Award-winning fiction and the cost of a good book

First, the good news!

I'm delighted to announce that two of my books have been awarded prizes in the prestigious CIBA competiton.

CIBA (Chanticleer International Book Awards) is a respected competition which offers writers across a broad spectrum of genres the opportunity to compete for one of its Grand Prizes. Winners were announced at the Annual Conference, which was held in Bellingham WA in April.

Tall Chimneys, ever my golden girl, cleared the slush pile to make the long-list, and then entered the short-list before finally settling as a semi-finalist in the Goethe Category. This section is for post 1750 historical fiction, which covers Georgian and Regency (1750-1830), Victorian Era (1837-1901), Edwardian and Turn of Century (1890-1920), Interwar Period (1918-1939), Mid-20th Century (1945-1970s), Late 20th Century (1970s-2000), U.S. History, and World and International History. So, it was a big field! And I am pleased as punch that CIBA recognised Tall Chimneys with an award.

The winner of the Goethe category was Sleeping in the Sun by Joanne Howard. Well done Joanne!

The Cottage on Winter Moss surpassed even her older and more popular sibling by becoming a finalist. One step on from semi-finalist, this really is a huge deal. She rubbed shoulders with only a handful of other books in the Somerset (literary fiction) category. This is a wide church of books that don't comfortably sit elsewhere, including literary fiction, contemporary fiction, women's fiction and family themes, LGBTQ+ fiction, literary adventure and suspense, literary historical, magical realism, multicultural and world literature, and social and psychological fiction.

The winner of the Somerset category was What the River Keeps, by Cheryl Bostrom. Congratulations to her!

The overall winner and Grand Prize recipient was The Rabbi's Knight by Michael J Cooper. It was entered in the Chaucer award category, which is the home of pre-1750s historical fiction, a category I will be entering into the 2027 awards with my upcoming new release, The Buccaneer's Return.

Michael is a previous winner of this award with another book in his series. I am currently listening to the audio version of The Rabbi's Knight.

Why? Well, I'll be honest, while wishing to celebrate with and encourage the winners, I balked at £6.25 for the Kindle version of his book so I used my monthly Audible credit. What the River Keeps is £8.99 and Sleeping in the Sun is priced at an eye-watering £9.94.

I notice that none of these winners have so far appended their coveted winners' badge to their books, which I have, and I must say that those prices seem ... a bit cheeky.

Both my award-winning books (and several others) are priced at £2.99 both on Amazon and here, in my own online shop.

And now, a little grouch from a grumpy author!

Image from FreePik

Buying from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other reputable digital book retailer is fine. But buying direct from the author is better. I receive 100% of what you pay, which will never be more than you would have paid in the online stores. If you dislike buying from large online stores, please consider buying direct from the author, or go to your local book shop and order a copy if they do not have what you want on their shelves. There are various online digital libraries like Hoopla and Borrowbox. These are great, and the author receives proper remuneration. Local libraries will order a physical book for you if you ask.

Please, never NEVER use sites that offer 'free' books unless you can be sure that they are out of copyright or uncopyrighted. Anything else will have been pirated (stolen) from hard-working authors like me. Similarly, if you buy books from Temu, you can be fairly sure that the author will receive NO royalty. I recently had mine removed from there, listed by b...ards who had stolen them.

I buy secondhand books even though I know the author won't receive a penny. I see it as a kind of recycling, and in most cases the books I buy are out of print so unavailable elsewhere. I feel conflicted about borrowing (and loaning) books. Of course we want to share good stories with our friends, but passing one book around a whole reading group is like going into Costa and sharing a single coffee among an entire table of people. You wouldn't do it, would you? Spare a thought for the author who laboured over their story for months or even years.

What do you consider a reasonable price to pay for an ebook?

Full disclosure. I make around £2.02 on a book priced at £2.99 on the big online sites, but admittedly I consider this to be a discounted price My normal prices peak at around the 4.99 mark except in Australia and Canada, where they have to be a little more to fit into Amazon's royalty share criteria. I think this is a reasonable amount to ask when you consider that a fancy coffee is £3.25 these days, and it is what I generally feel comfortable paying when I buy eBooks myself. But what do you think?

I'm sorry to say that I have withdrawn almost all titles from Kindle Unlimited, as the amount of money I was receiving per page read has plummeted so drastically that I began to feel it was something on an insult. At 0.003p per page, a 555 page book (like Cottage) remunerated me £1.66, assuming a reader read the entirety of it - and why wouldn't they? Frankly, I just don't feel that is a fair return on the work that went into it. While I recognise that KU is an excellent and cost-effective way for people to access books in these straitened times, I think there has to be some fairness to the people who are writing them. Unfortunately, the fund-share allocated to writers is predicated on the number of pages that KU subscribers have available to them and, as the market is infiltrated by books written by AI, this has exponentially increased. I can categorically state here that ALL my books are written by AUTHENTIC INTELLIGENCE - mine!

But don't get me started on that!