The Only Rule Amazon Truly Cares About

An important read for all indie authors considering KS.

David Gaughran

On Monday, I found out that some bug hit a German e-book site causing the reactivation of long-dead listings, including one of mine, putting myself and some other authors in breach of KDP Select’s exclusivity rule.

Amazon pounced into action and cancelled my Countdown deal which was scheduled for this week, screwing up a carefully planned promotion. And despite pledging to resolve the matter and restore the promo, Amazon has not done so.

I’m going to go through what happened in detail so you can be sure that I acted correctly at all points – because there is a lot of shadiness going on at the moment – but feel free to skim some of the details if you wish.

Let’s Get Digital and Let’s Get Visible had never been in Select, so I decided to throw them in for one term as an experiment at the start of July…

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Scammers Break The Kindle Store

A must-read post for anyone in the publishing industry who deals with Amazon. We must put pressure on Amazon to put a stop to this.

David Gaughran

On Friday, a book jumped to the #1 spot on Amazon, out of nowhere; it quickly became obvious that the author had used a clickfarm to gatecrash the charts.

The Kindle Store is officially broken.

This is not the first time this has happened and Amazon’s continued inaction is increasingly baffling. Last Sunday, a clickfarmed title also hit #1 in the Kindle Store. And Amazon took no action.

Over the last six weeks, one particularly brazen author has put four separate titles in the Top 10, and Amazon did nothing whatsoever. There are many such examples.

I wrote at the start of June about how scammers were taking over Amazon’s free charts. That post led to a phone conversation with KDP’s Executive Customer Relations.

Repeated assurances were given that the entire leadership team at Amazon was taking the scammer problem very seriously indeed. But it was also stressed that the…

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The Long Hot Summer of 1947

Frank Parker's author site

My second Novel, Summer Day, was originally published in the spring of 2012. Earlier this year I re-issued it with a few changes and a revised cover, thanks to Sharon Brownlie (cover) and Katherine Hamilton Pfiel (editorial suggestions).

As it is set in July 1947 I’ve decided to make the Kindle version free for the first 5 days of July 2017. Here’s a link to a blog post about the book’s genesis: http://cassandra2012.blogspot.ie/2012/04/england-after-war.html

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The space in the break of my heart…

Maxpower's Blog

My mother died 23 years ago. She was sixty. To be honest it was a devastating loss. We lost our father two years earlier through a long battle with cancer but Mam? Well she simply disappeared one night, or at least that’s how it felt. She had come through a brief enough medical battle which in itself was life threatening. She was on the way back out of that battle all seemed well. Mam went out with her sisters for the first time since her battle began as if to celebrate her return. She dropped dead holding on to her sister’s hand, singing.

Today is her birthday. She would be eighty three. I saw her two days before she died and I never saw her again. I was called to the hospital at two in the morning, but the body that lay on that hospital bed wasn’t Mam. She was gone…

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Here is my interview with Val Tobin

Thank you for interviewing me, Fiona. 🙂

authorsinterviews

Hello and welcome to my blog, Author Interviews. My name is Fiona Mcvie.

 

Let’s get you introduced to everyone, shall we? Tell us your name. What is your age?

Val Tobin, age fifty-five.

Fiona: Where are you from?

Newmarket, Ontario, Canada

Fiona: A little about your self (ie,  your education, family life, etc.).

I have an eclectic education. I started with literature, psychology, and philosophy at the University of Waterloo and then went to DeVry Toronto for a diploma in Computer Information Systems.

After working in the computer industry as a software/web developer for ten years, during which time I also wrote for an on-line tech magazine, I became a Reiki Master/Teacher.

From there, I received my Angel Therapy Practitioner® certifications from Doreen Virtue in Kona, Hawaii. I also studied for and received a B. Sc. In Parapsychic Science from the Institute of Holistic Theology. Then I completed a…

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Introduce Yourself: Introducing Guest Author Frank Parker

An interesting interview with Frank Parker.

Pearls Before Swine

Welcome to Introduce Yourself, a new and exciting blog segment of The PBS Blog dedicated to introducing to you new and established authors and their books.

Today I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Frank Parker. Welcome to The PBS Blog! Let’s get started.

What is your name and where are you from?

My name is Frank Parker. I was born and grew up in Herefordshire, a small rural county next to the border between England and Wales. I lived for the first decade of my life in a small stone cottage beside a stream with a couple of waterfalls. We were surrounded by traditional hay meadows and grew all our own vegetables in a medium sized garden. My parents were from London originally. They were married shortly after the commencement of World War II. Dad was an airman. Two years after I was born he was killed in…

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Ghosts, God and wait for it…

Interesting post from Max Power.

Maxpower's Blog

The thing that breathes on your neck in the dark, the voice that whispers in the dark and the hand that softly brushes the foot you’ve foolishly left outside the duvet at night, all present intriguing psychological dilemmas for us not dissimilar to some people’s relationship with God.

As a dedicated sceptic, despite my recent encounters with my own night-time visitor, I have always been fascinated by the dark, frightening, creeping thing in the night, the fear that stalks just out of sight, the haunting and the shiver down your spine. I am no psychologist but like most people, I have an understanding that these things are really our own inner fears and insecurities coming to the surface as we fade in and out of sleep…or are they?

Look, I’m a writer and one who particularly enjoys delving into the darker matter of the soul, so perhaps I spend more time considering such…

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