Oh, my. Not sure what happened in here? So I'll just respond to what is left of the thread.
Thank you for your comments about Pickles. Yes, it had to go on the back burner for various reasons. The second book is 3/4 finished and has been for nearly a year, with the third book already laid out too. Sadly ... when I set out to do it, I had no idea just how poorly authors of children's books are paid generally. I get about 60p per book. I'm the lowest paid (and the last to be paid) out of everyone involved.
As for the law domains. For £150, I think they are decent domains, with backlinks, holding sites that are indexed by search engines and receiving anything from 300-1000 visitors a month. For £150, I don't really see how that could be criticised?
The reason you cannot see PR is because they were developed AFTER Google stopped doing PR ... so I'm not sure why you even mentioned it? If you're the excellent SEO you seem to indicate you are, then you know that PR is no longer a factor any more. It hasn't been updated properly in nearly two years.
Yes, sadly unless you're JK Rowling or someone of that ilk you get paid peanuts.
I know 2 authors, one is Trish Cooke who used to present a kids TV program and now does childrens books, and she allegedly gets a pretty raw deal, or at least she did last time I saw her a few years back.
The other is a Dr of economics who has written several lengthy tomes of academic quality on a specific niche of economics, and her husband thinks it's ludicrous that she can take 12 months or more researching, writing, editing, etc, and then gets a yearly royalty cheque of about £100.
She does it for the love of the subject and the wider social implications, but really being an author isn't all it's cracked up to be.
My sister is currently dreaming that she's an author and has done a "self published" book, and while I wish her the very best I think that she's dreaming and is about (when it launches) to get an almighty wake up call.
I know what it's like because I wrote a couple of short books that I sold as ebooks at £19.99 each, or both for £29 and then some government funded idiot convinced me to print them "the get them in Waterstones" - which I eventually did, but my profit went from about £17 per copy sold to about £2.50 per copy sold and it took me 18 months to shift 6000 copies.
He insisted this was the best way because he also had printed a book and said it had done very well.
When I next bumped into said idiot he said" how are you getting on with the books" I replied "I've just got rid of the last box" and he said "WHAT! Really? I've only sold about 100"
What a muppet - he cost me literally £thousands.
If you can do it yourself you'll make oodles more, but it's very hard work, especially with the bigger retailers.
But you'll already know this. I hope you make a go of it, people don't appreciate how much hard work goes into it, so the best of luck with it.
