Dear Amazon, what’s up with my Kindle prices?

How much thought do you put into pricing your books?

If you’re like me, it’s a lot.  Which is why it finally drove me around the bend that Amazon has been changing all my prices, without even asking nicely.

When you’re pricing a book, you probably pick a nice, clean number with a 99 on the end, a suffix that is invisible to consumers.  If a book is $8.74 (unless it’s clearly marked down, like from $9.99), it’ll stand out and look weird.

Know how I know?  Because for a long time, I’ve noticed that Amazon prices for my KDP ebooks look terrible.  They totally jump off the page.  Oh, they’re close to the numbers I’ve picked… but not exactly.  And that has slowly been driving me mad.

Just to pick a few titles at random, the prices were $5.11, $1.12, $5.14, $1.13.  Those are terrible numbers, numbers that jump off the page and make a buyer reluctant to buy.  That’s very frustrating, especially because I KNEW I’d priced them at $4.99, 99 cents, $4.99 and 99 cents. 

Why bother planning your prices if they’re just going to change, am I right? 

What’s going on here?

I eventually found out why this happens.  If you’re outside the United States, Amazon can tell from your browser’s IP address, and they adjust the price you see accordingly.  Without telling me, Amazon has been detecting my computer’s location and adjusting the prices accordingly.

At least there’s some GOOD news:  buyers inside the U.S. will most likely see the right prices for your books, namely, the ones you’ve so carefully chosen in KDP’s dashboard.

To test this, I ran my author page through two “anonymizers,” sites that hide your current IP address so nobody can tell where you’re surfing from.  One was in Europe and one was in the U.S. 

Here’s what the pricing looks like from each location:

 

There are all those terrible prices!  But look what happens if you’re seeing the same page from the U.S.:

Read More

Should you crowdfund your next book (on Kickstarter, GoFundMe, or PubSlush)? 3 reasons why not.

Should you crowdfund your next book (on Kickstarter, GoFundMe, or PubSlush or whatever tomorrow’s Next Big Crowdfunding Site happens to be)?

No.

Well, that was easy, wasn’t it?

Now we can all go home.

What?  You want me to defend that statement?

Well, okay.  Here are three reasons.

#1 Your crowdfunding project makes me feel spiteful.

I’m not saying this to be nasty, I promise.

I love you, I love writers, I want to encourage independent writers to get their books in print and live their dream.  Really… I do.

But if you publicize your crowdfunding project in writers’ circles, you’re going to get a LOT of people staring at your post, thinking, “I paid to publish my books, darnit; you should pay to publish yours.”

Either that or they’re just plain bored. 

Bored with writers who hang out online on facebook, LinkedIn, and anywhere else writers hang out, telling me to fund their book… when they ought to be writing. 

Another question that may just cross our mind when you announce your crowdfunding attempt: 

Read More

Photo picture books: good, bad, UGLY.

I’ve taken some heat over the last couple days for this post, which suggests that writers can choose free photos from Wikimedia and other websites and use them in their books as an alternative to hiring an illustrator. 

(Photo credit:  Albert Kok, Wikimedia)

Yet photo-based picture books are a long tradition, going almost back to the beginning of both.  And we cannot all dive to the bottom of the seas to take our own pictures of sharks… nor is there any need to, with good-quality stock photos and (high-quality!  read my post!) internet photos.

So I decided to search through Amazon to find out exactly what’s out there these days:  the good, bad, and ugly in kids’ picture books that are based around photos.  But not in that order!

Books illustrated with photos tend to come from the non-fiction end of the spectrum… but not entirely, as we’ll see in a couple of the examples below.  They can be found both in slick professionally-published versions and some good, bad and loathsome self-pubbed editions.

Read More

Do talking animals make our kids dumb?

In case you don’t feel like reading on, the answer is no.

But the question has been raking up headlines all week anyway, thanks to a University of Toronto (my alma mater !  so proud !) study proving that they do. 

Or at least, kind of proving they do. 

