author, I think it’s a terrible practice to review another author’s book, since you’re peers and coworkers in an increasingly hostile industry, and I’ve seen enough authors make fun of reviewers for simply stating their honest opinion (which is what a review is for!) that I honestly don’t feel safe posting a review, even if it would be mostly positive. The author of the book I’m reading now wouldn’t like to read the review I’d write. There’s too much echoing and the characters are too young for the situations she has written them into. Her book would read much better if they were aged up by ten or fifteen years, but I would never say that in a public forum with our names attached, nor will I DM her because it’s not my place and the criticism wouldn’t be taken well anyway.

If you’re a professional reviewer, you might appreciate the accuracy fractional stars provide, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Although, I watched a clip of someone playing around, moving their pointer back and forth over the stars, and it looks like it’s possible to rate a book less than one star–.50 or .25 of a star. I actually think that’s kind of crappy and wasn’t necessary. Does anyone really need to rate a book less than one star? I’m not sure what that gets the reviewer or the author. With review bombs a real thing and vindictive reviewing a common occurrence among spiteful authors and readers both, I see this blowing up and not in a good way. It just makes me even more glad that I don’t review books or read the reviews attached to my books. That is part of the publishing industry I’m comfortable avoiding.

If you’d like to read more about that, you can here:
https://goodereader.com/blog/amazon-news/goodreads-finally-supports-both-half-star-ratings

Those were the two biggest news stories to cross my path last week, but I think this is something of interest to those who are still in KU. The KENP payout for the month of August is the highest it’s been so far this year, at 0.004895. Everyone says how little KU pays and that the KENP keeps getting lower and lower, so this should be good news for the pessimists who think KU isn’t worth it. Though, it’s probably not enough proof to get them to change their minds.

If you want a visual of what that means, Wicked Games has a KENPC (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count) of 462. That’s different than the number of pages in the paperback, and you can find your KENPC under the “Promote and Advertise” tab on your dashboard. Click that and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.

Screenshot of the Amazon KDP Bookshelf showing Wicked Games by VM Rheault. The Kindle eBook is live at $4.99 and enrolled in KDP Select, while the paperback is live at $14.99. A purple arrow points to the “Promote and advertise” button beside the Kindle eBook listing.
Screenshot of Amazon KDP’s “Earn royalties from the KDP Select Global Fund” section, explaining how authors earn royalties from Kindle Unlimited page reads. The listing for Wicked Games shows a Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) of 462 pages, highlighted by a purple arrow.

Anyway, if someone reads your book from cover to cover, you can multiply the KENP payout by the number of pages and you’ll come up with how much you get paid for that read. At 462 x .004895, a full read of Wicked Games earns me $2.26. That doesn’t quite compare to what I earn if someone buys the paperback or the ebook, but I’d rather make $2.26 than nothing at all because my books aren’t in KU. This isn’t a KU vs. Wide debate, it’s just how I feel, and I was happy to hear the payout had risen that much. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will stay there, but it’s good news for authors in KU who are toughing it out despite Amazon’s shaky content policies and the AI slop taking over the bestseller lists that Amazon doesn’t seem too keen on doing anything about.

I don’t have sources to cite for the KU payout, but Craig Martelle said in his Successful Indie Author Facebook group that 2026 was turning into a stellar year for KU authors and he keeps track of the monthly payout. I stole the August figure from him. September’s hasn’t been released yet, but hopefully the trend keeps going. Especially since in September I had the best sales month I’ve had in years, and I didn’t have to pay a dime for it either.

That’s all I have for this week. I hope you have a lovely Monday!

Until next time!

The Blame Game

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Retro floral graphic with orange, peach, and dark green flowers arranged around opposite corners of a cream background. Bold black vintage-style lettering reads, “Blame does not resolve an issue. It only prolongs the problem.” — Byron Pulsifer.

Since I’ve been back from vacation, I have seen a lot of things online about blame, and I get it, you know? Times are hard, sales are low, and we look for excuses and people, companies, and platforms to point our fingers at.

It’s exhausting because sometimes there isn’t anyone to blame–things are just the way they are. And even if there is someone to blame, does it do any good? I’ve watched indie authors try to take on Amazon and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it just makes authors more bitter, and when it does . . . they’re happy for a little bit until something else happens.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve been blaming lately:

The KDP Sales Dashboard
This has been going on for a long time, and because KDP/Amazon isn’t exactly known for its transparency, even if there was a glitch with reporting, I doubt they’d tell us much about it.

I’ve seen authors post “proof” that KDP’s reporting is broken because a customer service rep told them there was a known issue and that they were working on it. But do you really think those reps have the most up-to-date information? I doubt it. They can only tell you what Amazon has told them, and I’d be surprised if the people answering the customer service chats knew much more about what’s going on behind the scenes than we do.

And those poor reps probably deal with angry authors all day long. I don’t know why so many authors accuse them of gaslighting when they’re just trying to help to the best of their ability and go home at the end of their shifts.

Another thing that really bothers me is authors trying to “catch” Amazon holding back sales and page reads by asking their friends to buy their books and read them in KU. Amazon has stated that there’s a lag in reporting and that monthly KU page-read totals aren’t finalized until around the 15th of the following month. Why authors are determined to read their dashboards in real time and then get pissy about it is beyond me, and seeing those posts has actually made it so I really don’t like being on Threads anymore. There are a lot of reasons why your dashboard doesn’t reflect sales and page reads immediately. People read on airplane mode; readers aren’t charged for paperback copies until they ship out; credit card processing differs from credit card to credit card and bank to bank. Stop trying to read your dashboard in real time. It won’t do anything except make you mad.

At the end of the day, I truly doubt Amazon is trying to cheat us out of money. They’re a ginormous company, and yes, there are going to be days when things aren’t working right. But a reporting glitch (real or imagined) doesn’t automatically mean Amazon is deliberately withholding royalties. It would be nice if Amazon would be more transparent when things weren’t working correctly, but that’s the price of doing business with them. You can put up with it or publish elsewhere.

AI Slop
This might be a legitimate concern, until we think of the phrase “Other authors aren’t our competition.” We hear that a lot, and maybe you think it’s true, maybe you don’t, but I honestly don’t see the influx of AI-written books as competition. Yes, it’s infuriating, but we’ve had to deal with other influxes of bullshit before.

Remember back during COVID when everyone had a book in them, and with no gatekeeping, everyone was able to publish it? The number of books published increased significantly, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. And before that, we had authors using ghostwriters, people selling each other already-published manuscripts, click farms generating page reads, and blah blah blah. There’s always going to be something getting in the way of organic discoverability.

And this circles back around to Amazon again. We call for Amazon to take the AI slop down, but can you imagine them paying enough people to manually vet every book before it’s published? And if I recall correctly (and I’m pretty sure I do), Draft2Digital implemented an account maintenance fee to help cover the costs of reviewing content, and everyone bitched about it. When Amazon does try to do something, like limit the number of books uploaded per week or ask authors to disclose AI-generated material, it’s never enough for anyone.

Do I wish the AI slop would go away? Of course I do. But that’s also like saying you wish authors wouldn’t publish shitty books. There are always going to be poor-quality books in the marketplace, whether they’re mass-produced AI slop from scammers or books written by authors who can’t afford editing or haven’t found their voice and style yet. I’m not saying those authors have the same intentions as scammers trying to game the system, but I am saying that poor-quality books aren’t a new problem, and readers have always had to sort through them to find something they want to read.

In the scheme of things, I don’t see AI slop as some new obstacle that makes it impossible for the rest of us to succeed. Indie publishing is open to everyone, and if it weren’t, there’s a good chance neither you nor I would be able to publish our books either.

The Algorithms
Just this morning I saw someone on Threads talking about how Instagram’s changing algorithms have tanked her writing career. Her reach has disappeared, and with it, her sales. I can understand why she’s frustrated. When you finally find something that works and the platform changes the rules on you, what are you supposed to do?

