Price change
Firstly, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all visitors to this site.
Secondly, if you’re thinking of buying Floodtide, now is a good time to do so. Not only will you possibly have more time to read it over the Christmas period, but Amazon are hiking the price by a quid or so on the 1st of January, 2015.
When I first posted Floodtide on Amazon Kindle, I wanted to set the price at £4.99. It seemed a fair price to me; I could have made it higher, as it’s a large book. A doorstep, in fact, at around 135,000 words. But every time I changed the price to £4.99, when I went back to check it, it had gone back to £5.14, and I didn’t know why. I eventually contacted Amazon and asked them about it. As physical books do not attract VAT (they’re considered an essential element of life), there was no reason to suspect any relation to that tax was behind it. But a member of their customer support service explained that e-books attract VAT at 3% in the EU, so if I wanted the price to be £4.99 I needed to take that into account. I duly adjusted my price to include the VAT as explained. No problemo.
But I’ve received several e-mails from Amazon recently, explaining that although previously VAT was based on the seller’s country, from January 1st it will be based on the buyer’s country. As VAT here is 20%, Amazon are adjusting the price to take account of that, and the price will rise by about £1. This has been prompted by changes in the laws relating to the sale of digital products; authors now have to include VAT in the prices they set. Amazon will be adjusting the price in this instance themselves, and I will update the price on this site as soon as I know what it is.
I hope this won’t put readers off buying e-books, either Floodtide or e-books in general, as other EU authors will be affected in the same way. But I think that if you’ve got the reading habit, you’ll just carry on in the usual way. I know I will.