So as I’ve been complaining about on Twitter, I’ve been putting myself through a shitload of what I’m sure are meaningless updates, since I’m sure 99% of people won’t notice them or even care. I’m just kind of neurotic.
But for those of you who do care, here is a developer-style list of updates I made to all my titles.
Removed the intros explaining about the re-release of all my re-released stories, (Wanderlust, Hellcats, Royal Lust, etc.), you know, all my stuff that used to be episodic shorts. I figured it was just cluttering up the beginning of the book, which is important for making a first impression, and at this point everyone who even cares already knows, and if anyone is confused, they can easily reach out to me for clarification.
Updated the back matter. So I went through and made tiny tweaks to the backs of all my books, like the descriptions of my other series, as well as my own About Me. Some of it was just minor wording that I thought sounded a little better, but the biggest change is that I’m no longer calling myself an erotica author, since it’s not really true anymore, and I’ve been slowly removing that label from myself. Again, not out of any kind of disparagement to erotica authors, but because I genuinely don’t think I can call myself one anymore. Erotica, by definition, is a plot that relies on sex. Remove the sex, the plot falls apart. That really isn’t true of most of my works nowadays. I also updated the back matter to reflect my new Crystal Candy stuff.
Updated the cover art. I’ve decided to color-code my covers. Fantasy is light green, Science Fiction is electric blue, Post-Apocalyptic is red, and Paranormal is hot pink. This is reflected in the color of the text. I also redid the darkness on the tops and bottoms of all them to emphasize the words a little more, and screwed with the placement of the backgrounds and figures a little bit. Ultimately most of this is just prep work for when I get new cover art, but that’s going to take a long time, so I figured I might as well just get it all out of the way now.
I checked over all the synopsis of all the books and made minor edits.
I tweaked the chapter titles and book titles inside the documents themselves slightly to try and make them all more uniform and look a little bit better.
The paperbacks. Oh fucking hell the paperbacks. So, I admittedly have not fucked with MOST of them for one primary reason: I HATE dealing with paperback cover art, and since I’m going to be getting drip-fed the covers slowly over the course of the next year, I figured I might as well just space out the task. I mean honestly, I sell maybe a dozen paperbacks during a good month, so it’s not like people are desperate for these. I also removed those intros from re-releases and updated the back matter for paperbacks as well.
I added tables of contents to the freebies. Stupid, I know, but I was looking over them and it just felt weird not to have them. Plus, Amazon probably likes it. I once got sent a message warning me that one of my titles (I think it was Large & Lovely?) didn’t have a table of contents, and I was like…yeah, it’s a fucking short story, like why would it need one? Now I’m a little more pro with the back matter and stuff, so I can at least stuff a really basic ToC in there, lol.
Something really fucking annoying I had to do was remove ANY reference to ANY kind of family from any of the descriptions. Large & Lovely, for example, referenced the protagonist’s father and younger brother. Royal Lust referenced Ellie’s father. Adventurous referenced Steven’s dad. I mean, this is fucking stupid, and it obviously got through once, but it just feels like asking for trouble at this point. Whoever got their fucking bitch ass in a twist over incest on the Kindle can genuinely just fuck right off.
That’s about it. All the new covers should be updated to the website by now, I don’t know if all the updates have gone through on the actual Kindle versions yet, since that’s a crapshoot, but it should be by, at the latest, the end of the week.
Now I’m going on fucking vacation.