Your weekly newsletter is here once again but I regret to inform that there is sad news as this will be the final post from Great Kindle Deals for several reasons:
1. Amazon provides no statistics to blog owners for UK subscribers meaning I have absolutely no idea how many readers I have - it could be anything from one to over 1000. Only reader emails provide some sort of indication - though one or two emails a week provides no indication of how many total readers there are.
2. Amazon provide no information, and have just removed the little they did provide, on the money the blog was bringing in. They were keeping 70% of 99p a month meaning just 29p per subscriber - plus I have no option to see how many subscribers I have meaning I have no idea what I am making - there have been no payments and I have no idea when there would be one. I was not doing this for the money but no statistics means no feedback and no info for me to keep motivated.
3. The UK Kindle audience is far too small at the moment - this is probably the reason that there are no other (as far as I am aware) UK-centric Kindle blogs.
4. Finally, and perhaps most importantly - real life and work has caught up with me meaning very little time for reading, let alone writing a blog every week.
5. Some readers are extremely discouraging - when the blog was publishing I achieved only 1 review of 5 stars, as soon as the blog did not post for 2-3 weeks, there was two or three 1 and 2 star reviews which have not been changed since which is extremely discouraging as a sole writer.
So what happens now?
This blog will be deleted from the Kindle store when this post is sent. The blog will stay up at greatkindledeals.blogspot.com for archival purposes. Please cancel any subscriptions you have to the blog in your Amazon account though these should be cancelled with my removal of the blog.
If Amazon does provide detailed statistics to blog publishers in the future I may consider restarting the blog provided real-life conditions allow it.
So, I'd like to apologise to you, my readers. I thank you all very much for subscribing and hope you enjoyed the last six months of updates. I will be removing this blog from the Kindle Store.
Meanwhile for your Kindle fix please take a look at the links on the right hand side of this blog: http://www.ireaderead.com/
If you do have any comments, the email is greatkindledeals@gmail.com
A sorrowful farewell,
Giovanni Costa
Great Kindle Deals
Hi, If you'd like to keep track of your subscribers and other stats I recommend feedburner.com Google bought them a while back so you can get to them via feedburner.google.com I use it on all my blogs and I can track the number of subscribers as well as format the feeds in as many valid formats as I like to widen the readership.
ReplyDeleteIt would be a real shame to lose this excellent resource.
Thanks Shaun, I already use feedburner but I think that only provides stats for those who subscribe directly through RSS and not those who subscribe through Amazon. If that isn't the case please say so as that would then be an accurate indicator.
ReplyDelete