Most of you would be aware of Amazon’s borrowing system. It isn’t available in Australia yet, but we are certain it will be soon. Customers join up to Amazon’s Prime program for around $15 a month and then they can borrow any book they want. Authors have been paid $1.35 for each borrow, which is a great deal, especially if your books are priced at 99 cents. KU (Kindle Unlimited) borrows have accounted for half of our monthly income.

Amazon has changed the system from July 1 2015. Now they will pay authors on the number of pages read. We are expecting our income to fall as our books are shorter than most adult novels. Hopefully not too much!

With the new change we have decided to sell our series books in bulk sets as well as single books.

Authors don’t receive their payments for 3 months after each month’s payment, so it will be very interesting to see if the new system makes a change to our income.

Katrina Kahler has received 5 of these awards from Amazon since they were introduced 7 months ago for having a book in the Top 100 sellers on amazon.co.uk.

Katrina wrote this series of books about 2 years ago. They sat there making very few sales for a year. We kept changing the cover, revised the title and description, a little bit of FB marketing and whamo! it took off. This series of books is making a lot of money each and every month.

So the moral of the story is…DON’T GIVE UP! If it isn’t working, make some changes.

Can you believe that the latest “big” trend on Amazon is the sale of Adult Colouring Books? Any of you who are graphic artists or enjoy playing around with graphics and photoshop may want to investigate. Apparently they are wonderful for stress relief. You would have to publish them through Createspace as paperbacks.

This online Thesaurus is straightforward and user-friendly. I’ve been using it to come up with some fascinating words in my writing. Hope you enjoy it!

https://www.powerthesaurus.org/

Want to see how JK Rowling planned Harry Potter? Check out this page:

http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/j-k-rowling-plotted-harry-potter-with-a-hand-drawn-spreadsheet.html