Check your Author Page! A warning to Amazon Authors.
Amazon changed the price of ALL my books to free yesterday, for reasons best known to themselves.
I only found out about this by chance when I was scrolling through Amazon in an idle moment (yes, a lot of those at the moment). My eye was drawn to the cover of one of my novels with £0.00 written underneath, which led me to check my author page and find to my amazement everything was completely free (not just for Kindle Unlimited as usual, but everything). I didn’t mind about the short stories as I often put those on free download as part of a KDP promotion, hoping to draw readers to my novels (there are some short titles intentionally free at the moment), but I was somewhat agitated to see there had been multiple free downloads of my Sing with the Choir novels. Previously, they had only been free on a very few occasions, for example, Three Hundred Bridesmaids was free for a few days at the start of lock-down because I wanted to do something positive and cheery.
I am always happy, of course, to be discovered by new readers (and there’s the slight chance I might get a few reviews from Amazon’s mistake), but the feeling of powerlessness as I watched the books slipping away yesterday evening was tricky to deal with.
One of the problems with KDP is that you can only contact Amazon by email. They still haven’t replied (beyond an automated reply saying my email will receive a response in 1 to 2 days) but the books have now been priced correctly. Whether this is because I emailed in, or possibly some mighty bot picked up on the error, I don’t know (yet). Hopefully there will be some light shed on the subject later today or tomorrow.
In the meantime, if you feel moved to check out my Amazon Author Page (after hearing my tale of woe!), please be my guest.
