Category Archives: Books
Well, that was fast
Like others, I posted a goodbye video on TikTok Saturday. About an hour later I got the message saying that the service was no longer available for American users, but that they were in talks with TFG about re-establishing contact and thanking him profusely for the opportunity.
Yesterday morning the app was live again. It’s still not back in the Apps or Google Play stores, but current users still have access to the app and their videos. But things had already changed. I saw an ad in FB suggesting that I link my TikTok account to FB, and other reported seeing Meta ads in TikTok. As of this morning people are getting community violation notices for speaking out against TFG and content is being taken down.
Just a reminder—billionaires don’t care what happens to you. And foreign billionaires really don’t care what happens to people here in the US. TikTok’s return was never in doubt, but now it’s been co-opted into the right wing media platform.
Which is not great, but billionaires are gonna billionaire. And I can still vote with my feet, so I will. You can find me on Bluesky and Youtube if you are of a mind, and I still have my newsletter and this blog.
Headphones
So, I’m a little slow at times.
Some relatives stayed with us last week for New Year’s, and one of them brought a pair of Bluetooth headphones with her. She’d pair them with her phone when she wanted to walk or work out and would cheerfully march along listening to her music.
Now, I love my music and podcasts, but for some reason it never occurred to me to get a pair of Bluetooth headphones. I have a pair of Bluetooth earpods but they’re not very comfortable and one keeps cutting out so I don’t use them very often. When I’m sitting here at my desk working I usually rely on a pair of corded headphones, and if I want to listen to something while I’m walking I just crank the volume on my phone.
But watching S toodle along with her pretty cream headphones got me thinking—it might be nice to have a set of cordless headphones that I can put on and just, you know, leave on. Wear them when I’m working, wear them when I’m walking around the house, wear them when I’m cooking or cleaning. The plus side is that I’d never have to worry about interrupting Ramón with my music or a podcast while he was on a call.
So I hunted around and found an inexpensive pair of Helix headphones at HEB. Took them home, charged them up, then paired them to my phone and went for a walk. My first impression—they were ever so slightly tight and made my ears hurt after an hour. But plastic can be stretched, and after leaving them wrapped around one of my mannequin heads for a day I tried them on again. This time they fit well enough, so I paired them to my desktop, turned on some Zoe Keating, and got to work.
People, I haven’t taken them off all day. I’ve gone downstairs multiple times to get a drink or lunch, I’ve gone on three walks around the house, I even went out to get the mail (they disconnected just as I reached the mailbox, then reconnected once I was within the house’s Wi-Fi range again), and I’ve had constant soothing cello music in the background all the time. I know the 10 hour runtime might seem a bit limiting, but we have USB-C chargers all over the house and I can charge the headphones at my desk while I’m cooking dinner or watching TV. Now I understand why so many people are wearing these things.
First full workday of 2025
After some thought I’ve decided to go back and do a re-read of what I’ve done of Typhoon Warning so far. I know, I know, but I’ve been stopping and starting so much that I’ve lost the feel for both the characters and the story, and that ain’t good. I need to get everything more firmly settled into my mind before I completely hose the plot, and doing a re-read of what I have will help with that.
And yes, I may do a bit of editing here and there, but just to smooth out the occasional infelicitous phrase or misspelling. I’m not going to bother with a full edit until the whole damn thing is done. That being said, I am very pleased with the way the book opens and Chiron’s meeting with the fates in Chapter One. I always enjoyed writing those characters, mainly for the snark they bring to the game, and putting them all in one room has been a huge amount of fun.
Hopefully I can get the read-through done by Wednesday or so, and then I can start back in on actual writing. Of course, I have other books calling at my writing brain, especially when I’m cleaning or cooking, but I need to get this one done first. Then I can play.
In the meantime I’m also keeping a weather eye on the, well, weather (it’s cold here in the clavicle of Texas at the moment, but Anita Gigawatt looks like she’s going to hold so we just have to keep the house warm for the kitties and make sure no pipes freeze) and the events going on in Washington. Ain’t gonna make any predictions at the moment, but this is going to be an interesting day, no doubt about it.
Oh, right, I have a blog
I am going to be more regular about posting here—dunno if anyone still reads this, but I have no problem yelling into the void.
So, 2024 was not a horrible year for me. Yes, there were bad points—I lost my cat Jessica in July to thyroid lymphoma, and then there was the whole michigas with the election that still makes me want to throw things at the screen. But my writing income continued to increase despite the fact that I only released one book, and I got thisclose to finishing Typhoon Warning. I know, I know, but that book has been fighting me like you would not believe, to the point where I had to start working on other WIPs just to keep my writing muscles loose.
