And the numbers are in
I swear, changing my Amazon book prices in Canada and Australia was probably the smartest thing I’ve ever done.
When you publish a book in Amazon, you choose a price for the book. You then have two options—Amazon will set the price in all of its other markets based on the US price. This has been a no-brainer so it’s what I’ve been doing. And my Canadian and Australian/NZ sales have been non-existent, which struck me as strange because those are two big markets for English language books.
Until I read an article that said people who let Amazon set the price for their books in Canada and Australia/NZ are pricing their books out of the market. Most Canadians are willing to pay CAN$4.99 for an ebook, but Amazon had been pricing my ebooks around CAN$7.99 because of the conversion rate, and Australia was getting hit even worse.
So I went in and manually lowered the .ca and .au prices for all of my books to make them numerically identical to my US prices (e.g. if an ebook cost 4.99 in the US, it now costs $4.99 in Canada and Australia which appears to be average for the market).
The proof in the pudding came last week when I participated in Zoe York’s Stuff Your Kindle/eReader Day with Storm Season (Olympic Cove 1). The idea with this is to set one of your books free for a day (or a weekend) and let romance readers pick it up with the hopes that they’ll like it so much they’ll buy your other books. Granted, the bulk of readers are only picking up free books, but a small percentage of them will read through a series, and that can add up to decent income and new readers who will want your other books.
Anyhoo, I just checked my numbers for the weekend and not only did I give away a BUTTLOAD of copies, I’ve also been getting significant read-through of the Olympic Cove series. And whoop, there it is—someone in Canada is reading the rest of the series. This, after not making a single Canadian sale all year.
I need to check on average book sales in other foreign markets and see if I need to make adjustments there as well. My primary sales come from the US and UK, with a handful of French and German sales here and there (and someone in the Netherlands who’s reading through the Olympic Cove series—thank you, whoever you are). But there are a bunch of other Amazon markets—if my books are overpriced there as well, you bet I’m gonna adjust prices to make them more competitive.
Some good news for my Canadian and Australian readers
As you may know, Bob, Amazon bases foreign ebook prices on what the ebook costs in the country where it’s originally published. Since I’m an American, my ebooks are initially priced in US dollars, and then Amazon extrapolates that price into other currencies for international ‘Zon markets.
Except that this can really hurt people in markets where the local currency is lower than the US dollar. I was recently made aware that Australian and Canadian readers are getting absolutely *reamed* on book costs because of this, which is not right.
As I am not a greedy a-hole and want to keep my books at a reasonable price so that more people can read them, I have gone in and reduced the prices of my ebooks on amazon.au and amazon.ca to numerically match my American prices—i.e. most of my full-length novels will now be CAN$4.99 and AUS$4.99, with novellas being cheaper. My one historical romance Behind the Iron Cross is the outlier at $5.99 in both countries, but it’s a huge book so it costs a buck more. I’ll be analyzing costs in other countries and applying additional corrections as needed, and once I learn the pricing controls on Draft2Digital I’ll be doing the same over there.
What can I say? I’m all about keeping readers happy.
High Tide is Done (Hi, Susan!)
As of 9:00 PM last night or thereabouts, I finished the last sentence in High Tide. It tops out at 94,742 words, and I’m going to let it simmer for a week while I finish the outline for Hurricane Warning and get started on *checks* Chapter Three. The plan is to set up a pre-order this weekend for June 25th, which will give me more than enough time to get it whipped into shape and reader-ready (my editor and my trusty betas are standing by). Then all I have to do is finish, edit, and publish Hurricane Warning, and hopefully all the readers who refuse to read a series until its done will come running. One can hope.
I’ve also made a wee change in the schedule I posted last Friday. I am going to keep posting A Court of Green Clover on Vella as well as the other novellas in the Division Street Fae series, but I’m not going to publish them until they’re ALL done and I can rapid release. Considering that I already have Hurricane Warning, To Love a Wild Swan, and Mage of Fire on my To Be Written desk already, I think this is more than acceptable.
