Thriller author Mark Dawson bought 400 copies of his own print book to boost the title into the Sunday Times bestsellers Top 10 in the UK but Nielsen BookScan, which supplies the figures for the list, has now rejected the bulk buy and is recalculating the list.
Amazon Advertising has added Kindle Edition Normalised Pages (KENP) Read to the performance dashboard so authors can get a better measure of the return on their ads.
Over 1,000 indie authors earned more than $100,000 through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing during the year to the end of May 2020 and ‘thousands more independent authors earned more than $50,000’.
The Kobo Plus ebook subscription service is opening up in Canada after launching in Europe in 2017 in Belgium and then adding the Netherlands.
The Kindle Unlimited KENP rate for June 2020 rose to $0.0045 from $0.0042 in May while the KDP Select Global Fund for June 2020 edged up by $100,000 to $32.3 million from $32.2 million in May 2020.
Nearly half of UK adults say they read more books during lockdown and almost doubled their total time spent reading per week from 3.5 hours to 6 hours.
Print-on-demand specialist Lightning Source is adding print capacity with investments in the US, UK and Australia.
The Wattys 2020 is opening up for entries from July 13, 2020 with the aim of helping writers to complete their novels and Wattpad has handed out some advice on how to impress the judges.
The Fussy Librarian ebook promotion website has started to publish some valuable data detailing numbers of clicks and cost-per-click on recent free ebook promotions.
The Kindle Unlimited KDP Select Fund for May 2020 leapt to another record high of $32.2 million, up from $30.3 million in April 2020.
UK indie ebook publisher Joffe Books is linking up with library specialist Severn House in a new partnership to republish titles from Severn’s extensive backlist.
TV presenter Claudia Winkleman has joined the judging panel for this year’s £20,000 Kindle Storyteller Award.
Lockdowns around the world continued to see digital book sales continue to increase during April as ebook distributor PublishDrive reports that its online book sales rose by 23% in April compared with March.
Cookbooks took the top prizes in the latest Kindle Direct Pen to Publish Contest (2019) which received more than 10,000 entries this year from a very wide range of self-publishing authors in India.
The Kindle Unlimited KENP rate for April 2020 fell to $0.0042, down from $0.0046 in March, while the KDP Select fund for April 2020 rose strongly to a record high of $30.3 million from $29 million in March 2020.
It’s been a long time coming but Apple Books for Authors has now launched and allows non-Mac users to publish directly to Apple Books.
The UK government has ‘fast-tracked’ its plan to end VAT on ebooks and digital newspapers and the rate of tax has been slashed from 20% to zero from May 1, 2020.
Amazon has reduced the minimum price that authors have to set for ebooks on Kindle Direct Publishing for European Union marketplaces.
The coronavirus lockdown has boosted ebook sales and one of the channels showing the biggest rise is library distributor OverDrive.
Barnes & Noble has restored ebook distributors to its regular payment schedule after paying late for February and bringing in a policy of 90-day payment delays.
