I listened to my very first podcast last week. A fascinating interview by Joanna Penn, interviewing Liliana Hart about not going exclusive. I thoroughly enjoyed listening away to two top sellers discussing the various pros and cons of it all, but one thing caught my attention. The comment was made in passing but it made me pause. Is iTunes a more grown-up ebook store? Stepping back from a writer's POV whereby I always make more sales in Amazon, and instead, looking at iTunes from a reading POV revealed some interesting points. iTunes keeps it clean. When you pop on to look at books, you … [Read more...]

Any author who has e-books in Amazon will have experienced it at least once. A returned e-book. I don’t have a major gripe with this as I expect there will be those occasions someone hits the wrong button (the one click buy is very simple after all) and buys a book they didn’t mean to. What I do have a problem with is the people clearly using the system. The ones that buy a book in a series, read it, return it then proceed to do the same for the next book. They’re fairly easy to spot if you check your sales daily, there’s a day or two in between and suddenly a return and it continues that way … [Read more...]

I often write in cafes. My writing time during the working week is an hour at lunchtime and whatever I can cram into my evenings. When my lunch break comes along I trundle off to one of my regular haunts with my laptop jammed under an arm (already on, primed and ready to go) then order a pot of tea and settle down to write. This can understandably make me fairly unsociable at lunchtimes and unfortunately prevents my current attendance at a jujitsu class I really enjoy. But with a normal 9-5 job this is the reality of a moonlighting indie author. I don’t make enough off sales  to live, pay … [Read more...]

I’m always interested in learning new words, and quite enjoy reading the dictionary, but I’m really bad at remembering them. Frustrated with this, I had a hunt around for a tool that might help. I discovered Vocabulary.   Look up a word. Learn it forever. Vocabulary.com is the quickest, easiest way to learn vocabulary. It combines the world’s smartest dictionary with an adaptive learning game that will have you mastering new words in no time. It’s available on Android AND Apple, and via the google store cost me just $3.50 (nz). Holy heck this this application is addictive! It … [Read more...]

As usual Amazon is tinkering away with their creations. Currently KDP Select. Initially you got paid each time someone picked out your book – whether or not they read/finished it. Now, from 1 July, your KDP earnings will be based on how many pages a reader completes. In theory this is to allow authors of full length novels to get an appropriate payment when prior to this everyone got exactly the same, whether you’d written a 10 page book or 1000. BUT If someone decides to grab your book and only read a page then you will lose out where as prior you still would have been paid the full … [Read more...]