Lego and updates

Hello readers! Just a short post from me this week. The boring part, which I’ll get out of the way as quickly as possible, regards Amazon bookstore logistics – specifically, the availability of books through Kindle Unlimited. The exciting part (hopefully) is a new micro-scale Lego model, which might look familiar to those of you who have read the Highmoor series.

Kindle Unlimited reshuffle

This update will only make sense with a little bit of context, so bear with me while I attempt to explain…

My books, like many self-published books on Amazon, are available through Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service that provides access to hundreds of thousands of novels, comics and dubious self-help guides. Authors can enrol their books in the scheme for three months at a time, and we can choose to automatically re-enrol them whenever the term comes to an end. The downside to enrolling is that we agree not to publish or distribute our books anywhere except the Kindle store. The upside is that Amazon gives us five promotional days per term, in which we can make our books free or discounted, and let the Amazon algorithm push our work towards more readers.

Given that my writing is just a hobby, rather than an actual income source, I’m happy to enrol my books in the Kindle Unlimited scheme. I make the most of Amazon’s promotional tools, and the Kindle audience is big enough that I’m not too worried about publishing elsewhere. However, the three month enrolment cycle can make my life a bit awkward.

Every now and then, I run a “free book weekend”, making all of my books free for two or three days. These are fairly straightforward to schedule using Amazon’s publishing and management tools, and they are a great way for me to broaden my audience. However, I now have six books on the market, and their three-month cycles are out of sync. Free book weekends cannot run from one cycle into the next, and when cycles overlap, the number of available weekend dates gets limited. I could just about juggle this discrepancy with five books, but with six, I am now spending too much time frowning at calendars. As such, I have decided to take two of my books out of the Kindle Unlimited scheme for a short time.

I have tried to arrange this hiatus to cause the minimum amount of disruption. Synwyr will be unavailable through Kindle Unlimited from the 6th of February, and Sylvre will be unavailable from the 28th of February. Both books will be available again from the 11th of March.

I apologise for the inconvenience if you are reading either of these books through the Kindle Unlimited scheme. There will be a free book weekend on the 18th and 19th January, so you can download free copies and avoid missing out. Also, to be clear: all my books will remain available for purchase in the Kindle store. Only the Kindle Unlimited scheme will be affected.

In happier news…

I have managed to get a good amount of writing done recently. The fourth and final book in the Highmoor series now has a significant chunk of the first draft completed, and I’m hoping that I can get a bit more done before work deadlines start piling up again. I also have more art in the pipeline, and I have updated the Highmoor Art page.

And here is the Lego, as promised:

I’ve branched out from building castles, but I haven’t branched very far. This is Ghyreth Bridge, which some of you might recognise from the Highmoor series. The scale is much smaller than the previous models, so the structures aren’t particularly detailed, but hopefully this gives you some idea of what was in my head when I wrote the story.

Thanks for reading, and have a lovely week!