The was a mistake. Ongoing issues with Bookvault and Ingrams.

20/52

The speed with which you realise you’ve made a mistake. Honestly, switching off Ingrams as my distributor went badly wrong. I had misunderstood what Bookvault meant when they said they had access to Amazon. I assumed they were a printer that Amazon used to supply their own stock holding, as with Ingrams. Amazon buys my stock from Ingrams and then sells it as their own inventory.

This works for me but Bookvault prices are lower so that would work for me better.

But, this is not the relationship between Book Vault and Amazon. They sell on Amazon as a third party vendor via Amazon Marketplace, and that’s a whole different kettle of fish. I’ve done third party selling on Amazon, I know all the ins and outs of it and I know that it’s not what I was looking for.

Having received no orders in over seven days, I spent some time chatting to Bookvault and discovered that no, Amazon doesn’t use them as printers.

So, no Amazon supply and no Gardners Extended Catalogue. And that’s the end of my experiment with Bookvault for now. Their print quality and price is excellent, far outstripping Ingrams and KDP, but they distribution channels are not working for me. I shall continue to use them for my own supply and maybe a shopify store in the next few months.

For now though I switch Ingrams back on and instantly got twelve orders on day one of switch on.

So, I tried something and it didn’t work. I lost a week’s revenue but I learnt stuff. Honestly, if I had had a proper conversation with Bookvault first I needed has wasted that week. But I hope my mistake saves you the same failure.

Cover Art

I received the first draft of the cover art for book two, Dead Winter Bones and realised that it just wasn’t going to work. My heart actually plummeted it was so wrong. Book one had been a huge slog to get sorted and in the end I’ still wasn’t thrilled with it. But the show must go on and so I published.

Now I was looking at book two and realised I had another herculean task ahead of me to achieve a cover I wasn’t going to be happy with. Rather than waste the designers time any further, I apologised and cancelled the contract, and they will use the first draft as a premade that they can offer for sale.

Got another walk for West Walks under my belt. This time a cracker around Godolphin.

Next Week

• It’s all about finding a new designer. I’ve been in touch with a few but I need this before August and I’ll need a new cover for book one as well to tie the theme together. I may end up with a premade cover whilst I settle on a final theme.

  I hate this, it’s a waste of money. I’d wait, but book two has an Amazon pre-order on it, so I can’t push the date back. I’ve been fannying around about these covers since the book first came out. I should have dealt with this months ago.

  Not impressed with myself.

• More work on Golden Three. Current word count. 11283. Had wanted to have the first 60k written by the end of May. Fallen far, far short. Lots of six a.m writing starts for me. Even then I’ll only hit 30K if I’m lucky. Really don’t know why I’ve fallen behind. I just fail to remember to make enough time for edits.

• Maybe another walk for West Cornwall guide book.

• Nothing for Liz Hurley

• Need to start looking seriously at Eva St John and moving wide. There’s quite a lot of factors in play there so I want a week where I’m not stressing over the Anna Penrose books.