Well, after a dip that I think was caused by Amazon’s rollout of Kindle Unlimited, sales seem to be picking back up again. I have no scientific answers as to why, but this Christmas I had a look at a relative’s Kindle with online lending enabled and the experience of searching the Kindle Store for a book you might read for free could be better. A lot better. This may be why Kindle online lending hasn’t taken over the world yet.
I’ve complained about Amazon’s useless categorisation system before, and over the… three years? four years? I’ve had a Kindle, it hasn’t got any better, which leads me to think that there just isn’t any money for Amazon in improving it.
I am not trying to knock people who want preppers handbooks, books about how to improve your life with mega-doses of vitamins or giving control over to the angels, any variation on BDSM with millionaires, aliens or millionaire aliens, books about conspiracies or books by people who have already had worse happen to them than the Illuminati could ever dream up.
However, I have no interest in any of these, so it would be nice if every damn category wasn’t full of them. (As for people who want erotic stories about embarrassing ‘accidents’, you pursue your dream, but do you really have to do it in the Politics and Sociology section?) My best guess is that these books are popular enough that Amazon actually makes more from people who would like a misery memoir clicking on ‘Fantasy: Arthurian’ by mistake [1] and then finding something they’d like than they lose on people whose tastes run to different genres giving up in disgust.
Anyway, it’s made me feel a lot better about not including the books in Kindle Unlimited, because I don’t think anyone would be able to find them if I did.
As far as getting new books written goes, I have to admit that 2014 has been a total washout. This year I have mostly been moving house (twice) and trying to get the house I’ve finally settled in how I want it, and my creative energies have gone on that. The rest of my time has been spent sleeping. I do now have a writing room that isn’t entirely filled with boxes, so hopefully writing will recommence some time in 2015.
Happy holidays, or happy random time off work because of other people’s cultural holidays, to you all!
[1] ‘Uncle Daddy, You Didn’t Want Me To Be Born And Then You Tried To Drown Me’ by Mordred would sell like hot cakes, I bet.
Ankaret Wells 
‘Uncle Daddy, You Didn’t Want Me To Be Born And Then You Tried To Drown Me’ by Mordred would sell like hot cakes, I bet.
Do you think the cover would be an attempt at scribbly manuscript, superimposed over an ominous cradle floating out to sea?
Pete’s recently got a Kindle Fire in addition to his paperwhite, and he says the Fire’s version of the store is far, far worse than the paperwhite’s, and he’s finding it much harder to locate books he’d like to buy. That could be a wider problem affecting sales.
*Worse* than the paperwhite? Bloody hell. My sales have now more or less gone back to pre-Unlimited levels, and whileI have no idea how many people are reading on a tablet as opposed to a dedicated e-reader that definitely seems like it could be a factor. What’s the Fire actually optimised for?