An Experiment & Canceling Quickies

Have you ever come to the sudden realization that you’re doing something simply because that’s the way you’ve always done it? And there’s no real reason not to change it? And, in fact, there might be a few good reasons to change it?

I think that’s where I’m at right now with my collections.

When I got started, way back in 2014, I tried to be experimental and try new things, but I had a kind of clear goal with my collections. At one point, they were an experiment to me: write six episodes, collect them in trilogies, then collect two trilogies into a Season. And it worked. Like REALLY well. Back then, those Complete Seasons were what paid my fucking bills for the most part.

So I think that, combined with the uncertainty of how Amazon felt about putting something in the KU twice (once as a stand-alone title and again in a collection) really locked doing it just like that into my head. It wasn’t until recently that I even had the notion that I should probably be unlocking that bonus content I generated for the collections.

But it kind of just hit me today, for some reason, that I should stop doing this. Tons of people are releasing their Complete Trilogies and Complete Series in the Kindle Unlimited alongside their stand-alone titles.

So that’s what I’m going to do as an experiment. For now, I’ve made the first titles in Hellcats & Desire free, and I want to see how that does. But for the rest of my titles, I’ll be slowly working them into the Kindle Unlimited.

This will include the bonus content short stories.

Which is why I am going to cancel the Quickies. Since the beginning, even when I was excited about the idea of Quickies, something has felt off about them. Kind of…I don’t know, sloppy, I guess? Asymmetrical, unbalanced, uncertain. Just off. Although I’ve generated a fair amount of new content, it just hasn’t been feeling right. It’s been kind of fun writing for old stuff, but it’s also be unusually taxing. I’m terrible at writing short stories, to be honest. I don’t enjoy them and they slow me down way more than you’d think they would, and almost no one seems to be buying them. Not that I blame people.

So this is what I’m going to do. With the exception of Hellcats & Desire, given I can’t enroll them in the KU since they’re on other sites and part of the First Title Free experiment, I will take down the Quickies and integrate any bonus content into the Complete Trilogy and Complete Series and put them in the KU once they are updated. I’ll also probably drop at least some of them to 99 cents to help with visibility.

What does this mean for the immediate future? Well, since I’m putting a halt on Quickies, I’ll dive right into Haven - Epilogue.

Little Update

So I’ve been really busy. I’ve gotten some stuff out and managed to make something of a minor breakthrough in terms of aesthetics and presentation.

First, the releases.

Biggest one, I got Like A Fine Wine out!

I also threw together the Alien Harem Collection. It was weird writing for Alien Harem again. I put together a short bonus for the Collection, obviously. Hopefully I managed to get it right.

I also finally put together my Misty Vixen Collected paperback. In short, it’s a 300-page paperback that collects all of my uncollected stories available on Amazon. So Exploration, My Undead Lover, and the five Freebies. There’s absolutely NO NEW CONTENT, I want to be clear on that. This is really just for the people who want to own everything in physical format. You can buy it here. (For some reason it’s ‘not in stock’ at the moment. I have no idea why this is or how long it will take to fix.)

I’ve also finally managed to put Quickies #3 out. It’s got FOUR new short stories, one for each of my stories/series in my Paranormal Universe. That was also strange writing for, and it also gave me a certain bit of satisfaction in finally completely closing the door on that universe. As nice as some of it was, and I did really like some of the plot elements and emotional notes hit with Parasexual, I’ve definitely been leaning hard into more action-oriented survival situations where things are desperate. That’s just a lot more engaging to write for me.

What took up an appreciable part of my time was that I discovered I could put in customized images in my works without too much trouble, so I created a customized title image for all of my works. Instead of just some text with one of four font options available to me through Kindle Create, now you’ve got some (hopefully) cooler looking titling!

I also took the opportunity to update the back matter, removing any reference to Crystal Candy and adding in the Like A Fine Wine section since that story is the first time I’ve created a new series in over a YEAR now. Yeah, I just double-checked and the last time I started a new series was back in April 2019 with the release of Haven. Wow. (I guess technically I started like four with Crystal Candy, but I’m not really counting those.)

I also gave the website a little update, making sure all the links still work and doing little touch-ups here and there. The main thing I did was replace the list of text hyperlinks on each of the Universe pages that lead to the individual series pages with cool-looking (I think) tiles. Check it out. (I know, I know, stop the presses, such a MASSIVE update.)

Now I’m bucking down and getting to work on Haven 7. You probably won’t hear from me until the next Newsletter. Hope you enjoy the minor updates and little releases!

Changes & Sacrifices

Some of you may recall several months ago when I made a statement to the effect of “If I was smart, I would drop everything right now and focus on writing Haven.”

I didn’t. Instead, I wrapped up Parasexual. Then I wrote Haven 3. In the weeks that have followed its release, this statement has, if anything, come back to haunt me, and it caused me to begin reconsidering the plan that I had made for myself in December.

For as long as I’ve been speaking with my followers, I’ve maintained a few things. One is that while money isn’t everything, it is crucially important and does keep my bills paid. Another is that I’ve often attempted to find a balance between what I want to write, and what will earn me money. I still believe these hold true, and I still strive for that balance.

