Ah, business.
Don’t get me wrong: I get that part of being a writer is the business of being a writer. I get that it comes with the territory and you can’t really avoid it (although I suspect that the very successful ones do manage to avoid it to a large extent).
But I don’t have to like it. And I don’t.
Last week I was hit with an advertising charge for my work. That’s normally fine, but it was almost the same size as the charge I was hit with the week before that… and I just couldn’t afford it. On average, my book sales for a month cover about two weeks of running ads… and normally that’s a loss I can absorb because I’m still a new writer and I’m moving small-potatoes worth of units. But paying literally twice that amount…
Anyway. Moral of the story is that I’ve had to reduce my ad budget by a sharp margin, all the while Ye Olde Amazon is saying that I should be increasing it. I understand their justification, even if we step back from the “We want to make more money so you should pay us more money” position: the number of times my ads show up to people is definitely limited by their budget. But that will have to wait until I have more money I can spend on ads, which I currently do not.
Fun.
Oh well. Hopefully enough people are leaving 4-and-5 star reviews that a few more people will see my work, and at this point that’s basically all I can ask for. Maybe someday I will have a proper ad budget… but it is not this day!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!