Holly's Walks

[Hollysdad]

The new Wye Valley book has now been uploaded for review. All being well it should pass review and be on sale by the end of the week. With this in mind I‘ve taken the old version down. It will still appear on Amazon but will have the status ‘unavailable’. Apparently if I delete the book it will prevent anyone from selling second-hand copies on Amazon so I’ll leave it up for now.

 

[snowbunny]

No royalties means no more Bonios for Holly!

Now, why do I not believe that?

 

[Hollysdad]

Now, why do I not believe that?

I guess you’ve recognised how well Holly has trained me.

 

[Hollysdad]

Everything sailed through the review stage. The only minor glitch was that I needed to increase the spine thickness because of the extra pages.

The book should now appear on Amazon Holly's Walks: Walks for dogs (and people) in the Wye Valley: Amazon.co.uk: Charlesworth, Philip: 9798550952283: Books

I've kept the price at £8.99 since 2016. Is anyone looking for ideas for Christmas presents ......

 

[Lisa]

Fantastic, Phil! Congratulations!!

 

[Hollysdad]

Amazon's pricing and royalty scheme for ebooks is not straightforward. They have two royalty rates, 35% and 70%.

At the higher royalty rate they deduct a download fee every Mbit of the book. They then take VAT off what remains, and the pennies left over are royalties. About 97% of my book file is pictures and maps, so the file is huge. Going for the higher royalty rate would make the Kindle book nearly twice the price of the paper one!

At the lower rate they don't charge a download fee but still take off the VAT. It means I can get the price down to about half the paper book and still afford a few Bonios for Holly.

It's clearly a scheme that favours books with no images. I'll go for the lower royalty rate

 

[Granca]

There was a 2016 edition of ’Escape to the Country’ on at lunchtime, featuring the Wye valley. I found myself looking out for Holly!

 

[Hollysdad]

There was a 2016 edition of ’Escape to the Country’ on at lunchtime, featuring the Wye valley. I found myself looking out for Holly!

She'll be there somewhere. Look in the river or any muddy areas!

 

[Hollysdad]

The Kindle process is driving me nuts.

I've finally got to the point where Wye Valley and Forest of Dean books are ready to be released onto Kindle. It's taken a lot of effort, more than I'd expected. The last stage of the process is to preview the books using the Kindle Previewer tool. If they pass that test they can be released.

Both books are failing the test and coming up with the message 'Problem in Previewer'. It doesn't tell me what the problem is, just that there's a problem. I've tried everything I can think of over the last few days but keep getting the same message.

This morning I went onto the Kindle Community page and apparently this is a known problem with the previewer. It rejects perfectly good books for no apparent reason, so the problem may be their software and not my books. Amazon are trying to fix it as it affects a lot of authors.

Meanwhile I've got two books ready to go and no idea whether they're correctly formatted.

 

[Selina27]

Oh dear, what a bother for you.