But the first thing you learn as an indie author is to never plant your seeds in someone else’s garden. Is it inevitable? Yes, yes it is. And I know I’m doing that exact thing by enjoying the sales boost posting Reels has given me. But I’ve always been realistic about the fact that, at some point, it will stop. It might not be this year or next year, but one day posting Reels won’t do anything, and I’ll have to figure out what to do next, if anything. I might even find myself back where I was on July 24th, 2026, the day before I posted my first Reel.

You can blame the algorithms, and you’d probably be right. Platforms change, reach disappears, and there’s not much you can do about it. But you also have to admit that you built part of your business around what that platform was giving you. That’s not necessarily a mistake–sometimes you have to take advantage of an opportunity while it’s there. The question is what you’re going to do when that opportunity disappears and you’re left with nothing but tumbleweeds.

This is where I struggle with my own advice.

Before I started posting Reels, I’d done just about everything I could think of, and nothing moved the needle. Not a newsletter, not running ads (I came out even but never ahead), and not buying newsletter promotions like FreeBooksy. So when I say authors need to have a plan for when the algorithms decide to jerk you around, I’m well aware that I don’t have one myself.

I could retry some things, like going back to TikTok or posting more consistently on Pinterest, since I never really gave that a chance. I could try something brand new like Lemon8. Or I could get discouraged and threaten to walk away like I did over the summer.

I’m not sure what I’ll do. But I do know that if Instagram changes its algorithm tomorrow and my sales disappear, spending my days blaming Instagram isn’t going to bring those sales back. I can be frustrated. I can even be angry. But eventually I’ll have to decide whether I want to try something else, keep writing without worrying about sales, or walk away from publishing altogether.

The Market
I actually haven’t seen anyone blaming the market for a while. We all know trends shift and subgenres die until they come back again like a vampire when the sun goes down.

Writing to market used to be a dirty phrase, but I don’t hear it much anymore. I don’t know if that’s because people have accepted it as a way to sell books or because authors who aren’t writing to market aren’t so vocal about it anymore. I’ve never had a problem with writing to market. In fact, when I started my pen name, I did it so I could write even more to market.

Reader preferences can change, but from what I can tell, dark romance and hockey are still having their moments. There was some talk that billionaires were out, but I only heard that from other authors, and I take their opinions with a grain of salt. I don’t write for other authors, so I don’t really care if they hate billionaires because Bezos, Musk, and other shitty men have ruined the genre for them.

What you write is one of the few variables you can control, and depending on how fast you can crank out a book, you might be able to catch the wave of whatever’s popular. Or you could switch to an established subgenre like romantic suspense or small-town romance. If you don’t write romance, maybe mystery thrillers or domestic suspense are more your thing. Freida McFadden has certainly attracted plenty of attention, and if that kind of storytelling appeals to you, you could explore it yourself.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that chasing a trend will result in sales, but at least choosing what to write gives you an opportunity to respond to the market instead of simply complaining about it.

There was also some talk on Substack about leveling up your craft and writing a better book. I blogged about that because when I first read it, I was offended. I would assume most of us try to write the best book we can every time we open a new document. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. It’s easy to grow stagnant, and plotting a new novel that requires you to stretch your skills could be exactly what you need to improve your craft. Wicked Games was my twistiest book to date, and I enjoyed the challenge of making sure everything fit together. It pushed me in ways my previous books hadn’t, and I’m glad I wrote it.

If your books aren’t hitting, though, it’s hard to tell whether the problem is what you’re writing or a lack of discoverability. You can write a wonderful book that nobody finds, just like you can market the hell out of a book that readers aren’t interested in, and sometimes you won’t know which problem you’re dealing with. That’s why I think it’s important to keep writing what you love. If the sales and reader interest aren’t there, the enjoyment you get from writing might be the only thing that keeps you going.

Playing the Blame Game isn’t much fun, and for me, there’s not a lot of point to doing it. There are always going to be things happening in the industry that affect sales, and there are always going to be companies like Amazon that are difficult, and maybe downright skeezy, to work with.

We can’t control any of that, but we do have to make choices about how we respond. We can pivot when it makes sense, try something new if we have the time and money, or recognize when something simply isn’t working anymore.

Maybe that means experimenting with a platform you haven’t tried before, like TikTok, or writing in a different subgenre. Maybe it means taking a break from writing and marketing and coming back when you feel better. Those are decisions only you can make. And while it’s understandable to be frustrated by things outside of your control, spending all your time blaming them won’t help you figure out what to do next.

So, remember, when sales are low and you’re discouraged, there might not be anyone to blame. Sometimes things are just the way they are and all you can do is push yourself through the muck and keep going.

Monday Musings: Indie News, AI Accusations, & What’s Next

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1,392 words
7 minutes read time

Graphic for a Monday Musings blog post featuring a stack of white papers clipped together with a blue paperclip on a soft blue background. White daisies decorate the image, and gold text reads: "Monday Musings: Indie News, AI Accusations, & What's Next."

Good morning to everyone except the people who hate Amazon and won’t shut up about it. Here’s your monthly reminder that if you hate them that much, you don’t have to publish with them! Ta-da! If that’s not you, I hope that wherever you are the skies are sunny and your coffee is hot!

There have been a couple things in the indie industry that caught my eye over the past couple of weeks and I thought I’d touch on them since I like keeping up with changes and then maybe I’ll mention quick what I’ve been doing at the end.

One of the biggest pieces of news that floated by me last week was that MailerLite is going down to only 250 subscribers in their free plan. I feel like this is in line with what I’ve been speculating since Draft2Digital launched a 12 dollar per year service fee for active accounts and everyone went crazy because of it. Free services are slowly being phased out, or the services are being so pared back that they’re almost useless. An author who is starting a newsletter with the intention of actually growing it isn’t going to begin with a platform that cuts you off at such a low number. That means if they’re going to hustle for signups, they could be looking at a platform change just months after starting or they’ve made the decision that they’re going to pay so they can stay.

I’ve always been of the mind to begin as you wish to continue–since it’s just easier that way all around–and I’d look for a different provider. If you’re looking to move or start a newsletter and want a bigger number, Kit seems to have the biggest number of free subscribers that I’ve seen in their free plan at 10,000 (that isn’t a typo). Use the slider to adjust to the 10k number and you’ll see that the free plan stays free for that number. I have never used Kit before, but I know people who have, and you need to get your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in order and also use a professional email (like hello@pennymaxwellauthor.com) or your emails will go to people’s spam/junk folders. Gmail has tightened up how they deliver emails, and that’s just the way it is now. As they say, nothing in this life is free. Still, my email attached to this site is $84.00 a year, which doesn’t seem so bad if your newsletter aggregator is free. Kit will also integrate with BookFunnel if you pay for the Mid-List Author tier, though BookFunnel’s prices went up this year too, so you’re going to be paying for something if you want to offer a newsletter to your readers.

Whatever you do, export your list regularly! Don’t lose your list. Then you’re free to move to whatever aggregator you want, even if that means just blogging on your own website like I’ve started doing.

Another big news item that everyone lost their minds over is that KDP is now offering groundwood paper as a page color choice. I didn’t think this was a big deal really. Cream has always been fine for me, but there are a couple of things worth noting. For one, KDP will allow you to change already published titles to groundwood, which is interesting because page color used to be tied to your ISBN number. That appears to no longer be the case. I buy all my ISBNs from Bowker and KDP has offered me the choice to switch, though like putting my ebooks in libraries, I’m not going to bother.

Screenshot of the Amazon KDP Bookshelf page for Wicked Games by VM Rheault. The Kindle eBook and paperback editions are live. The Kindle edition is enrolled in KDP Select and priced at $4.99 USD, while the paperback is priced at $14.99 USD. The page also displays options to promote and advertise the book, order author copies, create a hardcover edition, and add an Audible audiobook using a virtual voice. Also groundwood option is shown

The other thing to keep in mind is that your spine width might change. KDP encourages you to double check by using the Print Previewer and/or ordering a proof before you publish with the changes. Be sure to read their guidelines so your book will print properly if you make the change.

