Now that the audiobook edition of Steal from the Devil has launched across all applicable retailers, there are some more details available on price and functionality!

The audiobook can be acquired through these routes:

• Free membership listen on Audible,
• Direct purchase on iTunes or iBooks for £10.95 (or equivalent value),
• Direct purchase via Audible/Amazon for £20 (or equivalent value),
• Greatly reduced direct purchase via Amazon UK, USA, DE, or AUS if you own the Kindle edition.

 
Retailers set their own prices for the audiobooks, which they base on listening length and market factors.
 
The audiobook has been produced in line with the requirements for Whispersync for Voice and Immersion Reading, two features of the Kindle/Audible platforms. The former allows you to stop reading and start listening where you left off, or vice versa. The latter allows you to listen while the relevant text is actively highlighted, which is handy for language learners and non-native speakers.
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Learn more about Whispersync and Immersion Reading.

As previously forewarned, the price changes have now been entered on the Kindle store. Readers probably have 8 hours at most to purchase Armada Wars novels at the old prices, before the new price structure takes effect. This time period is very much dependent on what Kindle region you use.

The new prices are as follows:

It has begun! The Kindle edition of From Shattered Stars is arriving now, for those lucky readers who live in Australia or use the Australian Kindle store. As midnight hits in the time zone for each regional Kindle storefront, the book will become available for download there. If you pre-ordered, and your device is connected, it will appear by fricking magic.

Three handy things to know:
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1. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read for free.
2. If you buy outright, you will feed a starving child for one day.
3. You only have a few days before the prices change across the board!

 
The paperback edition is expected to land on the store and on Amazon before the end of June.

AmazonPrime has just been expanded to include free books and magazines. If you have Prime, you can now read all kind of books for the grand sum of £0.00 (thats $0.00 or €0.00, for those of you using funny money.)

Armada Wars books are not currently in the selection of titles, but watch out for them popping up. It's not immediately clear how Amazon will be selecting monthly or permanent titles but as ever time will tell. In the meantime, all the Armada Wars titles can be read for free through Kindle Unlimited!

The cost of the Kindle eBooks is likely to rise this summer, but in the meantime the prices of all Armada Wars novels have dropped today, which includes the pre-order of From Shattered Stars.

The USA now gets novels for $3.99 (still $2.99 for Steal from the Devil), and books that were $5.99 in Canada and Australia are now $4.99 in the respective currencies. Readers in Mexico, Brazil, India, and Japan also benefit from reduced prices across the board.

Because of the lower prices, all volumes which were $1.99 USD via Kindle MatchBook are now just $0.99.

In other news, the obsolescent .mobi file format has been dropped, and replaced with the more versatile  .ePub format.

The posters for From Shattered Stars have arrived at last, and at A1 size (84.1 x 59.4 cm) in high quality print they look amazing! Like all the other posters, they are printed on heavy duty 250gsm silk paper, using a professional CMYK process which duplicates the colours reliably and beautifully.

There's a new value pack in addition to the old 3-pack, this one is of course a 4-pack containing all the posters for the main sequence novels. The price point of the 3-pack has changed to make it 15% off, and the new 4-pack gives you a chunky 20% off.

To make stock-keeping simpler and the accounts easier to work out, book signing is now a flat rate of £4 per copy.

Books in the store which previously offered 'signed' or 'unsigned' as an option no longer do, they're just the plain paperbacks. Signing is now an 'item' in its own right.

To get books signed you just add one signing item per book. If you're buying several books but don't want them all signed, you can put instructions in the 'notes to seller' field at the checkout (have faith: this box appears when you return from PayPal). Just say which books are to be signed and which are not.

The signing item now comes up as the first 'related product' on every book page, so it's easy to see.

In addition to the previous simplification of shipping, the higher shipping rates for posters have now been scrapped. Everything will now be shipped at the same rate, governed by weight, whether the order contains paperback books or posters.

It does cost about £2.00 GBP more to mail a poster tube than a box of books, but Armada Wars is going to pay that difference.

However, since posters do require different packaging, please continue to order posters separately from other products wherever possible!

Few of you — if any — will have noticed the small, occasional fluctuations in the prices of the Armada Wars Kindle editions, but as it happens whenever I upload updated files to Kindle Direct I also take the time to check that the prices are fair across the different Kindle regions.

Using the $USD price as a starting point, I check the current exchange rates and nudge prices for other regions (Canada, Mexico, Japan etc) until they have more or less the same value. They tend to wander apart over time, you see, as exchange rates rise and fall.

With all the ongoing chaos of Brexit, and the founding of the Nation of Trumpmania, exchange rates have gone a bit mad. That has affected the bookshelf prices of all Kindle publishers.

They started off the same, but right now I would have to majorly hike UK prices to make British sales 'fair' on USA customers. And nobody wins there; UK customers would be paying more, and USA customers would not actually gain any benefit. I can't simply drop USA prices by the relevant amount because I would then not be able to stay in the Kindle Select programme. KS specifies allowable price ranges for each region, which bafflingly are not adjusted for exchange rates — they are treated as if the values of the different currencies are equivalent.

I'm not sure what to do about it at this point. I am open to suggestions.

I'm also aware that the King Trump intends to pull the USA out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Amazon has not yet advised publishers and authors whether or not they think this will impact on Kindle or CreateSpace sales in countries such as Japan, Australia, etc. In the event that problems do arise, I have started to sketch out a plan which would subsidise shipping for paperbacks to that region. But we'll see what happens.

The way things are going around the world, and particularly in Europe and the USA, I can't imagine stuff will suddenly get cheaper anywhere. I would expect rises, personally. So if you were thinking about getting into the Armada Wars series at some point in the near future, you should probably go make some swift purchases!

The following price reductions have been made to the store, with immediate effect:

• ​The base price of every paperback is now clearly below the Amazon list price.
• The surcharge added for signed copies is now a lower flat rate of £4 per book.

The official store is now far and away the cheapest place to buy the paperbacks new!