I suspect that part of the block is due to Warning wrapping up the Olympic Cove series. It has a lot of threads that I have to tie together, and it’s kinda freaking me out. Yes, writers can get freaked out by their own work. I just don’t want to screw up the dismount, you know? Storm Season was my first novel and Olympic Cove was my first series, and I want to finish it in a way that pays tribute to both the characters and the readers.
So here we are in 2025, my sales for the month so far have been excellent, I’m running a 99¢ sale on To My Muse for the rest of January, I retitled/recovered Behind the Iron Cross and it’s now on sale as A Seduction in Berlin, and once Warning is done I’m finishing off the rest of the Paladins of Crystal series, then I’ll be focusing on the Hidden Empire and Two Thrones series.
Also, I’m looking for a day job to cover the bills in the meantime. So yeah, 2025 is gonna be a busy, busy year. But hopefully it won’t be as bad as I’ve been fearing. We’ll have to wait and see.
Still Early Days, But…
I woke up this morning to five book sales in Australia. This was a complete read-through of the Olympic Cove series and a purchase of Breaker Zone, which is #2 in Olympic Cove so I can hope that the reader will like it enough to buy the rest of the books in the series.
As I said in the title of this blog post, it’s still early days into this change and I don’t want to be cheering just quite yet. But in 2023 I made US$43.47 in royalties from Australia and US$58.27 from Canada. The bulk of both those amounts came from KU reads, not actual book sales. As of today I’ve made US$41.96 from Australia and $US30.84 from Canada, and the bulk of that money did come from ebook sales. Seeing as it’s only July 2, I find this significant.
Oh, and I’m $54 away from passing last year’s Amazon income. Once again, it’s only the second day of July. Seeing as I just released a book, will be releasing another one in August as well as the series omnibus, and will (please God) release two more books in the Paladins of Crystal series this year, I don’t think it’s impossible to think that I may well double last year’s income.
Looking Back at June
I’d mentioned in an earlier post how I changed my book costs in Amazon’s Canada and Australia markets to be numerically identical to my US prices (e.g. if a book costs US$4.99 here, it costs CAN$4.99 in Canada and AU$4.99 in Australia).
I checked my end-of-month numbers and whaddya know—I had 355 downloads of Storm Season from Canada thanks to the Stuff Your Kindle/eReader Day, AND I’ve had 5 purchases for Olympic Cove books, including one complete read-through of the series except for High Tide (but that read-through happened yesterday so I’m hoping they’ll come back for High Tide).
As for Australia, I had 252 Amazon downloads of Storm Season from Australia due to SYKeD—no sales yet, but an Aussie author on TikTok said that she’s going to spread the word about my lowered prices so we’ll see. But it’s not fair for Amazon to have all the bennies so I’ve also gone into Google Play and Draft2Digital and changed my book prices for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand there as well.
TL;dr—This has been my best-selling month this year to date thanks to SYKeD, changing book prices, and the release of High Tide, and I’m hoping to bump that up even more next month with the release of Hurricane Warning and the omnibus edition of Olympic Cove.
The Promo Whirl Begins
Firstly: High Tide is live on all major ebook retailers. The print version will come out on Friday.
Secondly, this is how my release day is going so far:
- Got up at 3:11 AM, checked that High Tide had gone live on Amazon, grabbed the ASIN link and added it to the book file’s Olympic Cove Series and Other Work pages, and republished it.
- Checked that Draft2Digital had processed the book file and generated an ISBN, grabbed it and added it to the book file, and republished it.
- Checked that Google Play had processed the book file, grabbed the store link and added it to the book file’s Olympic Cove Series and Other Work pages, and republished it.
- Went back to bed for a few hours.
- Woke up and checked that High Tide had republished at all retailers. It had, yay!
- Updated the book page’s buy links here.
- Submitted High Tide to BookBub and added all the required links.
- Finished making ad graphics (I needed pull quotes).
What I will be doing for the rest of the day:
- Creating a promo packet that can be distributed to author buddies for inclusion on their blogs.
- Creating an AMS ad.
- Promoting High Tide on all appropriate FB book groups.
- Creating a TikTok promo video for High Tide and uploading that.
- Promoting High Tide on other social media.
- Sending out a newsletter with buy links.
- Setting up the book on BookFunnel so that I can send book links to my Patreon members
Once that is all done, I may relax with a well-deserved rum and coke. Or I may work on Hurricane Warning, who knows?
And High Tide is off
I’ve just uploaded High Tide (Olympic Cove 5) to Amazon, Draft2Digital, and Google Play (hi, Susan!) and it is currently churning through their servers. As soon as I have buy links, I’ll update the book page and let y’all know here. The print book will probably be available at the end of the week.
And yes, I’m currently working on Hurricane Warning (Olympic Cove 6) and have a projected release date of 8/6/24 for that book. 22,000 words done, another 70,000 to go, whee! For now, however, I’m gonna go grab a protein snack and hit the hay. Night!
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.
Nicola Cameron Writes 