Amazon was on a roll with changes this month and sent out an email notifying authors that if they were using a Payment Service Provider that is not a participant in Amazon’s Payment Service Provider Program, you would need to change where your royalties are deposited. I didn’t get the email because I have my royalties deposited into a local bank, but there were plenty of authors who did, and of course, because it’s Amazon, everyone was unhappy.

Screenshot of an Amazon KDP email notifying publishers about an update to the Payment Service Provider (PSP) Program. The message states that bank accounts linked to KDP must participate in Amazon's PSP program and complete know-your-customer (KYC) verification. Publishers are instructed to update their bank account information by August 1, 2026, or royalty payments will be placed on hold until the account is updated.
h/t to Emma Hamm for showing us her email on Threads.

In other news that’s equally disheartening, is this article in The Independent. Three out of five winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize were accused of writing their stories with AI. Upon an investigation, those writers were cleared. Unfortunately, I think we are going to be seeing more and more of this as time goes on. What really bothers me is that there doesn’t seem to be any repercussions for the people doing the accusing. Accusations like that can destroy careers and reputations, but there doesn’t seem to be any consequences. Another thing that bothers me is that when they investigated the claims, they went over evidence including “working drafts, time-stamped documents, and notes.” What if we don’t have any of that? I write in one Word file and edit in that file. I have some notes in a notebook and I also have bits and pieces of prose since writing in a notebook is how I get unstuck, but that may not be enough evidence if I am ever accused of using AI to write my books.

I don’t know how anyone can protect themselves, and stuff like this is part of what makes me feel so defeated. Accusers get away with it while the authors have to prove their innocence. It’s not right, but I don’t see anything changing. Burden of proof shouldn’t be on the author, but here we are. If you’d like to read it, you can read it here: https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/news/commonwealth-prize-clears-winners-ai-allegations-review-b3001994.html. Thanks to my friend Chris for the article, and if you’d like to read what he’s been working on, you can find it here: https://www.shadeofthemorningsun.com/

Life has been kind of busy lately so I haven’t gotten much done on Frozen Assets. I’m 74,722 into it with maybe around 10k more to finish it up. I was a little concerned that it’s going to be shorter than my usual, but then I thought that gives me some leeway when I start writing Cold Mercy. I don’t have all of Celina and Trevor’s story plotted out yet, and it will make things easier if I don’t feel like I have to compete with a 110k word book. I’ve been thinking about Cold Mercy off and on and I’ll take a break after I’m done with Frozen Assets to watch more hockey documentaries and read We Breed Lions by Rick Westhead. The research has been half the fun of writing a hockey romance and I think I might have said in a different blog post that rather than using it for only two books, I’ve been thinking about a standalone after my duet is done. Though I was reading about an “Alpine Divorce” situation on Threads that gave me an idea, but that will have to get in the queue.

As of right now, I’m not sure when I’ll publish again, as I’m leaning toward saving up some books for the next couple of years or just putting them on my website for free when I feel like it. I have come to the sad conclusion there is no point in publishing anymore, not in the way that I have been with cover reveals, blurb reveals, ARC copies, trying to have a big launch, and paying for ads and buying promos. I’ve done all there is to do, and like I told a friend earlier, I’m taking my hands off the wheel.

I have two more editor Q & As to post, then I will be done with the people who were kind enough to give me their time. I hope you’ve been enjoying them. I know it’s been fun for me to see the different ways editors work.

This is all from me this week. Enjoy the rest of June, and if you have plans over the 4th of July, be careful and stay safe!

Until next time!

A Few Thoughts about Amazon Closing KDP Author Accounts

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text that looks like a rubber stamp. red letters that say account closed

There’s a lot of talk online right now about Amazon closing KDP author accounts for what seems to be no reason. This isn’t an alarmist post, but this is activity you should be aware of and be prepared for. Five years ago, this didn’t seem to be happening so frequently, and I believe we can thank Amazon’s adoption of AI tools for this sudden increase in account terminations. Because there is little to no human input when accounts are closed, this really is something we all need to keep in the back of our minds.

I used to think it wouldn’t happen to me because I don’t do anything sketchy and never have, but the fact is, you don’t have to be doing anything suspicious for them to close your account. Someone on Threads had their account terminated all because they changed the price of one of their books after running a sale. I sometimes put my books on sale too, and I would hate for that option to disappear because I’m scared of Amazon’s inconsistent enforcement of their unclear guidelines.

But, I am a “hope for the best but be prepared for the worst” kind of gal, so here are a few things I’m going to do for myself and some resources I’ve collected that you can bookmark in case you or someone you know ever needs them.

• Know this can happen to anyone and that it’s not your fault.
You might automatically think you did something wrong, but bots don’t have brains–they just snag on something while they scan. I know you’re gonna panic–I’ll panic too if it happens to me–but first and foremost, don’t blame yourself.

• Don’t panic.
I know this is going to be easier said than done. Hell, I get nervous now checking my reports, thinking one morning I’m not going to have access, and then when I check my email I’ll have the BAD NEWS. It’s very anxiety inducing, and I’ve heard that from other people too. Still though, not panicking will keep you from lashing out and replying to one of those emails in a not-so-nice manner. Staying courteous and level-headed will serve you well. I’ve had a pretty crappy last few years, so if this ever happens, I’ll probably literally throw up. It’s just not something I need on my plate right now.

• Get all your stuff together.
*Find your KDP account number and keep it in a safe place. In one of the Facebook groups I’m in, someone said to write down your KDP account number because if your account is terminated, you won’t have access to that information. That’s a really good idea, and I did it the minute I read it. To find it, sign into your KDP dashboard and click on Account in the upper right hand corner.

screenshot of kdp dashboard. text says. kindle direct publishing, bookshelf reports community marketing above, your account, english, help, sign out, feedback

You’ll be asked to enter the two-step verification code, and once you do that, the account number is on the left where the red box is on my screenshot:

screenshot of a kdp account. text reads account id, your identity, your account. account details getting paid, tax information.

Save that in a place where you can find it easily.

*Keep all your ASINs of your books in one place

*Start a list of contacts of anyone you think can help, like an author who might have access to an Amazon rep.

*If you’ve gotten your rights back from a small press or publisher, keep their rights reversal letter handy.

*Keep copyright information of all stock photos and art you used on your covers.

*If you’re a member of an author’s association like the Authors Guild or the Alliance of Independent Authors, find their contact email so you don’t have to hunt for it.

*CD Reiss put this Google doc together, and it goes step by step with what you should do and how to communicate with the KDP reps. It’s not foolproof, but you’re dealing with bots, so you can’t expect anything to be perfect. It’s a great starting point: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PKd94sSvgD3XoFFWHaUC6Gxey2GOU6WH7cRLNpb3428/edit?tab=t.0

*Find an attorney that handles this sort of thing. Not everyone can afford an attorney, and I completely understand that. Hopefully between contacting KDP on your own and having help either from someone who has access to an Amazon rep or through an author’s association, it won’t come to that. But it never hurts to find an attorney now so you don’t have to choose one while you’re under duress.

Gather all this information now so you have it when you’re blindsided and can’t think.

• Email your association now and express your concerns.
There are a few authors I saw who aren’t waiting until something happens to email their author organizations. I am going to email the Alliance of Independent Authors as well–I’ve been a member for a few years now. I’ve heard from some authors that when they’ve asked for help, some organizations aren’t doing anything. I will take that with a grain of salt because they could be doing something in the background, and dealing with Amazon can take days or even weeks. So I’m not going to jump to any conclusions about their assistance or lack thereof, but one of the biggest reasons I joined Alli is to have someone on my side in case something like this ever happens. An email will also let your organization know that this is a huge concern in the author community. Stay polite, of course, because we have to believe we’re all in this together. And if you aren’t a member of an organization, it might be a good idea to look into it:
The Alliance of Independent Authors
Authors Guild
Independent Book Publishers Association
SFWA
RWA

Should you verify your identity if you haven’t been asked?
I wondered about this, since not long ago KDP was asking quite a few authors to verify their identity. I was not one of those authors, and maybe you weren’t either. I looked around online, and most people seem to agree that if you haven’t been asked, don’t volunteer the information. When dealing with Amazon, I think it’s safer just to give them the information they request when they request it. You may be tempted to overshare, thinking it will help, but giving them too many details when they don’t ask for it might actually muddy the waters and slow things down.

