Withdrawing My Books from Kindle Select

This is just a quick post to announce I will be withdrawing my books from KU/KOLL, in response to Amazon's algorithm changes that mean the KU money is largely now being shared by just two classes of people:

1. unscrupulous people who game the system
2. best-selling authors who get millions of pages read per day

My books will still be available for purchase from Amazon, and in print as both A-format and B-format paperbacks. They simply won't be available for free once the Kindle Select renewal periods ends.

For me personally this will drop the royalty payments for the ebooks from 70% to 35%, so I will also be increasing the prices in the next week or so. (I've also been thinking for a long time that I may have been pricing them a little too low.)  This should have a negligible effect on sales, because I am not competing with the scammers to pay for ads, so my books are not being bought.  Very few are even found by people borrowing them (perhaps one or two books per month).

So the ability to borrow my books will end, for each, on the following dates:

Wild Thing - Feb 26, 2019 (The Leeth Dossier #1) (Wild Thing paperback)
Harsh Lessons - Dec 21, 2018 (The Leeth Dossier #2) (Harsh Lessons paperback)
Shadow Hunt - Jan 19 2019 (The Leeth Dossier #3) (Shadow Hunt paperback)

Once my ebooks are no longer exclusive to Kindle Select I'll be able to enrol them in all the other ebook distribution platforms, which do not appear to suffer from the same problems Amazon has engineered for itself.

I doubt I will be returning the books to Kindle Select because I anticipate Amazon will fail to take effective action until the average quality of books available there has fallen noticeably.

For any other authors who wish to withdraw their books, the process is quite simple, as described in the relevant KU help page:

1. In your KDP Bookshelf page, next to the book you wish to withdraw, click on the "..." (ellipsis) button beside the "Promote and Advertise" button.
2. In the menu that pops up, click on the "KDP Select Info" item.
3. On the page that leads you to, clear the tick from the "Automatically renew this book's enrollment in KDP Select for another 90 days" in the panel that pops up. (You might need to click on the Manage KDP Select Enrollment button to get that panel with its check box.)

In happier news, I hope to put the finishing touches to Violent Causes (The Leeth Dossier #4) by mid December (about a week), and launch it a couple of months after that.  I'm pleased with how it has turned out -- with Dave's help (and Jon's) as usual!