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.

And the thread rises from the dead...fittingly, given that writers are almost always readers.

From things I've read recently, I highly recommend Evelyn Skye's A Year Ago in Spain. It's a moving romance with a strong fantasy element.

I'm currently reading book 7 in Ben Reeder's Demon Apprentice series. (A young boy is sold to a demon by his own father. He learns enough tricks to escape from the demon and dedicates himself to compensating for all the evil he's done while enslaved by the demon. With the help of a werewolf girlfriend and other supernatural associates, he still has many tough scrapes with the forces of evil.) No one would confuse it with Shakespeare, but it's very entertaining.

I just finished One Two Three by Laurie Frankel. The titular characters are sixteen-year-old triplets who live in a town poisoned by a chemical company that escaped all responsibility. Now the same company wants to reopen its plant under supposedly safer conditions. Most adults are seduced by the prospect of new jobs and more money for the impoverished town. The girls' mother continues to try legal avenues to stop the company. The triplets, all of whom are emotionally scarred, one of whom is autistic, and one of whom has severe physical issues, decide to take matters into their own hands. Their possible in--the handsome but naive son of the plant manager, who falls in love with one of them. But love doesn't just go one way, creating complications that none of them could have anticipated. And incriminating evidence seems always to be just out of reach.

Hinds Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard. An allegory of the Christian life. It reminds me very much of the movie Inside Out, where all the emotions are characters.

Glow of the Everglame by Penn Cole.  Very Interesting fantasy series.

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.