Yet another body blow/heart breaker

In the 6 months or so that I've been selling my blog subscriptions for the Amazon kindle, blog subscrition - of those blogs of mine that were popular - had continued to go up. The daily report said so - even during those times when you'd have to wait 6 days or more before the "daily" report was updated, and this would be reflected in the monthly report that would tell me how much money I was going to earn.

This month, it was different.

This month, the numbers didn't match. According to the daily report, I should have had well over 400 subscriptions for my Rush Limbaugh blog... on the monthly report, I only had 200. ALl my other blogs had been cut in half as well.

So while I was confidently expecting that next month I'd top the 1000 subscription mark, total, and start getting $300 a month from Amazon, with things only getting better...my income has been cut in half again. (The first time of course when they arbitrarily changed all my blog fees from $1.99 to .99 without even telling me they were going to do it.)

I simply don't trust Amazon's numbers any more. It used to be, up until this month, that if someone purchased a subscription to your blog, it would show up in about an hour - on the Amazon subscription page. But I've got at least 2 new blogs that have, supposedly, a couple of subscribers, and they still don;t show any numbers.

Long story short, I'm heart broken and fed up.

Working as hard as I do for $300 a month was just barely worth it. Working as hard as I do for $100 a month...or however much Amazon will arbitrarily decide to give me in future...just isn't worth it.

So I'm going back to concentrating on books for the Kindle instead. To date, those at least record purchases the day they happen, and you can tell if the ungrateful creeps have returned the book the same day too. (Something I dont think should be allowed, by the way.)

But there you have it.

Quiz Books

Quiz books are a quick and easy way to publish a book on the Kindle - assuming you know your subject.

I've been working on a science fiction quizbook which is almost ready to go into production.

These books are simple. You ask a question on one page, and on the next page, provide the answer. Divide the quiz into ten topics, asking ten questions about each topic, and a final question so you can say, "101 questions within!"

Be professional about it. Provide a bibliography and any sources you use to come up with your questions. Phrase the questions in a humorous or some unique way, so that your readers will always recognize your quiz books.

Also, have an umbrella title for the quiz books, so that you can produce a series of them, and if someone buys one, they can search easily for the others.


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Subscribe to our other blogs on Kindle:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report

Will Amazon ever get its act together?

It used to be that you could kind of guauge the numbers on your blog's subscription page to see if you were getting any subscriptions. But it does not seem like that any longer.

A few days ago, the blog report didn't update for about 4 days. When it did update, one of my blogs all of a sudden had 10 more subscriptions than it had before, despite the fact that, on the subscription page, there was no movement of the numbers. I started several new blogs, and each of these doesn't show that I have any subscriptions at all. (It used to be, whenever the first person subscribed to your blog, you'd get a number around 12,000 as your ranking. This would gradually go up as no one else subscribed to your blog. But if people did, then the number would continue to go down.) So I've got 4 blogs, that according to my "daily" blog report, have a handful of subscriptons, but which show no numbers at all. So for whatever reasons, those subscription pages can no longer be used for anything.

Meantime, I got my payment for November blogs a couple of days ago...exactly half of what it should have been and I dn't mind saying I swore a few times. Still I know other people are in the same point (although some blogs, as old as mine, continue to cost $1.99, which really frosts me...)

Meantime, I think a lot of people must have gotten Kindles as Christmas presents, because one of my books has started selling. Only 3 copies so far in the last 2 days, but that's a heckuva lot better than nothing!


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Subscribe to our other blogs on Kindle:
Seaborn: Oceanography Blog
Star Trek Report: Space Sciences
Volcano Seven: Treasure and Treasure Hunters
Rush Limbaugh Report