I’m also going to take advantage of my lighter week to whip this house into shape and catch up on a lot of chores, both business and personal, that I’ve slacked off on for the past two weeks. First and foremost on the list is moving the hella powerful portable AC from the guest room to the library so that it can cool off the lower front half of the house, then installing the old window unit we’d bought for the kitchen in the guest room in case anyone comes to visit. The joy of not having a working downstairs HVAC system while heading into a Texas summer, am I right? Also another reason I really need to sell more books. *sigh*
The End is Nigh
Bet you thought I forgot about you. Not a chance.
I have been busting my ass for the last week writing a chapter a day on High Tide (and putting them up on Vella—I’m currently up to 58 episodes so that tells you something). As of last night I finished Chapter 22, which means I have three more chapters and High Tide is finished (hi Susan!).
Now, it still needs to be edited, and according to the Vella rules I can’t publish the story until thirty days have passed after I post the last chapter and mark the story complete. Which means the earliest I can publish High Tide is on June 19th.
Am I gonna do that? Nah, because I want to give myself a little wiggle room in editing, getting stuff to the editor and betas, getting stuff back from the editor and betas, doing the weasel word pass, the spelling/grammar/punctuation pass, and the final polish. So you can expect to see High Tide available on all platforms on June 25th. I’ll even set up an Amazon pre-order on Monday so that I’m locked in, how’s that?
So what comes after High Tide? Well, my mind is still firmly in Olympic Cove so I’m going to go straight onto Hurricane Warning. This is the last book in the series and will be Chiron’s story, wherein you learn his background with Asclepius, where exactly Asclepius has been all this time, and the role they play along with their lover Dr. Nessa Bryant in the final battle against the Mad Nereid. And since people seem to like following progress reports, I’ll post them here daily.
I’ll also be working on finishing A Court of Green Clover (Division Street Fae 1) at the same time, but that’s 1) a novella and 2) already half finished so I can do that in the evenings after working on Warning. What I would like to do but will not promise because every time I do that I get bit in the ass is the following schedule:
Finish High Tide and publish it.
Finish Hurricane Warning and publish it.
Turn Olympic Cove into an ebook box set and publish it.
Finish A Court of Green Clover and publish it.
After that, I would like to work on Crystal Reflection (Paladins of Crystal 3), To Love a Wild Swan (Hidden Empire 3), and Mage of Fire (Two Thrones 5). I strongly doubt I can finish all of these in 2024 but I’m going to give it the old college try. After that, I want to finish off the last two books in the Paladins of Crystal series, then trade off between Hidden Empire, Two Thrones, and Division Street Fae. Two Thrones has a projected eight books and Division Street Fae has five books. Hidden Empire does not have an end date and can continue on as long as I come up with stories for it.
And then there’s Pacifica Rising, my poor lonely SF romance series that does not follow the android/alien/lab creature trope. Is there an SF equivalent of romantasy? I know some people hate the term but it’s a damned handy marketing term. Speculative romance? Romascifi? I need to come up with a better term. But I’d really like to finish the other five books in that series as well (I see you cheering there, Jackie).
So now you’re all caught up to date, and I need to get to work. See you tomorrow, kiddos.
Good To Know
Apparently I either bored, grossed out, or offended four newsletter subscribers with my most recent newsletter because they unsubscribed. Which, as I said in my previous post, is fine—I want people who are reading the newsletter because they’re actually readers of mine who want to know what I’m doing, not folks who signed up just to get a free book. I really hate using terms like “organic” to describe the former people but you know what I mean.
That being said, I can also understand why some people might not want to hear about the cancer and how I was feeling at the time (namely, terrified and convinced I was going to die in ten months due to a reading on the PET scan that was, in fact, not osseous metastatic disease as suggested by the doc who wrote the report). I won’t really be discussing it again in future newsletters apart from brief reports on my six month checkups, just in case you’re on the fence about subscribing.
Still, I need to talk about more than just the latest release and whatever backlist book I’m promoting in a given newsletter. Courtney Milan does a beautiful job with that, talking about all the various teas she tries and throwing in little personal elements before she promotes her book. I tried talking about jewelry but that petered out quickly, Maybe I should talk about crafting in general? Crafting is part of my writing process, after all, and I usually have at least one project on the go at any time and I can show progress pics, or talk about why I picked that project, or mention the company that charged me for patterns I didn’t buy and never wanted, and that they stole from other creators. Ahem.