Make sure you do have proper identification on hand in case they ever do ask. Don’t let your state ID or driver’s license expire, and keep your banking information up to date. I know not everyone can afford to, but my kids and I recently got our passports. I’d recommend going through the process if you can. Not just to have it on hand if KDP asks to verify your identity, but to have it as a form of identification in general. The world is a messy place right now. Protect yourselves in every way that’s possible for you and your situation. If you want to read KDP’s help page on verification, you can find it here: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GH7TYHP6FR9QAUM9

No one likes to think that something like this could happen to them, but being proactive can take a lot of the stress off if you find yourself in this kind of situation.

I hope you all had a lovely Easter holiday if you celebrated, and that you’re having a nice spring so far. We just got a few inches of snow dumped on us, which is never great. It might be another month before the ground finally dries out, but, that’s Minnesota living for you.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you here next week!

Monday Author Update: Sweet Nothings.

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Happy Monday! Well, I hope it’s happy for you, but if you’re not a full-time author, by the time you read this, you’ve probably guzzled a gallon of coffee and you’re sitting behind your desk at work wondering why you haven’t won the lottery. I know, I’m such a downer, but that’s life. I was scrolling Facebook yesterday and bumped into this motivational piece of perfection….

I don’t know why stupid stuff like that makes me laugh, but it does.

Anyway, not much on my plate this week besides going to Rochester, MN on Tuesday for my Mayo Clinic visit that’s scheduled on Wednesday afternoon. I’m fortunate we’re having a mild winter and I don’t have to worry about blizzards. Over the past three years I’ve talked a lot about how icky I feel, and I’m trying not to get my hopes up. This is an old subject, so I won’t waste any more time on it. I’ll be sure to update you next week, though, and hopefully I’ll have some good news to share.

I’m proud of myself and I’ve been doing the prompts that I made up for the February social media content calendar I shared with you last week. I don’t mind talking about myself, but I was at a loss of how to do it. The prompts help, and I’ll schedule posts for when I’m gone. The Canva scheduler makes that easy and I post to my FB author page and to my IG page. The algos don’t know who I am so I don’t get many likes or comments, but if I can teach them to know who I am (again), maybe that will change and I can start building my following (again).

Here it is if you missed it last week. It’s never too late to start posting.

I’m more than halfway done editing book 4 in my series. It’s slow going, taking out all the whens, whiles, and withs and some becauses. I definitely took the easy way out when I wrote these, and I’m still layering in feelings, emotions, and descriptions into the scenes. This book isn’t too bad. I’ve only added 1,000 words so far and I have 4 chapters left. I won’t get it done before my trip, as rewriting takes a long time, but I’m hoping to get all of them done by the end of March. I still have to do covers, and I wish I could afford to source my stock from a site that wasn’t DepositPhotos. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there and right now, I’m at their mercy. I think I’ve got the template ready to go–the backgrounds and possibly the title font (though I’m always on the lookout for beautiful font duets). I’m keeping the series logo I made for the other covers. There’s nothing wrong with it. Will these be the books where I start chopping heads off? Stay tuned.

I’m thisclose to joining Threads. I vowed I wouldn’t add another platform to my social media, but I see teaser posts on IG and FB enticing me to join. I’ve exceeded my limits of clicking and reading without having a profile. It’s not because I want to promote my books–IG and my FB author pages are enough for that. No, the posts Zuck’s been teasing me with are what I’ve been missing since Twitter went to the way of X. I need a place for book news. Facebook and the author groups I’ve joined fill in a lot of that, but I had to leave 20booksto50k for ethical reasons, and I left the Self Publishing Formula group that’s hosted by Mark Dawson after all that plagiarizing stuff came out. Losing those two groups hasn’t been a big deal, but I’m seeing that BookThreads could be what I need to fill in the gap. Twitter hasn’t been the same, and I got treated to more BS the other day when someone was commenting on this article:

https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper

They talk about about authors using AI to get ahead, write faster, crank out more content. I’ve often referred to self-publishing as a hamster wheel, that little furry guy running faster and faster but not getting anywhere. The industry is full of books and when you release a book that sinks the second you hit Publish, it can feel like you do a lot of work for nothing.

I keep my mouth shut a lot of the time now. I’m not popular on Twitter, my views are not well-received, much like Joanna Penn who said in the article she had to step away because she’s an AI cheerleader and she got a lot of pushback for that. I am not an AI cheerleader, but I feel out of place all the same.

I really do just want to make one thing clear–I do not blame Amazon (KDP) for the grind self-publishing had turned it. I’m not denying at all that it’s common, COMMON, for authors to publish 4-6 books a year. And not novellas, either. Full-length books. It’s common. But it’s the KNOWLEDGE that it’s common that can eat at you. You know authors are doing something you can’t. I can’t publish four books a year. Not without writing them and saving them up. Writing, editing, cover design, proofing the proof, it all takes too long. Especially if you’re dealing with a series. Especially if you want to publish something that’s got some quality to it. It’s not easy writing a book full of twists. Half the reason I sat on my series for so long is that I have 540,000 words of an intricate plot that I needed desperately to make sure held together. Only time away could give me that clarity, and it has proven to be valuable so far.

The woman featured in the article turned to AI for help. She’s living off her book money and that in itself, I’m sure, is stressful. I’m at the point where I don’t think I’ll ever be able to quit my day job, and that’s okay, but trying to find time to write after working 40 hours a week is stressful in its own way. I’m not not blaming this woman for letting AI write part of her books, that’s her choice, but the WHY she did it I don’t agree with. She said her readers would drop her if they had to wait too long between books, and I think that is complete BS. Okay, maybe not complete because I do think you need to have consistency when publishing. Even if you train your readers to only expect one book a year. Publishing is the fastest moving sloth there is, and yeah, you’re going to have your work cut out for you if you’re writing a series and need five years between books. That’s why I write my series before I publish them. People binge now, and I just go with it. But rather than turn to Al for help, there are things you can do.

Keep your readers informed. Start a newsletter or post consistently on social media. If you let your readers know what you’re doing, what you’re working on, and when the next book will come out, they will wait for you. Build a connection with your readers. Care about them, and they will care about you.

Recommend other books. Listen, when I was reading that article, I felt her desperation, but in the end you are not going to be the only author a reader reads. It’s impossible. Romance whale readers can read a book a day. There’s no humanly possible way to keep up with that pace. Instead of being scared of being replaced, embrace the idea that books are a community and you are only a piece of it. Recommend other books–you should be reading them anyway–but that’s why it’s important to create a niche. On my V’s Vixens FB page, I post books that are free and in KU and pull quotes from books that are similar to mine. I’m building a readership of the kinds of books I write. If you’re all over the map, your readers won’t know what to read. They read YOU and want to read books that are similar to yours. Make it easy for them. Recommend books that you like so when your next book is ready to go they know exactly what they’ll be getting.

Relax, but not too much. I like rules, and if you’ve read my blog for a while, you know I do. Stick to one genre, know reader expectations. Cover your book to market. Learn an ad platform. But the one rule I have never ever agreed with is to write every day. For some people it’s not possible, and beating yourself up over it won’t make things better. If you can’t write, you can’t. Thinking is writing. Plotting is writing. Sorting through stock photos is, maybe not writing, but you get the idea. Don’t lose your joy, or like woman in the article, writing will be come work and not the good kind. She said after she started using AI for a prolonged time, she didn’t feel connected to her characters anymore, would lose the theme of her books. She didn’t wake up thinking about her characters, she didn’t go to bed and they were the lost thought in her mind before she drifted off. You know what? When characters claw at you from the inside out, that is the best part of writing. When your characters need their story told so badly they don’t let you go. I felt sorry for her when I read that. If you lose your joy, there’s not much to write for anymore.

