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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Re: Drop in low priced paperback royalty is a bit insane.
« Last post by Bill Hiatt on Today at 05:18:05 AM »
I wonder if this is Amazon's way of discouraging short paperbacks. After all, it already raised printing costs, so it doesn't seem as if it would be a cost issue. Perhaps someone miscalculated, and someone else has now realized that Amazon is somehow not doing as well on short paperbacks as it thought. But if so, it would seem adjusting the printing costs would make more sense than lowering the royalty.
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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Re: Drop in low priced paperback royalty is a bit insane.
« Last post by Lynn on Today at 03:32:17 AM »
I have a chap book and planned to do more for an older series of short novelettes. I'm not looking forward to deciding this issue. I hate to price 9.99 for a 2.99 story but it might happen.
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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Re: Drop in low priced paperback royalty is a bit insane.
« Last post by Bill Hiatt on May 17, 2025, 11:38:05 PM »
This will influence my decision about whether or not to put my shorter works out in paperback. My Substack writing is creating a growing stream of novellas. I was going to put them all out in paper at some point. Now, maybe not. My novel paperbacks are all comfortably above the $9.99 zone.
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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Re: Drop in low priced paperback royalty is a bit insane.
« Last post by alhawke on May 17, 2025, 05:45:35 AM »
It's surprising that they're affecting pricing with Amazon at $9.99 in Australia. Paperbacks are like double the price in Australia vs the US.
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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Re: Drop in low priced paperback royalty is a bit insane.
« Last post by Bill Hiatt on May 16, 2025, 11:17:29 PM »
It would definitely be more rational to have the price in your principal market be the governing factor.

In my case, virtually all my paperback sales are in the US, so it doesn't affect me much. But for people with paperback sales in diverse markets, it could be a real headache.
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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Drop in low priced paperback royalty is a bit insane.
« Last post by TimothyEllis on May 16, 2025, 03:49:05 PM »
I just got the email telling me that paperbacks priced under 9.99 would now get a 50% royalty instead of 60%.

Fine, until you apply that pricing on the submission form.

The first book I looked at which was affected was priced at $8.20US.

But if you up it to 9.99, the US gets 60%, but nowhere else does.

So I kept putting it up, and only when I get to $11.30US do all the stores convert back to 60%.

That's pretty insane.

Instead of just tagging it to 9.99US, they applied separate thresholds to every single store.

The other thing is, that lost 10% makes a huge difference in what you actually get.

So now the question is, do we just increase the price so all the stores are back on 60%, or do we just put up with the 50%?

How many sales do we lose if we put them up, given the reason they're under 9.99 anyway is they're short?

Not sure. I've got 8 to check. The first I put up, and it had the highest number of paperback sales of any of my books with 37.

Forgot to post this, and changed all 8 to $11.30US.

In spite of them saying $9.99 is the price, it's not. $11.30 is the minimum to get 60% now in all stores if they base off the US store price.

What happens when exchange rates change is anyone's guess.

For now though, my cheapest paperback in Australia is now $19.40 for a $2.99 kindle.
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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Re: Something going on with ranks again.
« Last post by alhawke on April 14, 2025, 05:31:27 AM »
{edit: also,  the response they gave you is the same they've given me when I've called. I don't see customer service helping with this.
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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Re: Something going on with ranks again.
« Last post by alhawke on April 14, 2025, 05:29:55 AM »
Sorry this is happening, Timothy. It's happened to me in the US market lasting a couple days--a few times. And it's messed up promos. It sounds like whatever algorithm has been affecting the US on Zon is traveling to Australia. I haven't had issues with Australia ranking before.
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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Re: Something going on with ranks again.
« Last post by TimothyEllis on April 13, 2025, 02:05:23 PM »
This from Amazon help.

Someone has no idea how their own system works.

Quote
Hello,

Thank you for contacting Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). I hope you are having a lovely day.

My name is Tamara, I am the Senior Support Agent that will be assisting you today.

I can empathize with the position you are in and I will gladly do my best to assist you!

After further research I can it can be confirmed that the ranking for your book(s) is correct. There are multiple factors that determine the rank of a book and we cannot share our sales rank algorithms and related criteria.

Keep in mind that Sales Rank fluctuates every hour in line with customer demand and in relation to the demand for other books, both of which may vary based on factors such as popularity of new releases, seasonality, etc. While monitoring your book?s Amazon sales rank may be helpful in gaining general insight into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and other initiatives to drive book sales, it is not an accurate way to track your book?s sales or compare your sales in relation to books in other categories, since a particular item?s sales rank does not absolutely reflect its sales.

I understand that you are concerned about your sales rank, so I have requested that our technical team look into this just to verify that there is no issue that I have missed.

You can expect a response within the next 24 hours.

Have a great day further.


Thanks for using Amazon KDP,

Tamara
Kindle Direct Publishing
http://kdp.amazon.com

I have never seen a book remain the same rank for 24 hours without there being a major problem.

Plus I checked the category ranks, and they're not even close to what's displaying.

 :icon_think: :shrug :dizzy
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What are Amazon doing now? [Public] / Re: Something going on with ranks again.
« Last post by TimothyEllis on April 13, 2025, 11:30:42 AM »
8 hours later and AUS and UK ranks are still exactly the same.

 :HB

The US rank seems to be behaving normally.

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