Hey everyone,
I don’t really know how to begin, so I think it’s best I just say it how it is.
As many of you know, the majority of the books I’ve released over the years have been self-published. To do this, I used a platform, which I won’t say the name of, but it wasn’t Amazon’s in-built one. This platform had a lot of features that were really useful to authors and a wider distribution network than just Amazon’s. I have used them for a decade now, and never had any problems until now. I’ve probably produced over 50 books with them if you include works I’ve produced collaboratively with other authors and also clients.
But earlier this year, they made a dramatic change. I won’t go into all the boring and technical details, but suffice to say my faith with this platform has utterly disintegrated. The new system is unusable and almost all of my old data has been damaged in some way. I have lost sales and revenue significantly. Most of my books are no longer distributing and if they are, I’m not being paid when they sell. Ten years of work has been compromised. It’s been very stressful and tough. I’m not the only one affected by this – thousands of authors have, including some great writers you know and love. We’ve been chatting about this at length, though I’ve kept silent about it publicly, waiting for solutions to emerge, but it seems none are forthcoming. This is real and happening. So, I thought I finally had to air it.
I should say, if you’re a Writing Collective author reading this and you’re concerned, then your books are okay! We’re monitoring it daily, but we think that due to the way they were set up, they will not be affected in the same way as my individual books.
I am never one to despair! With destruction comes new beginnings. I am going to be working on removing my work from this platform and republishing it on new platforms. This will likely mean my books disappearing from Amazon over the next few weeks / months (or at least becoming “out of stock”). This is sadly unavoidable if I want to reclaim the rights, which I certainly do. But the good thing is that I’m not powerless here. In the words of Escanor from Seven Deadly Sins:
The books WILL be re-released! And on a better platform, which gives more creative freedom, and overall a better deal for me. I’m not going to be able to re-release them all overnight, as there are simply far too many. But I am going to work on rebuilding my list book by book. I’m going to try and make it fun – letting people vote on which books come back next, making a game of it. I already have plans for the first couple of books, and boy are they going to look better than any book I’ve released previously. At the end of the day, I had fun writing these books, and so as challenging as this process is, we should still try to claim something fun and positive from it.
The first thing I’m going to release to start this process of resurrection is Black Gate: Omnibus – a collation of all three books in the trilogy into one epic volume! This will be coming out June 2020.
The Black Gate trilogy is kind of a calling card for me as a writer, so it makes sense that this is the first book to be risen from the ashes. Check out the cover reveal below! I think it might be my best-ever book design-wise – I’m still trying to keep going forward through this! (thanks to Lizokor for the amazing artwork).
Don’t worry, all the major books I’ve published will be coming back. Some of them needed updating and proofing anyway, so in some strange way, this has been good: it means further refinement and improvement.
One other thing I would mention is that if you really like my work, and want to see more of it, one way you could help me during this difficult time is by becoming a patron. I have recently set up a Patreon account, where I’m sharing never-before-seen writing and behind-the-scenes videos every month. The good thing about being so prolific, is that even with these setbacks, the surface of my creative output has yet to be even scratched. There’s enough in the archives to keep us all entertained for years.
Patreon is proving a really fabulous and vibrant community, and its growing daily. So please, if you’re interested, take a look and consider backing me; I’ll be eternally grateful.
To all those who have read, reviewed, shared, and studied my books over the years: I salute you with every one of my mindflayer tentacles. You’re the best, the bomb, and you’ve literally helped keep me sane and alive. I promise never to give up, never to surrender, and to keep fighting the good fight. You guys make it all worth it.
Lots of love,
Your friendly neighbourhood mindflayer
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