I didn’t get into with that guy, though he spouted off a few more things about how evil KDP is and how there isn’t an alternative to publishing. Maybe KDP has the biggest slice of the pie, but they gave us the pie. I truly think Amazon gave us opportunities when we wouldn’t have had them otherwise.

That is all I have for this post. I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead, and if you have time, sign up for ProWritingAid’s Romance Week. I always sign up but never watch anything. I still have all the 20booksto50k videos from their November conference. Plus two of Alex Newton’s K-lytics reports. But if you’re interested here’s a non-affiliate link to sign up. https://prowritingaid.com/romance-week/sign-up

Until next time!

Brief Author Update and KDP Changes

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I haven’t been doing much except re-editing my Lost & Found trilogy and redoing the covers. I said in a previous blogpost that book one didn’t have the problems books two and three had, but I was mistaken. I went back and edited it more thoroughly which took time, and then I read all three of them again just to make sure I didn’t edit in any typos. My proofs come today, but I’m not reading them–okay I might spot-check them, but that’s all–I’ll page through them to look for formatting errors and make sure the back matter is how I want it, and then I need to move on. They are going to be as good as they’re going to be and I’ll have to be happy with that. I’m pleased with cover changes, and I hope that it will bump up sales. I haven’t been pushing them because I didn’t like the covers, but now I can promote them with confidence. I’ve said I don’t have imposter syndrome, but maybe I do. I’ve never been fully confident thinking my books are any good to read, but my trilogy is good, and I remembered that editing them. It’s a good story arch, and I want people to read them.

Just because I like the story, I’m reading my duet over again. Not with the express desire to edit them, though I am making changes and editing out the “when” sentence structure if I come across it. I also like “because” and with a quick sentence rewrite, I can usually edit it out. These aren’t bad–I hadn’t fallen into a writing tic while I was writing these, and I’m reading more for pleasure than to edit them. After those are done, I have a lot of admin stuff to do, and I’ll spend most, if not all of my free time in in the second half of November and all of December getting them done:

*Changing from the MailerLite Classic to the updated and newer version of MailerLite. We need to do that by February and I’ve heard stories ranging from it’s super simple to horror stories of lost email addresses. There’s a tutorial somewhere, so I need to watch it. Luckily, I don’t have anything complicated there, just one landing page and one welcome email that is sent to everyone regardless of how the sign up. It should be cut and dried, if not, dare I say, easy, but we’ll see. I’m going to set aside a whole day for it because I don’t want to stress myself out. This is a good time to redo my welcome email anyway, make it prettier, but I think I’ll have to redo the integration I have set up with Bookfunnel. I have 771 subscribers right now. I’m not running an FB ad to my freebie at the moment, so the past few subscribers I’ve managed to gain have been through the back matter of my books only. I’ll send an email letting my subscribers know that my Christmas novel is live, then I won’t send one out until I’ve moved my account over. That’s the top item on my to-do list for now.

*Publish my rockstar trilogy to IngramSpark. I always let a couple of months go by between publishing on KDP and publishing on IngramSpark. I’ve heard it’s good to let them settle, and it’s what I’ve always done. I’ve never had an issue publishing to IS after KDP, so I’ll keep doing it that way. The interiors are the same, but I’ll have to tweak the covers. IS uses different paper and the spines are thinner, which means I usually have to adjust the font to avoid it lapping over to the front or back covers. I can’t do that until my trilogy is done and published with new covers. I want to put the Lost & Found covers back there pushing readers who like trilogies to buy my other one. This is a back matter page of Safe & Sound telling readers I have my rockstars available:

I made the graphic in Canva. One of the best things you can do is use your back matter wisely! I do the same things with all three of my standalones–if you like this standalone, I have another available, and you can find it here.

*Make hardcovers for the rest of my books. I offer hardcovers of my Cedar Hill Duet and Rescue Me. That was all the further I got with my hardcovers, but now that my books will be 100% finished, I can make hardcovers of the rest. I’ve never sold a hardcover (only a handful of Large Print I can’t offer anymore because KDP blocks them as duplicate content) but I like how the buy-page shows more than one buying option and it shows readers that I’ve invested in my book to make other versions available.

*Try to enjoy the downtime and the holidays. That list will take me more than a few days, and while I’m not writing, I’m going to try to enjoy the holidays. I have a tooth that’s going to need to come out soon (I have PTSD from a root canal gone bad and I will never subject myself to another one) but I’m going out of town from November 15-18th and I would like to have it done after I come back. There’s no good time to have an extraction, and my November is busier than it’s ever been, but having an achy tooth in my mouth ups my anxiety, and I would like it out the sooner the better.

*Plan my next books. I’m thinking of another duet, but bigger ones, 150k per book or so. I want to incorporate the underground king concept I blogged about here, with the kidnapping/psychic element that’s been knocking around in my head. To write these as well as I want, I’m going to need to read some dark mafia books. I want these dark too, but not in the sex kind of way, well, not only the sex kind of way. Drugs, crime. Violence. The vibe I was looking for when I wrote All of Nothing. I don’t have a plot yet, and I still have to put my series up, but it’s never to late to plan.

*Try to enjoy walking more. I have a lot of negative feelings associated with going for walks, and I’m trying to sever those ties. When my ex-fiancé and I would talk, I would go outside for privacy. As our relationship deteriorated, I didn’t go outside just for privacy, I would go outside because we were fighting and I needed to walk off the nervous energy (and the fear but let’s not get into that). Walking now brings back a lot of those memories and feelings. We’ve been split up for a long time, and I’m used to him not being in my life anymore. Our five years together were more tumultuous than happy and splitting up was better for both of us. Still, those feelings are still there, and I need to push them aside to enjoy walking again. I also walked to get air at the beginning of the pandemic to try to quell my anxiety. I wasn’t anxious because of COVID though I know many were. I was anxious because unbeknownst to me at the time, I picked up a box of Snuggle dryer sheets, and they were wreaking havoc on my girlie parts (more specifically, they gave me bacterial vaginosis). Three years later, I’m still having issues my gynecologist doesn’t seem to understand, and now walking brings back those feelings too–of sucking air into my lungs, trying to calm down because while those dryer sheets were screwing up my body, they were also screwing up my mind. I’m still dealing with the side effects of that unfortunate purchase, but at least I know the cause of my health issues. There’s nothing keeping me from going for a walk and enjoying what that time outdoors used to mean to me–plotting my next book, listening to music, listening to publishing podcasts, and enjoying the health benefits that come with moving your body. I’m already doing better for myself recognizing those ties, I just need to do better with making time to do something about it.

I should probably make this a different blog post, especially since I don’t know if I’ll have time to post anything next week, but I wanted to chat about some of the new features KDP has been rolling out.

The first one is KDP will allow you to schedule when your paperback goes live. This isn’t the golden ticket people think it is though. While it’s nice you can schedule a release date, that doesn’t mean it’s on preorder. The only way you can schedule a preorder of a paperback is to publish it through IngramSpark, and I really discourage you from using IS to fulfill Amazon orders. You’ll end up with a bunch of problems, that, unfortunately, will be difficult to fix with the way I’ve heard IS’s customer service is since the pandemic and Robin Cutler’s exit. I’ve also heard that you need to have your files available before you choose a date (this was in an FB group and I have no idea if it’s true or if placeholder files can be used), but that actually makes sense, because the only nice thing I can see about pre-scheduling is that you can order author copies before your book goes live, and they won’t have the ugly stripe over the front. Paperbacks aren’t a big consideration when it comes to my books–most of my sales come from KU. I like to offer paperbacks, and Vellum makes it easy to format them and make them pretty. Lots of people were excited about this new development, but they still need the 72 hours to review your book and you can’t order author copies until your book has passed that review. As far as I can see, nothing much has changed there, except you can schedule and check it off your launch list.

