Changes going forward
Thanks for your support of the Fluency Course! I hope you are enjoying using it with your students.
There have been a number of developments I would like to share with you.
First, in terms of edits and changes to the books.
UNEXPECTED PROBLEMS
Until now we have operated on a kaizen basis, updating and improving the books where we could so that each year’s books were an improvement from the last.
This year we ran into an unexpected problem: because we have teacher books, many people were surprised that their teacher books from last year no longer matched the new student books this year.
This was our fault. We should have realised it would be an issue.
Another problem was that some of the online supplementary materials have been updated to match the latest version of the books, but that means they no longer match the versions from last year.
Again, we completely failed to see this coming. I apologise for any trouble this caused with your classes.
FUTURE EDITS AND CHANGES
We are not going to make any further changes to the current books. This is the 1st edition of the Fluency Course. It will be available on Amazon indefinitely, and the online resources will also be available on the Fluency Course site. Any books you buy from now on will not be different from the books available now.
In the future we may release a 2nd edition of the Fluency Course. This will be a different product, with different listings on Amazon, a different cover, etc. The 1st edition will continue to be available alongside it so that teachers and schools can continue to use that if they prefer.
In June, we had an unpleasant surprise from Amazon.
PRICE RISES
At the end of June Amazon Japan raised its printing costs by around 40%.
The way royalties work for Kindle print on demand is that Amazon gets 40% of the price of the book and the author gets 60%. The author has to pay the printing costs from their share. Then sales tax is added.
After the June price rise, we are no longer making any profit from selling the Fluency Course. This is… not great.
After a lot of soul-searching and thinking, we have decided to raise our prices for the Fluency Course.
However, I want to give you enough notice so that you can make different arrangements for next year if you need to.
We’ll be raising prices from November 1st 2023. This should give everyone a chance to buy any books they are planning to use this year (or even next year!) before the prices go up.
The new prices will be as follows:
Student Textbooks: 2200 yen (inc tax) -> 2970 yen (inc tax)
Teacher books: 2200 yen (inc tax) -> 2970 yen (inc tax)
Workbooks: 1100 yen (inc tax) -> 1485 (inc tax)
The workbooks will continue to be available in PDF form for free from the Fluency Course website for schools that prefer to print them themselves.
I’m really sorry to have to do this and I would have preferred to keep the books at the former, more affordable, prices but this change will make it possible for us to continue supporting the course going forward.
We have heard of many school owners struggling with retaining Junior High School students and we are planning more supplementary materials and resouces to help teachers and schools who are using the course, and we hope you will continue to enjoy using the Fluency Course to help your junior high school students succeed and run a successful language school.