I’ll think about it this week. In the meantime, since I don’t have access to ABC or any of the streaming services hosting the Oscars I’m gonna catch up on the winners over at TikTok. While we still have it, anyway.
New Newsletter Subscribers
A newsletter is an important promotion tool for an author, especially indie authors, because it’s your direct pipeline to your readers that no middleman can touch. With a newsletter you don’t have to worry about the Book of Face throttling your posts, or some bozo billionaire tanking another social media platform (or the government trying to shut down a SM platform, grr). As long as you have a list of genuine fans and readers you can email them directly about upcoming publications and sales, give them pertinent buy links to your Shopify store, show them adorable pictures of your cats, etc.
The trick is to build your newsletter list in such a way that it contains only the people who actually read your stuff. Yeah, a huge NL list is great, and there are all kinds of ways to boost your NL numbers through things like swaps and paid promos. But if 80% of your NL members come from those mechanisms, they probably signed up for a free book and aren’t really going to bother opening your newsletter when it hits their inbox. The word here is “organic.” You want people to sign up because they found you, think you’re interesting and your writing is fabulous, and they want to hear more.
Why am I rattling on about newsletters? Well, I’ve had three people sign up to my newsletter in the last month or so through the signup form here on my website. This freaking delights me because it means (at least, I hope it means) that these three subscribers are organic—they like my work and they want to hear about new releases. When I send out a newsletter next week with a pre-order link for A Court of Green Clover, I can pretty much guarantee that they’ll want to buy it or read it on KU (as an aside I’ll be releasing ACoGC on Amazon and KU first, then after the KU period expires I’ll be releasing it wide, so if you prefer to buy your books on Apple or Kobo you will be able to pick it up in three months).
Right now, my newsletter list is only a skosh over 500 members. I prune out the hard bounces and the unsubscribes without rancor because those are the people who wouldn’t have opened the NL anyway. The important thing is that even with pruning the member list is growing, slowly but surely. Or to quote Sall Field as Norma Rae, “You LIKE me, you really, really LIKE me!”
Happy Anniversary to Myself
According to Facebook today is my eleventh anniversary as a published novelist. Eleven years ago today Evernight bought Storm Season, setting me off on this crazy adventure.
So much has changed since 2013. I lost one cat, gained two more, became an indie author and started writing MF romance as well as MM romance, went through financial tribulations, and had cancer last year. I also wrote a total of seventeen novels (sixteen as Nicola and my alternate history mystery as Melanie Fletcher).
Which is actually pretty good for someone of my generation. Yeah, I know Millennials and Gen Z can churn out tons of books a year because they have the energy and drive to do it. But for someone who is in menopause and is already missing a couple of body parts, seventeen books (eighteen if you count Shifter Woods: Claw since it’s 42K words which puts it into novel class) is something of an achievement. Of course that number would have been nineteen or twenty, but My Adventure With Cancer ate a good third of last year along with four teeth, five lymph nodes, and a strip of my jawbone.
So I’m busy playing catch-up this year and trying to finish those three books as well as the ones scheduled for this year, all while looking for contract tech writing or instructional design work because this house desperately needs a lot of repairs and I’ not making enough money from the books to pay for all of it. Oh, and I’m waving off my drunken slattern of a Muse who keeps popping up with new books ideas while I still have at least six to finish first. And yes, I’m completely aware these are First World problems and there’s a genocide going on and I’m incredibly lucky and should just shut up and be happy about my anniversary. I know this, truly.
It’s just that to me, money = time. I don’t want to be filthy rich—I do not have the temperament for it. I just want to have enough money where if the washing machine starts leaking or the refrigerator stops dispensing filtered water I can call a repairman instead of looking up ways to fix it myself, because that takes me away from writing. I want to have enough money so that I can pay for expensive CT scans and my medical insurance deductible for the year without fretting about how I’m actually going to cover that bill, because that takes me away from writing (as an aside, if anyone needs cover art done my schedule is open and I’m ready to make something amazing for you). I want to have enough money to put solar cells on the roof with a battery so that if this summer is as hot as last summer I won’t constantly be worrying about the grid going down, because that takes me away from writing.
The ironic thing is, if I cranked out a bunch more books I’d make more money and a number of these problems would be eased. So I probably should shut up and get back to work.
