It’s arrived! If you’ve already told me that you’d like a print copy of my latest book The Tablet, I’ll be in touch soon to arrange how you’d like to get it.
In order to vote you do need to become a member of SFFANZ which costs NZD10. You’ll then be able to access the voting form. Instructions on how to vote are here. There is also a bunch of information about the SJVs on the website.
To date, all four of my books have been a finalist for every single award that I’ve entered them in, but I’ve never actually won. This could be my last chance to win an award!
Voting will take place electronically. We will create PDF voting forms that you can download, fill in, and send back to us. We will update this page with details when the form is available.
Note that we are only doing online voting, taking place before Continuity 2024 [conference]. The deadline for voting will close on Saturday, June 22nd, 2024 at midnight.
These are my book sales on Amazon. I only have 4 books, but I have them for sale in both paperback (Print-on-demand or POD) and e-book formats. That’s what all the different colours are. Now, these sales numbers are not fantastic, but still, it’s a few each month and I don’t do much marketing. Some books earn 50c royalties, others earn $3. So that’s money for nothing, right?
Wrong.
First of all, because I’m based in NZ and don’t have a bank a/c in the USA, I don’t receive royalties as I earn them, but have to accumulate USD100 in royalties before Amazon will pay them out.
The first time I accumulated $100 (which took a year!) I eagerly awaited my payment. Nothing. After a month, I contacted them, and was advised to read the fine print. It’s not $100 worth of total royalties, but $100 within one marketplace. What? Well, Amazon.com is the marketplace for the US. Amazon.com.au is the marketplace for Australia. I have my book available in 3 marketplaces (US, Aus & UK) and had accumulated $25 in one, $30 in another, $70 in the third.
So I had to wait another few months before I accumulated $100 in a single marketplace. By now I had read the fine print, and realised that Amazon will pay out up to 2 months (60 days) after the $100 had been accumulated. 2 months! But, I finally got that first payout. Which, once converted into NZD was $140 (back in 2020). My second payout (NZD 170) came in September 2022, my third in March 2023 and I just got my fourth in Feb 2024.
But now–over 5 years since I first started–I still have not received any royalties for the sales I’ve made in Aus or UK. Amazon holds my precious royalties because I’ve not met the threshold. Nearly US$100 of unpaid royalties.
When I first queried my royalty payouts, I was able to email and got a response from a human. It was nice. Most recently, I’d exported my sales reports from the Amazon dashboard, and knew that I’d accumulated another USD100 in the US marketplace (in Nov 2023), and waited 2 months before following up. In January, there was no longer the option to email an enquiry, instead you needed to use the chat function.
I had a very frustrating conversations with the ‘person’ responding to my enquiry.
There had been a disclaimer that the ‘chat function was new, and please bear with us as we get used to this new technology’ (or something to that effect). Okay. I stated my case: that I’d accumulated the USD100 worth of royalties in a single market in Nov, and now at the end of January, I had still not received my royalty payout. Could I please be told when I could expect to receive my royalties? I was given the response stating that my royalties would be paid out when I’d accumulated USD100 royalties in a single market! Straight from the Amazon Marketplace help page. I was starting to get frustrated. After 2 more to-ing and fro-ing I typed “Thanks, obtuse chatbot, I know all of that stuff, I just want to know when I’ll get paid out”.
The response? “I’m not a chatbot.”
Yeah, right. I didn’t believe that for a second. I ran off to tell my husband about this exchange. By the time I got back to my computer a message awaited me: “You haven’t engaged in this chat for 5 minutes. The chat is terminated.” Like a human would write that.
I left it there. A month later, I received a notification that my royalty payment would be paid out in 2-5 days. I received it on 29th Feb. According to my calculations, 29th Feb is more than 60 days after 30th November. Amazon is definitely swindling us authors!
So, what can we do about it? Well, there are a couple of options:
Apparently, you can set up an account with Wise which counts as being in the States, in which case your royalties will get paid out as you earn them. I haven’t set this up yet, so can’t give you any further advice on that count.
You can forget Amazon, and use another online distributor. I am investigating Draft2Digital, which I understand pays out royalties as you earn them. With D2D you can still sell your books on Amazon, it’s just not direct.
You can figure out how to advertise properly on Amazon. I’ve made attempts over the years, but I work full time, and it’s really easy to lose money, and seems to be quite tricky to make it. I just don’t have the time & energy to figure it out properly.
It took a while, but in December 2023 I finally got all my covers updated to the same style and all four books are actually the same size now!
I used 100 Covers and would highly recommend them. Unlike some other designers, they will keep on tweaking the cover until you’re completely satisfied. You can order a cover for just an e-book, or full wrappers for paperback or hardcover books. This one took a couple of months from start to finish, but I think the longest was 3 months.
Here’s what the process goes like:
You complete the online form & select the package you want (e-book only through to full suite of merchandise)
This includes providing links to covers of 3 books that reflect the style you want (it pays to check out the top 10 covers of books that you want to compete with so you can see what’s popular)
You describe things that are important to your book cover – the setting, a description of your character, is it magical etc
You can provide extra images of example of things that you think evoke the look & feel of your cover.
Here’s an example some images I sent through for The Tablet.
The other thing that you may not be aware of is that different platforms that print-on-demand (POD) have different requirements: crop lines or bleed widths or the barcode being embedded or not, etc. So 100 Covers provided me with 3 slightly different POD covers for Amazon, Draft2Digital and IngramSpark. And they’d keep tweaking it until it worked.
Here’s three different POD covers for Golden City:
In early December 2023, two writing colleagues and I shared a book stall at our church’s annual Christmas fair. Rachel Weston writes children’s picture books, Karen Cossey writes Middle Grade adventure and fantasy books, and I write YA fantasy fiction.
It was a fun few hours, where we all sold enough books to make the effort worthwhile. However, there were a couple of things I learned in the build-up to this event that I wanted to share:
Charge stripe (and no, I’m not getting any commission for promoting this product!). If you’re an indie author (like me) or have your own business, then you’ll know that it can be quite challenging collecting payments from your customers. It’s quite pricey hiring an eftpos machine, and a lot of people don’t carry cash these days. So I was really excited to discover this app that allows you to accept credit card payments. You set up all your merchandise as a list along with prices & deals, then link it to your bank account. This app can recognise someone’s credit card number (using your phone camera) then they enter the CVC. They can also enter their email address & it will send them a receipt. So cool! There was a small processing fee, but it worked like a charm.
QR codes. Now, I know these are nothing new, but I was quite chuffed with how I used them. One thing I did was create little business cards with a QR code to my website on the back – and of course, my website has purchase links.
I’ve also added QR codes at the back of all my books to where to leave a review, or purchase another book. Because people reading the paperback version can’t click on a hyperlink, can they? And it’s annoying having to type in web addresses. A QR code is the logical choice.
