I’ve made a decision—I’m going to get at least five chapters of Crystal Blade tuned up and loaded to Vella at some point this weekend.

Why? Because it’s halfway finished and is surprisingly clean, my sales have absolutely tanked (more on that later), and I need to make money somehow. I’ll make sure the chapters are edited and all shiny before I upload, don’t worry about that. And when the book is all done I can take down the chapters and publish it. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

And yes, I’m gonna keep doing the other two Vella series I have planned. But I need income now and this is the best way to achieve that.

So, my sales tanking. That appears to be a three-fold issue. Issue #1: KU payouts are at a historical low. This may be due to a KU strike fomented on TikTok back in February that was meant to punish Amazon for letting people buy books, read them, and return them. Unfortunately, it just hurt indie authors who have seen our page reads dwindle over the past eight weeks/

Issue #2: I don’t have details about this so I can’t say anything for certain but it’s been bruited about in certain quarters that some romance heavy hitters have been allowed into KU. Without being required to be exclusive to the ‘Zon, I may add, but hey, rules are for little people. That kind of a book influx from authors with a big following essentially swamps KU and makes it even more difficult for people to find indie titles, thus sales droop even further.

Issue #3: This one has been confirmed by the ‘Zon itself—there’s some kind of problem on their side that is preventing AMS ads with custom text to be served to potential customers. They’re working on it but we don’t have an ETA for a fix. In the meantime my AMS dashboard is flat as a rock since 4/12 and that lack of advertising has an effect on my sales, hence my decision to start uploading Crystal Blade to Vella. As soon as I have links for that, I’ll let you know.