Busy, Busy, Busy
I have three new episodes of A Court of Green Clover up at Vella at the moment and I’ve been working on the next episode of High Tide this morning, with hopes of publishing it this evening. Can’t guarantee anything, but since I started drinking a cup of Flow State coffee in the morning (I started on Saturday) it’s done wonders for my ability to concentrate and get work done. I don’t know if it’s the caffeine or the lion’s mane and chaga mushroom powder in the coffee, but it does seem to work for me.
At least for now. My metabolism has a remarkable ability to adapt to practically anything I put in it and make it stop working. Frex, I can only take ibuprofen for a certain amount of time before I have to go off it and use other, less effective painkillers because at some point my metabolism says, “Nah” and I might as well be eating M&Ms.
What I might try with the Flow State brew is one week on, one week off. That should hold off the acclimatization process and I still get at least two weeks out of a month where I’m insanely productive. Because I have sooooo much to do—I need to finish ACoGC in the next week or so in order to publish it in March, I need to finish High Tide because that is painfully overdue, then I need to finish Hurricane Warning which will wrap up the Olympic Cove series, then write To Love a Wild Swan for Hidden Empire and Mage of Fire for Two Thrones. And that’s just the writing part of the biz; it doesn’t include setting up my Shopify store so that I can direct sell ebooks and signed print books, learning how to do sprayed edges so that I can offer those in the store as well, and cranking out content for my Patreon, newsletter, and social media.
And yet I still feel like a slacker. I don’t know why my brain dislikes me, I really don’t.
Well, This Is Just Inexcusable
Look, I don’t know what happened to this month. It seems like I was either prepping the house to get it ready for the deep freeze we enjoyed here in the clavicle of Texas, going to doctors’ appointments (my oncologist says my CT scan and labs are “boring” and he doesn’t need to see me again until July), working on cover projects for clients, crocheting lap blankets for a friend who is collecting them for elderly folks in sheltered accommodation, trying to keep the place clean, and churning out wordage on High Tide and A Court of Green Clover (aka the secret St. Patrick’s Day project that I’ll be releasing on Vella in January and February in preparation for publication in March along with the other books in the Lusty Charms collection).
Of course, I could have let you know about all of that, particularly the WIPs. My apologies. I think I’m just a little overwhelmed at all the things I need to do in the next few months. When that happens I tend to hunker down and hide while I try to get everything done. It didn’t help that I hit a bit of a wall on High Tide this month, not sure why (I mean, I was about to write a battle scene and you know how much I love those). But that seems to be broken now and I’ll be posting new episodes this week on Vella.
Oh, I also got everything I need to do sprayed edges on books, which is the new big thing on Booktok. I’m practicing on some old books I have on hand, and when I have the technique down pat I’ll order new print books and add sprayed edges to them. I’m still not sure if I’m going to sell them through Etsy or Shopify—Etsy’s fees are pricey but I already have the store set up, plus they track state taxes so I don’t have to worry about that—but they’ll be signed and come with some cute tchotchkes. So you have that to look forward to.
Back to Work
Got 1,068 words done on High Tide today in between spackling and painting my office window in preparation for the installation of cordless blinds, and that felt pretty damned good. Clichéd as it sounds, I really think I needed the break to let the creative well refill.
It also helps that I came to an important realization about one of the characters—I was writing him as kind of a himbo, and himbos bore me. So I changed his personality a bit, gave him a much more rounded background and intelligence, and suddenly my interest in the story surged. Of course I’ll have to go back and make sure I edit these changes into the earlier chapters (as well as an additional character), but hey, I already know that this book is going to need a buttload of editing so hey, what’s one more item for the punch list?
After I was done with that and the wondow, I got some work done on my January chapter for my Patreon (this is the contemporary paranormal romcom with a Regency MMC that I came up with last year). It’s so far outside of both Nicola M and Natasha’s wheelhouses that I can’t really publish it under either name (I learned my lesson with To My Muse and Grading the Curve about sticking to reader expectations), so it’s going to be exclusive for my Patreon members.
And finally, I need to schedule some time to go in and edit keywords for all of my books to add the term “romantasy,” blessings be on whatever group of readers made that a viable trend. The fun, it never stops around here.
Nicola Cameron Writes 