However, I’ve also come to learn that sacrifices need to be made if you want to be successful at something. Sometimes it’s sleep, sometimes it’s having a social life, and sometimes it’s working on one project instead of another.

And specifically, what it means right now is dropping almost everything and shifting focus to Haven.

Let me give you an idea of the events that have occurred so you can better understand why I’m doing this.

My sales began to look poor in October, and then they started to get genuinely worrying through November and into December.

January, on the other hand, if it holds steady to what it’s currently doing, will probably be in my top ten best months ever (barring the freak lightning strike in May 2018.) And it is painfully obvious why this is happening.

Haven.

Currently, the Haven series is 4 titles. So far, this month, 69 titles (that includes the A Warm Place titles), have sold in some capacity. So that means that Haven represents 5% of all titles that have sold so far this month.

Haven accounts for 61% of my total income.

Let me repeat that: FIVE PERCENT of my titles account for SIXTY PERCENT of my total income.

That is fucking insane.

They are outselling EVERYTHING by several magnitudes. To help give you a better idea, Haven 1, 2, & 3 hold the top three spots of page reads from the Kindle Unlimited, with Haven 2 holding Spot #3. Spot #4 is The Misty Vixen Starter Pack, and it has earned less than 1/4 of Haven 2’s page reads. It is THAT much of a drop-off. The chasm between Haven and everything else is vast.

Meaning that the reason I’m having a spectacular month is almost entirely because of Haven.

If I was just looking to pay my bills and have some cash leftover at the end of each month, I’d actually be pretty satisfied with where I’m at. For awhile, I was, (or at least I think so, when it comes to the past, we tend to stack the deck.) But at this point in my life, I’m not satisfied with that. I’m still not honestly looking to be mega rich, I’m not interested in having a mansion or taking insane vacations or hoarding money just for the sake of hoarding money. I have a few bigger debts I’d like to pay off, and yeah, I have some expensive things I’d like to own, (it’d be nice not to have a car that needs a major repair every four to six months), but there’s people in my life who I would really, really fucking like to be able to help out in the way that only money, and I mean real money, can. There are causes I’d love to donate to, huge, enormous tips I’d love to leave, people I’d just like to make happy. I honestly fucking love being generous for the sake of being generous when I can afford it.

I think I can get there, I can get to that level of money, if I made a few sacrifices and focused even harder on what sells. Like Haven. I think that if I put the majority of my focus into producing Haven content regularly, I might actually be able to take off. And honestly, I’m tired of living in obscurity. I’ve been doing this for five years now. It’d be nice if I could be one of those people that gets fucking a hundred reviews within a few weeks of launching, you know?

I know there’s a few ways to go about this. One way is to game the system like Eric Vall and hire a team of ghost writers to pump out books for four or five different series. (I obviously don’t know for a fact that that’s what they’re doing, but come on, I don’t think it’s physically possible to pump out a 150,000 word novel EVERY FUCKING WEEK for A YEAR STRAIGHT. Like, genuinely, it’s not possible for one human to do.) Another is to do it like Jan Stryvant and focus on one series that’s already taken off. That one seems much more doable, and feels much more within my grasp.

So this is what I’m going to do.

Since I don’t want to just straight-up abandon working on literally anything else, I’m going to continue doing the 80-20 split. My 80% work will be Haven. My 20% will be whatever other project I’ve chosen to take on. Right now, that means Demoness V, and then probably Lust & Adventure IV since I’d really like to get that out of the way. Then maybe a few Quickies, and then something Sci-Fi. But my point is that I’ll now be aiming to get a new Haven novel out once a month until it’s done. After that, I think I may actually take on A Warm Place, since I feel strongly about that series, and I think it might do even better than Haven.

To those of you who were looking forward to basically anything else besides Haven, I am sorry. I hope the compromise I’ve tried to make with the 80-20 split is acceptable. But, honestly, I guess I feel like in one way, I’m doing this for the fans. The fans vote with their wallets on what sells, and the vote is in: Haven wins.

Useless Updates + Crystal Candy Stuff

I’ve been suffering for the past week, getting NO writing done, because once again I found myself falling down the rabbit hole that is updating all my fucking content.

So you can probably ignore this because I just felt like complaining.

Since it was the 5 year anniversary, I decided to kind of clean everything up a bit more thoroughly.

I touched up all the cover art, including the covers that have yet to be remade. Even though I am working to get them remade, it will still take time, several months, probably into May or June. I figured I might as well take the hour or so of effort necessary to bring the older cover art in line with the newer cover art, since it looks WAY better. This includes the entire A Warm Place series, and the Refuge covers. They’ve all been remade.

I checked over both this website and my Crystal Candy website, making sure all the links work, remaking all the banners, reading over everything and making sure there were no errors and rewording things here and there.

I updated my back matter again to further reflect the current state of affairs. I also basically remade EVERY story to republish to the Kindle for a number of reasons: updated back matter, to capitalize on the number of corrections I’ve made here and there as I’ve caught them or they’ve been pointed out to me, everything from accidental double-spaces, misspellings, factual errors, stuff like that, and also for more unity in terms of formatting.

