I'm sorry for not posting a Spotlight on Friday. There were some birthdays celebrated in my family this weekend, so I took the entire day off to spend time with others. Now, I'm trying to play catch up.
First, if you write YA books, or read YA books, or just love what YA authors are doing, this article will probably make you see red.
The good news is that the response in opposition has been phenomenal. Go here and here for rebuttals, and check out the Twitter hashtag #yasaves to see what others are saying.
Also, I mentioned last week that the Amazon product tags for ebooks recently disappeared. Vincent Zandri posted something here about this. The theory is that the tags haven't necessarily disappeared, but there's reason to believe that readers will only be able to tag books they've purchased. There's also talk that this is only a glitch, and we'll see tags return soon. Time will tell.
In other news, there is a huge summer sale going on right now. Over 600 traditional titles are priced at $2.99 or lower. I'm not sure how this is affecting indie sales. I'm not seeing the hit that I took in May when Amazon set 250 indie novels to free, and I've yet to stumble across "murmurings." This sale lasts until mid-June, though.
What I am seeing (because of this sale) is that my ranking is consistently hovering in the 600s, though I'm selling on average 30-40 more books a day. This tells me that a LOT of ebooks are being sold, and some of those 600 novels skittered past me. I think as more and more authors release ebooks, we're going to see rankings fluctuate like this. It's going to get harder and harder to break 500, and then 1,000, etc.
Good news for Neesha Meminger: JAZZ IN LOVE was picked as a top YA selection by Pennsylvania School Librarians' Assoc. You can read Neesha's YA Spotlight here.
And last but not least . . . Guess what I finally got?
A shiny . . . new . . .
It's beautiful. :)
KK
