I’ve now re-published five novels, on Amazon and elsewhere…or, anyway, they’re in process on the distributor/retailer side of things. One of them (The Shivers Between, Book I) is free on non-Amazon sites (including mine–courtesy of BookFunnel). So if you haven’t read it, or know someone who might be interested? It’s pretty easy to get.
It’s actually the first half of what used to be called Shiver on the Sky. And it may become free on Amazon as well–that’s a black art I don’t necessarily feel I fully understand. I’ve set the price at $3.99 US at the ‘Zon for the moment, hoping to discourage sales until the price-match if any occurs. Last word from an Amazon person? They’ll get back to me by the end of the day Tuesday. Maybe so. My understanding is that if the price-match is denied I should just try again. And again and again and etc. as needed and eventually one of their folks will give it the nod. Okay. Sounds efficient to me.
Confession: the freebie ends in a total cliffhanger. On the bright side, it also includes a link to get a free download of the second, non-cliffhanger, book in the series. Though it also signs them up to get more stuff from me at the same time. So I figure it’s only semi-evil? We’ll see how folks react. Could be a good thing, or a bad thing, or, you know, maybe nobody will even notice.
Also, if someone signs up and then unsubscribes immediately? No harm, no foul, and in the process they’ll get a link to a “members only” download page (more about that later) that will not only keep working for them…it’ll be updated with more freebies as time goes on. So they can keep checking back for more to read, if they want to. If not, not. It’s all good as far as I’m concerned.
Book descriptions and such are up on my own site. I’ll be including retailer links once they’ve all come in. IOW I’m a little bit lazy and don’t want to mess with it more than once per book. Google Play and Kobo were by far the fastest to make books actually live-and-for-sale, if any of you are interested in such things. Weird Google Play Books issue: their site insisted there was a problem with each and every cover image. Half an hour later, when I did nothing in response, all was magically well. So, okay, doing nothing? That’s in my wheelhouse.
Hey, I want to say this: these sites are all really good and easy to use, these days. Google in particular used to be a semi-nightmare. But aside from that weird non-error, they, Draft2Digital, and Kobo were super-smooth. Amazon’s KDP remains annoying (especially the “feature” of going back to a previous page, losing my work, when I use the backspace key while editing a pricing field), but it doesn’t seem to be any worse. On Smashwords, I’ve only listed the freebie so far. I’ll probably get around to the others. But D2D is so much easier to use that I’m not entirely certain Smashwords will distribute anything farther than their own store for me. Still. I do like the company. So I don’t want to leave them out entirely.
I thought about publishing directly to Apple’s store, since they’ve apparently made that possible for non-Mac users lately. But, nah. I’d have had to install iTunes to create an account. Or at least that’s what it looked like when I spent a few minutes looking this stuff up. And I really didn’t feel like doing that. I’d have to totally wipe all traces off my computer afterward, and what if I “needed” it again for some damn thing later? So Draft2Digital will handle distribution to Apple for me, for now.
Oh yeah! Funny thing. Pagan Sex is still “In Review” at Amazon, more than 24 hours after I submitted it. Ha! I mean, I know the title is ridiculous and off-putting and not as clever as I want it to be. And Amazon says 72 hours is typical. But, typically, in my actual experience, the review process (if any) finishes within a couple of hours. So that’s making me giggle.
(And hey! I just checked: in spite of what I said earlier, that book’s still “publishing” on Kobo, and so is The Blood Between, so my ill-informed but amusing-to-me guess is that title keywords are relevant to these processes. Once upon a time I got annoyed and pulled all my books from Kobo for several months, because they were not only censoring “erotica” but being draconian about anything that might potentially be sneaky hidden erotica…as if authors had some reason to do that in the first place, which was a weird-but-apparently-PC notion that never made sense to me…and they were especially draconian with regard to indie authors…I mean, fine, if that was how they wanted to roll, but I don’t have to like censorship even though I do claim I don’t personally either read or write that kind of book–anyway, it’s interesting to watch what people do…and also to write really long oddly-punctuated sentences from time to time.)
Much more to come. Those of you who get these posts via email will be receiving a link to a members-only free download page. So far it has the above freebie and the second book in the series…I want to get some more stuff ready before I send that out. Short stories, mostly, for now. They’ll only be available via my site–well, my site plus BookFunnel’s for the actual download/transfer. I’m playing with their service as a way to distribute ebooks in various formats to readers who may need help getting them onto various devices. They handle tech support? Kewl. Maybe it’ll work!
Anyway. Have fun out there!
Eww. Using MailerLite, that cover image turned out horribly. Got expanded to the full width of the email. It’s just a little-bitty thing.
I reached out to tech support. Maybe they won’t do that next time? I mean, their system overrode both the actual image size and the HTML image attributes. Not sure what else I can do to make that work on their end.
We’ll see how it goes.