For more information about using IS with KDP, look here: https://www.authorimprints.com/ingramspark-pre-order-amazon-kdp/#:~:text=Pre%2Dorders%20are%20accumulated%20in,or%20before%20the%20publication%20date.

The other thing KDP is playing with now is opening up audiobook creation using AI. So far, it’s by invitation only and in the beta stages. Beta in KDP language can take years (look a how long the new reports were in beta and how long the old reports hung around) and how long it will take to open to all of us (or at all) will be something to keep an eye on.

Of course this caused an uproar in the writing and author communities. Some are really against AI anything, and some totally embrace whatever AI has to offer. I like to be in the middle–there are good and bad aspects of it, and I think if you totally brush it aside because of the bad, you can miss out on the good. I don’t like using AI art for covers, and it’s becoming prevalent with romance authors because hot men who haven’t been used to death are becoming harder and harder to find–especially for authors on a budget who can’t afford to look beyond DepositPhotos. The only problem is, I can spot these a mile a way and all the covers that use AI to generate a man standing in a suit with a blurry background behind him are starting to look the same. No matter how long or how hard I have to dig, I will always buy stock. I believe in paying the photographer and I believe in paying the model. I don’t think creating an audiobook is entirely in the same category as using art. AI in this regard, I believe, is just technology moving forward. There is already text-to-voice options on devices, and using AI in this way is just opening up accessibility for readers who want to listen to the books they consume and for authors who can’t afford to pay a narrator. I don’t like gatekeeping and telling someone they shouldn’t create an audiobook because they can’t afford it is in its own way. There could be drawbacks to using text-to-voice, and we won’t know what those are until authors start reporting back. There needs to be way to correct the voice if it pronounces something incorrectly. The voice has to sound natural, but those voices are getting better day by day. On the author side, you have to take the time to listen and edit if that option is available. You can’t just upload your book, let AI spit out an audio version and put it up. There was one woman on Twitter who was using AI to translate her books into German, but she wasn’t using someone who knew German to double-check the translation. That’s irresponsible and scary. God only knows what it was coming up with. The last thing I want is to be a laughingstock in Germany. Good luck to her, I guess.

When it becomes available, I’ll give it a try. Apple already has given its authors a chance to create audiobooks with AI, (and people were excited about that, so I don’t know why KDP is getting flack) so it will be interesting to see how this goes. Just because I try it doesn’t mean I’ll publish with it. I might not like the voice choices, or because I write dual first person POV, I may not be able to publish using a female voice for the female POV and a male voice for the male POV. I’m definitely not going to shun something before I can even experiment with it. Ethics aside, you have to think of what you want for your business. I don’t listen to audiobooks–my mind drifts too much for me to concentrate–but I’m hearing now that listening to an audiobook is experience. It’s doubtful something that KDP offers will compete, but it’s nice to have to the option.

That’s about all I have for this week. I’ll be out of town November 15-18th. We’re driving down to the Twin Cities and we’ll be going to Mall of America, looking at a few museums, and going to the zoo if the weather permits us to be outside. I may take a pass at blogging or just put up a quick post I’ll write Sunday. Things won’t be calming down much after that either–we have The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to watch that following Tuesday, then Thanksgiving. We’ll be at the end of the month after that, and I have my birthday to celebrate. We’re going to Napoleon and out for a fancy dinner so I’m really looking forward to that. All in all a very busy month and I think I’m going to sleep all of December.

For my last piece of news, A Heartache for Christmas is available right now–it went live today! The reviews have been coming in through Booksprout, and readers are really touched by the story (and I am really really in love with the cover!). You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Heartache-Christmas-VM-Rheault-ebook/dp/B0CM2BLRPF/

Enjoy your week, everyone!

Kindle Unlimited Page Read Payouts Are Down. What I’m thinking, feeling, and my ultimate choice.

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if you spend any time in author groups on Facebook, the number one topic of conversation this week is that the KENP page read payout has gone down again. It’s at an all time low of $0.003989. That means KDP will pay you $0.0039 whenever someone reads a KENP page of your book if it’s in Kindle Unlimited. For as long as I’ve been publishing and having my books in KU, it has never dropped below $0.04X and it is a little bit disheartening to see, mostly because it’s been decreasing over the summer, and it’s always easier to fall than to climb up, no matter what you’re doing.

Just as a quick reference, we can do the dreaded math. Take, for example, Rescue Me. It has an KENP of 391. You can find that information on your Bookshelf. Hover over the three dots to the right of your title, click on Promote and Advertise, and the information is at the bottom of the page.

To do the math, you multiply the KENP of your book with whatever the payout is. For Rescue Me, if I multiply 391 by 0.003989 I get $1.55. So in KU, every time someone reads Rescue Me from cover to cover I get $1.55. Which is less than 70% of $4.99 if someone were to buy my book. For June, it was $ 0.004042 and that math equals out to $1.58. Three cents it’s that big of deal especially to smaller indies who don’t sell many books. (But considering it was $ 0.004293 at this time last year, it’s worth keeping in the back of your mind.)

Of course, this has brought on a tidal wave of authors declaring they’re going to pull their books out of KU and go wide, but it’s not a good idea to make decisions in anger and hate for Amazon. This is your business, businesses go through ups and downs and it’s better if you run your business with informed choices.

Here are my thoughts:

You have to build a brand/readership no matter where you are. This is true no matter if you’re in KU or you’re wide. You need to find readers, you need to show them you are in it for the long haul. You need a solid brand so a new reader can look at your author page/book covers and know exactly what they are going to get if they read one of your books and stick with you. Building a brand/readership is even more important wide because unless you regularly run sales on your books, you’re asking a reader who has never heard of you before to spend $3.99+ to try you, and you better be giving them their money’s worth. Not only so they don’t waste money on your unedited book, but that is their one and only taste of your writing and you need them to crave your books enough to spend money on each and every book you ever publish.

You have to be consistent no matter where you are. When I went to the Sell More Books Summit in Chicago before the pandemic hit, they had a panel of indie vendor reps, among them, Ricardo Fayet from Reedsy, Brad and Brad from Vellum, and a rep from Kobo who is no longer in that position. The one thing that stuck out for me during that talk was when she said, don’t put your books in and out of wide. We remember you, readers remember you. Google Play, Apple Books, Nook, and Kobo and others have representatives that work with authors and book promos. They won’t okay you for a promo if they know your fickle. Why would they help you build a brand and an audience when they think all you’re going to do is pull your books out and put them in KU the next month? Going wide is hard, but so is being in KU. It doesn’t matter where you are, you still have to build that readership. Authors think being on more than one platform is a sure way to find readers, but that’s not true. Your book will sink anywhere if readers don’t know your book exists. Stick with one place, publish consistently, advertise, work with the platform reps with promotions and sales. Being wide takes work, but it’s only a different kind of work than being in KU. They say work smarter, not harder, and if smarter for you is being wide, then you should do that.

Go direct where you can. It’s tempting to put your book on Draft2Digital and let them take care of it, but no one considers that if you do that, you’re paying D2D to distribute, you’re paying Nook, Kobo, Apple, etc, to sell your book, and you’re left with what’s leftover. After everyone takes a cut, you might as well have stayed in KU and absorbed the cost of the lower payout. If you want to go wide, do the work and publish directly to the platforms you can. Upload at Nook, Kobo, Google Play (if they’re accepting new authors–for a long time they weren’t and I have no idea if they are now). Upload direct wherever you are able to save yourself the cost of the distribution fee D2D charges you. Their fee and other FAQs are here: https://www.draft2digital.com/faq/

Your KU readers won’t follow you. Some authors think that their readers will follow them if all of a sudden their books are not in KU on Amazon anymore, and with all the years I’ve been part of author groups, the one thing anyone can agree on is, no, they won’t. KU has over four million books in it now, and depending on the genre you write, your books are a dime a dozen. I’m not so self-important to understand that if readers who have read all 7 of my billionaire books in KU (and even LOVED THEM) suddenly had to pay wide prices for any other books I publish, they won’t buy them. They would write me off and move on to the next romance author. Wide readers and KU readers are very different audiences. I have a KU subscription myself. I don’t buy books on top of that and I won’t try wide authors who put their first in series for free because I know I would have to buy the rest of the series if I liked the first. (That’s a normal marketing strategy even for books in KU because read-through is what earns you royalties.) Readers are smart–they know if you’re in KU or not just by browsing the newsletter promo lists like Freebooksy and Fussy Librarian.

