Celebrating Independent Authors
Thank goodness last year is outta here. Some good stuff happened, some okay stuff happened, and some stuff happened that I wish never had. We won’t speak of those things here. Instead, we will look forward to the blank slate that is this shiny, new year.
Did I mix too many metaphors in that last sentence? Well, we’ll just add that to this list of Indie Author Things to Do Better in 2015, which I herewith submit for your approval. Continue reading “Resolutions for Indie Authors”
The indie-author intarwebz have been buzzing this week with the news that Joe Konrath is pulling all of his books out of KDP Select. Konrath mentioned it almost offhandedly in a comment on his own blog post fisking an open letter from MacMillan CEO John Sargent.
I won’t quote Konrath here, because Amazon has so many programs that it’s easy to mix up the acronyms, and I think Konrath himself was writing quickly and not being as careful as he could have been. The gist of it, though, is that Konrath’s titles will all be out of Select when their current enrollment period ends next month. This comes in the wake of complaints by author H.M. Ward and others that Kindle Unlimited borrows are gutting their sales, to the point where it’s affecting their livelihood. Continue reading “Is Kindle Unlimited Gutting Author Earnings?”
‘Tis the season for drowning in red-and-green overload, moaning about nonstop Christmas music, and busting our budgets for stuff for ungrateful relatives who will be back at the mall on the 26th to exchange it for something else. (Surely you didn’t think that only happened in your family.)
But there are ways to feel less Grinchy about the whole holiday shopping thing. Last year, Amazon launched a program called Amazon Smile, and anybody who shops at Amazon.com can register. The first thing you do is pick a charity – most 501(c)(3) organizations are eligible. Once you’ve done that, Amazon will donate one-half percent of the purchase price (less taxes, etc.) of most stuff you buy to that charity. You can change up your chosen charity whenever you want. And you still get all of the functionality of the regular Zon site, including your wish lists and gift registries. Continue reading “Amazon Smile”
Americans who publish their books with KDP received an email earlier this month about VAT and how it impacts the prices of their books. If you were a lucky recipient of that email, you might have spent a split second wondering what it was about, just before your eyes glazed over.
VAT is the abbreviation for Value-Added Tax. It’s sort of the same as our sales tax here in the U.S., and sort of not. For the purchaser, it’s more or less a national sales tax. However, for sellers, it’s a tax on whatever they added to the product (or material or service) by what they did to get it in shape to sell. Here’s how Wikipedia explains it: Continue reading “Amazon and VAT”