195 - 2020 Updates Authors Need to Know

Facebook Facebook SEEMS to have emerged from its crazy banning ad accounts time period. But maybe not. If your ads or account got banned, you weren't alone! Try to get through to their chat or on the phone with someone to get this fixed.  They are finally shoving all people into the new Facebook look, which I hate, along with most other people. We'll forget old Facebook by next year. For now, we mourn.  Amazon's KDP Publishing Series pages can now be managed right from your KDP dashboard. This is great! You can reorder them, create a blurb that talks about the series as a whole, or add related content (which isn't showing up on the page yet).  You can now nominate your books for Kindle Deal or Prime Reading (I can't speak to whether those work well, but the monthly deals I got didn't do a thing for my sales). The place to do this is under the marketing tab. (It's in beta so you might not have it.)  You can no longer change the titles of your ebooks without republishing them. This stinks, because if you change the title and republish, someone might actually RE-BUY the book and get mad. (I've had this happen.) I'm hoping this change goes back. Author Center is now connected right in the marketing tab, and they've done some updating of their own. I almost never go into Author Central, but it's very shiny and new. You can also more easily handle the other countries with Author Central, right from the KDP dashboard.  Amazon Advertising Recently, Amazon advertising added a few metrics you can now track in your dashboard. First, the pages read (KENP read) and more importantly, the royalties for those pages read (KENP royalties). That's the difference between these two outcomes:  You can also now try Sponsored Brand posts if you're approved. These were formerly just for Amazon Ad Advantage members, which is hard for authors to get. It will show as an ad with up to three books. I haven't heard much about how these are working... yet.  A Few Others Draft2Digital is now ​allowing for authors to split royalties for co-authored works. Read more HERE.  I've talked before about the issues with Audible Returns and I think that some big things (aka: lawsuits) will be lining up soon. Read more on the whole thing HERE.