Here are the first two books in the Freebooksy contemporary romance promo newsletter I sign up for sent to me on Wednesday, August 16th. Any reader who has been reading books for any number of years knows that the Kindle-only book will be in Kindle Unlimited. It might not be reader knowledge that Amazon forces us into exclusivity, but they don’t need to know that. They see Kindle only, KU. When I go through these looking for books, I don’t even read the blurbs for books available everywhere. I don’t want to like a book that’s wide. I can’t afford to buy the others. Wide readers have a book budget, and KU readers have a book budget that’s wrapped up in their KU subscription fee. It’s too bad, but with rent prices out of this world, medical costs, parents doing the back-to-school thing, groceries, gas prices, and whatever else, the entertainment budget is the first to go. I’m not saying that so you stay in KU if you’re there, but you know, you have to build a readership with really great books and that takes time.

Change your mindset. Instead of moaning about the drop, do something about it. The piece of advice I see the most when this kind of thing happens is, “Write another book.” More books will earn you more money, no matter where you are, so get your butt into your chair and write. You can also write longer books to fill in that page-read payout shortage. If you write 70k books, write 75k books. Add a sex scene, or a couple of dialogue scenes between characters. Add an epilogue. You don’t have to add filler or fluff to lengthen a book. Also, if you haven’t already, start a newsletter. If you’re everywhere, a newsletter will be your reader hub. If you’re Amazon exclusive, readers can follow your Amazon author page and Amazon will email your readers when you publish a new book. If you’re wide, you want a place you can share with your readers about sales and promos and new releases. When you move your books over from KU, edit your interior and put your newsletter sign up link in the back matter of all your books.

If you don’t have one, you might think that’s just more work, but I don’t know if other platforms offer author pages like Amazon does. Kobo doesn’t. You can click on an author’s name and get their list of books, but it doesn’t look like you can follow an author, and I have no idea if Kobo will email you new releases once you’ve bought an author’s book. This is what I get when I searched Nora Roberts:

It’s just better to control that for yourself, and you can even put your newsletter sign up link in the author bio. Here’s mine on my Amazon author page.

What am I going to do? I’m going to hang in there a while yet. I have four more books coming out this year, and six next year, so we’ll see what happens. I could move my 3rd person books over, but then I would be courting two different audiences, and one for a name I’m not writing in anymore. I don’t think moving my older backlist titles is the answer. They aren’t selling, and I don’t use any of the tools given to me so they do. I can’t remember the last time I put All of Nothing or The Years Between Us for free, and since those are are standalones. I only get page reads for royalties if a reader happens to borrow instead of download when I do that, no read-through to other books.

It’s important to have some kind of plan in place when you make a decision like this, a goal, so you can measure if what you did worked.

Anyway, this will come up again and again, but I hope this is the last time it drops. You can assume a decrease when looking at your KENP royalties, and that’s what I do:

The biggest concern right now, for me, is if this downward trend keeps going. More than 50% of my royalties of any given month are from Kindle Unlimited, and like other authors say on various forums, if you’ve published for a bit and have built a brand around being in KU, you can feel trapped. You don’t want to stay because you’re scared to leave or don’t want to put in the work to move wide. It’s how I feel in my day job right now. I’ve worked there for 22 years, and finding something else is scary. I signed a contract saying I can’t say derogatory things about them online, so let’s jus say they aren’t the same company I worked for 20 years ago, and it’s discouraging not to be valued. Things change, and that includes Amazon. How much you want to put up with will be your own personal decision. If you don’t feel Amazon values you and your business, if you think you’ll be treated better elsewhere, then you should go. We all need to know our worth and act accordingly.

I blogged about wide resources and you and find some at the end of this blog post: https://vaniamargene.com/2021/09/06/ku-vs-wide-can-you-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too/

I also tweeted all of the resources I knew about in a tweet thread here:

Whatever you choose, good luck!

Hating on Amazon: Can we just stop?

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There are so many things that irritated me last week, and a lot of it boiled down to hating Amazon and its practices and the way they treat indies. I haven’t been immune to how frustrating it can be when I had my own go around with them over Large Print. I never did get it resolved and gave up. That’s the price of doing business with a large corporation who doesn’t have the time or the manpower to deal with everything on a case-by-case basis. You win some (being able to publish without an agent or the Big Five) and you lose some (having to deal with bots and issues lost in translation with employees who have English as a second language).

What is irritating to me is why indie authors think they are special enough not to have to deal with this. They act like Amazon is a big bully, pushing them around, but let’s remember that Amazon gave us the ability to self-publish and who knows how long that would have taken without them. For as many people who wish indies didn’t exist, it could have taken a long time.

I understand it’s scary when Amazon decides to take your books down because they found them on a pirate site, or they take your books down because they claim you don’t have proper licensing to use your stock photos on your covers. It’s frustrating when their return policy allows readers to return books, but the thing is, indie authors don’t want to behave like selling books is a business, and that’s exactly what it is. You are a business dealing with a business. That means doing what you need to do to keep your business running smoothly. Here are some tips to doing that:

Network. This might be surprising, but when adult authors who handle issues with professionalism have a situation with Amazon, they’ll not only post the problem, but how they resolved it. That’s important because maybe you haven’t had an issue with Amazon yet, but that doesn’t mean you won’t in the future. Knowing how another author handled the potentially same situation you may one day face is a great resource to getting your books back up with little hassle. The 20booksto50k group on FB is a wealth of information when it comes to this kind of thing.

Realize that indie authors can be doing it wrong and deserve Amazon’s slap on the wrist. There will always be an indie who doesn’t know they can’t use whatever they want on a cover. While it’s a pain in the butt to have to deal with something like that if it happens to you, all Amazon is insuring is that they aren’t helping you sell something illegal. You could be doing everything 100% correctly, but I’ll never blame Amazon for double-checking. It’s annoying when your boss is looking over your shoulder to see that you’re doing the work the way you’re supposed to, but for every 10 authors who follow the rules, there will be one who doesn’t know the rules or blatantly disregards them and will rip off a cover or use any picture they want from Pinterest.

Join an organization. Businesses have attorneys on retainer or have them as part of their staff. Businesses are also members of organizations in their field. It gives them credibility and resources to turn to if they need. Being an indie author isn’t any different. You are a business so you should invest in your books. Join Alli or the IBPA, or the RWA if you’re a romance author, or if you write Sci-Fi and Fantasy, join SFWA. All those organizations will give you to access to legal advice and have contacts at Amazon. They’ll reach out on your behalf and get your situation handled for you. A yearly membership isn’t that much–broken down it’s about 10 dollars a month) and it’s worth the peace of mind. Memberships can also include other benefits like IngramSpark uploads and revisions codes and discounts on editing and formatting. When I changed the insides for All of Nothing and Wherever He Goes, the revisions codes saved me almost half of what the membership cost. New uploads later this year will cover the rest of the fee. It doesn’t take long for the membership to pay for itself.