As it turns out, what they’ve done says very little about children’s books – in particular, not much we have to pay attention to as writers or as parents.

But along the way we can have a bit of a laugh looking at the samples of the stories they used, and looking at examples of talking animals who help our kids learn… so keep right on reading!

The Claim:  Talking Animals Hinder Learning

These results indicate that anthropomorphized animals in books may not only lead to less learning but also influence children’s conceptual knowledge of animals. (read the full study here)

This kind of sensationalistic stuff adapts really well to headlines!

Read More

Better World Books’ new strategy: destroying books for profit?

Excuse me, but I only just found out – and I’m still reeling.

As of last month, Better World Books, my favourite online used-book retailer (by far!) has started offering an “eDelivery” option when you order a used book.

At first glance, I didn’t think anything of it – and then I did a double-take.  What is eDelivery? I wondered.

I quickly found out.  Think they’re doing something like this to your book???

Think again… eDelivery is BWB’s code for “destroying a book.”

Read More

To snot or not to snot? (help me out here!)

This is a little more of a personal question than I usually share here, but I figure, what’s a community for, if not learning and growing together.

So here’s the thing:  I wrote a book.

Yay, me!  Right?

Thing #2:  It’s a rhyming book.

Thing #3:  The rhymes are good.  Yeah, I’m sure.  I’d be mighty proud of them, except for…

Thing #4:  The book is about… snot.

I made it up one day while fantasizing with my 6-year-old, who has allergies and also gets colds a LOT of the time.  He sniffles a LOT.  And I thought out loud – what if you could take a pill and just get rid of all that snot at once?

So I sat down and in a particularly boring Hebrew class, I dreamed up and wrote out the entire story – in verse.

Like I said, it’s good.  But also like I said, it’s about snot.

The trouble with snot, farts, etc

Read More

A Trip Back in Time: 15 books from 30 years ago that are still great today.

Do you remember 1984?  I hate to admit it, but yeah, I do, too.

Realizing for the first time that my kid is turning 20 this year (a “duh” moment, because he turned 19 last year!), I decided to do something “historical.”  But then I did the math wrong and pulled together a quick roundup of kids’ books from 1984 that are still great today.  That’s 30, mom, not 20. 

But never mind!  I’m happy I did… it’s been a great chance to rediscover some old favourites.

Read More

Should you write a kids’ book? Take this 5-question Yes/No quiz!

Five questions:  that’s all it takes to figure out if you’re cut out for writing kids’ books.  Yes?  No?  Maybe so? 

Let’s get started!

1.  Do you have a billion brilliant story ideas and can’t wait to find a ghostwriter so you can hand them over (upon receipt of a signed non-disclosure and a promise of a share of the royalties) and get them back as fully-conceived stories ready to publish?

2.  Did you love a book you read as a kid so much that you want to write the exact same story, only way better than the original author ever could?  Except updated, with computers?  Or robots?  In set in the future, in outer space?  “It’ll be Little House on the Prairie – on Mars, with a robot butler, and hoverboards, like The Jetsons!”

3.  Does your kid love to draw so much

Read More

5 reasons you’d be dumb to fund this indigogo project.

Does anybody really fund these things, anyway?  Or just click Like and pass them around?  I suppose somebody must, but some of the projects are just sheer dumbness, like this group who’s put together The Wikipedia Books Project to… print out Wikipedia.  The whole thing.

Yes, the encyclopedia that has effectively put print encyclopedias out of business… now back in print! 

Read More

Lost in Translation: The Giving Tree

Sheesh!  Some kids’ books translate beautifully into Hebrew, the works of Dr. Seuss surprisingly among them.  But tonight in Hebrew class, I had my first encounter with the Israeli version of an old, old favourite, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (Hebrew version here)… and came away slightly bruised and beaten.

You can read all about it here on my Aliyah (moving-to-Israel) blog because I’m not about to live through it all again by typing the story anew over here, too!

Click here to get the full scoop.

Have you ever read a so-called “translation” of a favourite book that just didn’t click in the other language?  Which book(s) and why???

Read More