What really bothers me is the entitlement I see from indies. There was one woman who was accusing Amazon of ripping her off because they discounted her paperback book. Thank goodness people corrected her and said she still earns full royalties when they do that. I’m really just flummoxed by the attitudes lately, and I don’t know what’s causing it. Another author was in a rage because someone bought and returned her trilogy. Amazon has updated their returns policy and according to it, readers can’t return books that have been read or partially read up to a point. You’re a business–you should expect returns every now and then. (If you’re getting a lot then it’s a problem with your product, not someone’s return guidelines, and I don’t care who you publish with.) I think complaining about something like that is tacky. You don’t know what kind of financial situation your readers are in. Maybe she had an expense pop up and had no choice. It’s none of your business why they had to return, and griping about it on a public forum is trashy and tasteless. I hope her reader saw that tweet and never buys her books again. I could start a long list of people who behave badly and never buy their books. I don’t need to fuel such bitterness.

I think a lot of indies forget that Amazon has been the target of their share of indie scammers. Authors who used click farms to fuel KU borrows and reads, authors who would book stuff for the KU page reads, authors who would publish individual books wide and then put a boxed set in KU hoping to cash in, authors who would host giveaways like Chance Carter who tried to give away Tiffany jewelry . . . There was even a black market scam where authors sold their manuscripts so other authors could publish the same story under a different title, cover, and author name. It’s not like in all the years we’ve been able to publish we’ve been completely innocent. I would be shocked if Amazon didn’t learn from that.

I’ve been called naïve and privileged for sharing this simple solution: Don’t like Amazon? Don’t publish there. I was called privileged because Amazon is the biggest ebook retailer in the world, I think, but it most definitely is in the US and people say they can’t sell books without it. I don’t see why not. I’ve seen indies say their sales are bigger on Apple Books, Nook, and Google Play. It all depends on where you push your readers. At the very least, publish there and push your readers to Kobo. And if you’re not willing to do that, at LEAST shut up on a public forum about how you hate how Amazon treats indie authors. Not all of us have a big chip on our shoulder.

I understand publishing is hard, but there are ways you can make it easier on yourself. Join an organization who can go up to bat for you. Buy your images for your covers that will provide you with the licensing Amazon wants when they approach you. In the group I was scrolling, the author said Amazon didn’t accept the Shutterstock license. I was surprised, but it’s good to know. They accepted the DepositPhoto license when she changed her cover. I know Amazon will under no circumstances accept the licensing Canva gives you if you use photos under your Pro Plan. So far I haven’t heard an issue with fonts, but buy the ones you want to use. Creative Fabrica will give you the licensing agreement when you purchase fonts off that site.

And last, if not least, if you have an issue, approach it like an adult, not just assume Amazon is “out to get you.” They aren’t. Dealing with their red tape is the same as dealing with medical insurance, car insurance when you get into an accident, dealing with the IRS when you can’t afford to pay in. Dealing with Amazon is an adult thing you have to do because you’re an adult running an adult business.

The scammy stuff is really interesting, and I haven’t heard of what was going on years ago popping up again. Maybe being heavy-handed, Amazon took care of a lot of that and shady authors don’t want to risk it. I heard Chance Carter had surfaced under a different name and then once Amazon caught on, we never heard from him again. I think it’s funny we’re still friends on FB and I’m still following his Author Page that has a post-apocalyptic feel these days. He had such a great following and he had to ruin it. It’s amazing as it is mystifying.

If you want to read more about scammers, you can visit these links, and even my own old blog post about it:

I must have been having a bad day…..I’m very ranty LOL https://vaniamargene.com/2020/05/04/scammers-gonna-scam/

Bad romance: To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm By SARAH JEONG linked above)

Chance Carter And #Cockygate Collide by David Gaughran

#BOOKSTUFFING AND WHY IT MATTERS by Cait

Book Stuffing, Bribery and Bullying: The Self-Publishing Problem Plaguing Amazon

Amazon Scammers — An Unregulated Group Pushing out Women, LGBT+, and African American Authors in Romance Fiction

People need to calm down. It’s gonna be okay. Buy a promo, buy an ad. Pour a glass of wine and breathe. After a week of this, I know I will.

Have a great week!

Author Update: Emailing Jeff Bezos and what I’m working on now.

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I’m writing a quick Thursday author update because on Monday I’m posting updated instructions on how to do a full wrap for a paperback in Canva. Both Canva and KDP made changes that have made my post from last year basically obsolete, and anyone who reads it now will be like, what? because the site where you can download your cover template has changed. So, you gotta stay with the times. (But no video as of yet. I know I promised, but making a video is nerve-wracking and I’m not excited to jump into it.)

I emailed Jeff Bezos’s email address this morning about my large print book. I submitted Captivated by Her in a large print edition, but KDP blocked it as duplicate content. I was a little pissy since I was able to publish two other large print books without an issue. So I wrote to his email address asking if large print was going to be blocked as duplicate content (which doesn’t make any sense to me anyway because it is) then why give us the option? There’s even a little box when you’re publishing asking if it’s large print. You can check it, and I assumed that publishing a regular print book along with a large print was a no-brainer. I guess not. In the email, I didn’t even ask them to unblock my book. I don’t care about that so much because I can publish them through IngramSpark (which is a hassle, but you do what you gotta do). I know on Amazon that can be hit and miss with availability, but it’s better than not publishing at all. I just wanted an explanation, and if they really don’t want us to publish large print, take the option away and force us to use IngramSpark. I hate seeing my blocked book on my dashboard, and I don’t want to do anything that will cause KDP to close my publishing account. I’ve always been on the up and up with them, and treat my books as a business. I just get mad when things don’t go how they should go. Anyway, I don’t expect a response. I’m sure Large Print books are not on their list of priorities, but at least i can say I tried.

I’m 30k into a new first book in a trilogy. I’ve got loose plots for all three books, and I’m having fun writing it. I was going to write the remaining four books in a different series I started last year, but the characters in this book wouldn’t leave me alone, so they’ll get slotted into my publishing schedule in 2024, and then I’ll have the other series to release in 2025. It’s a bit crazy that I’m that far ahead, but I don’t have to be.

The books I’ll publish between now (Captivated came out June 1st) and the beginning of 2024. I’ll release them 2 months apart.

I could release as quickly as I want, but there’s no point in turning on the faucet in a gush if there’s no one around to appreciate the water. I’ll slowly release while I gather email subscribers and hopefully readers. My launch (though I haven’t reached the 30 day cliff on Amazon yet) hasn’t done anything but with one book and it being half of a duet, I kept my expectations low. My plea to my newsletter subscribers who downloaded it as an ARC for a review went unanswered, and it doesn’t even have one to make the product page look nice. Maybe I should have gone with Booksprout after all. Oh well. We’ll see where I am next year at this time, though I don’t know if I’ll be doing much better. It takes so long now to build a readership, I may not be looking at any kind of momentum until 2024. But that’s par for the course in these times. I just have to work harder on building my list and learning how to take advantage of promos on Bookfunnel. Earning a reader’s trust takes time and lots of consistency. I’ll get there, I just hope I don’t burn out before I do.

My Facebook ad for my newsletter sign up is going well, and I have 218 subscribers. I’ll need to shut my ad off in a couple of days though since I’ll have reached a 100 dollar ad spend, and I don’t want to spend any more than that. I’m already paying for Bookfunnel, so I should explore that more. And I think I’ll turn off my FB ad for Captivated as well. I’m getting a few clicks but they are really expensive (26 cent a click), and my sales dashboard is a big goose egg for that book. I knew this was going to be an uphill battle, but I want to save a little money to push the book when the second comes out. Pacing in a book is important, but it’s also important when you’re blowing your budget. My Amazon ads are also dead in the water, probably because I’m not bidding high enough for them to be shown to anyone. For right now, I’m using Bryan Cohen’s method of a thirty cent click bid, and that is not enough for a romance genre, especially one as popular as billionaire. After I shut my Facebook ads off I can create a few more on Amazon with a higher bid and see if that helps. In the words of almost every professional marketer out there: Test, test, test!

That’s about all I have for today. I’m happy to be writing again, and I’ll be busy with this trilogy until the end of the year.

I hope you’re having a great month so far!