I basically did the same thing for my paperbacks. I would like to point out not ALL the paperbacks, just the ones that have finalized cover art. For example, Paranormal Passions paperbacks haven’t been updated, same with Desire.

I double-checked all the synopsis for every single story, both on the site and on the Kindle, (and Smashwords and, through there, the other sites the handful of stories are available on), and also on the backs of the paperbacks.

I also finally got through editing My Undead Lover, so that’s up.

In terms of backlog editing, I’ve basically given up, because at some point I realized that even if I manage to find someone to help me regularly, I’ll never fucking keep up with my own output, not at this point. So now I’ve just got Exploration, Demoness III, and The Former Princess to look over, as they are the last of the stories I managed to get looked over by another person before giving up. On that note, if you’re reading any of my titles and come across any error of any kind, I would absolutely accept and appreciate it if you shot me an e-mail about that. A few people have done that and it’s been extremely appreciated and helpful.

I pulled a lot of really late nights doing this, just because I wanted so desperately to get it done and out of the fucking way, because it’s not just a huge time-suck, but also just a brain-melter. I feel goddamned braindead after doing this stuff.

Plus it means I don’t write.

Now, about Crystal Candy.

So, before you get your hopes up, I’m still keeping things quiet for right now in regards to writing Crystal Candy stuff. Sorry.

A WARM PLACE. I did go through and re-upload new covers and slightly updated versions of A Warm Place. I still like that series, and I figure I’ll say it now. I have decided to rewrite A Warm Place and re-release it as a series of novels under Misty Vixen. However, this is still a ways off. I’m not actually sure when I’ll begin doing this. I’d like to get farther along in my other works for the moment. As for specifics, it will follow Chris, be written in first person, begin sometime before the current series, and continue to some point after it, with the first series now serving as the middle. Basically, I want to recreate the style I established while writing that series, just much more fleshed out, more character development, more events, more survival stuff, etc.

MAIDENS & MAYHEM. I have opted to cancel this series. If you were reading it, I am sorry. Although I do appreciate the idea I had going, I just couldn’t bring myself to care about it. That’s almost never happened before. It was part of the reason I ultimately decided to put Crystal Candy on hiatus. So I’ve just decided to cancel it. Although I do like the characters and I do want to do some kind of fantasy-setting story, so I think I’ll, at some point, do a much more survival-based story. We’ll see.

REFUGE. I still really like this series and want to keep going with it. Given the amount of time that’s passed, I’m going to go back and re-read/edit what I’ve already written, and then continue working on it. However, it will be at a much slower pace. And given this slower pace, I’ll go ahead and edit whatever I put out before I put it out.

After taking a look through my catalog of ideas for Crystal Candy, I ended up axing most of them, because I realized that they were either quick & dirty versions of ideas I want to do elsewhere, and I should just save it for when I get to those ideas, or they were like Maidens & Mayhem: cool in theory, but not for me. For example, I axed the modern stuff, since I honestly can’t bring myself to care about it enough. I still intend to do the horror story, and I am feeling the urge to write like a caveman story, with some fantasy elements. Beyond that, who can say? I’m definitely relegating Crystal Candy to a side project that I’ll get to when I can.

That’s it really. I’m still hoping to get Demoness V out by the end of the month, with work going into finishing Kyra’s Game, and publishing the first two or three Quickies, and Lust & Adventure IV, which will become my main project after Demoness V. And then once all that shit’s done, Haven 4, full steam ahead.

Quick Updates

So, first and foremost, Haven 3 is out!

 
 

eBook here. Paperback here. Alternate nude version of cover here.

I think this might be a new record for me. I wrote, edited, and published Haven 3 in about three weeks. Which is fucking insane. Also very draining, because I was also working on Demoness V at the same time. And trying to live my life, too.

So what’s next?

Well, the fact that it’s winter and that I just wrote a novel in three weeks means that I need to tone things down for a little bit. Traditionally, I take a break at the end of the year. Like, I just stop doing shit. At the moment, I can’t really afford to do that, so instead there’s going to be a bit of a compromise.

First and foremost, I’m going to keep working on Demoness V. Not at the breakneck pace I wrote Haven 3 at, but appreciable progress will be made every week. I still hope to get it out in January, though probably late January.

In the background, I also intend to put some real work into the first of the Quickies collections, and Kyra’s Game. I’m making finishing that one up a relative priority. I also am trying to wrap up a few irritating little glitches that are beyond my control. Some of my paperback and ebook version aren’t linked on Amazon, and Haven doesn’t actually have a series page yet, for some reason. Not to mention, Parasexual: Epilogue hasn’t been added to the Parasexual series, even though I marked it as the sixth title. Stuff like that.

The biggest change I’ve been making is cover art. Basically, lightning struck apparently, (metaphorically speaking), and I suddenly had an idea to make my covers look a lot better. I don’t really know why I haven’t been doing this for awhile now. Since inspiration struck, I’ve been going through and updating everything, ebook and paperbacks. All the ones that I can update should be changed by now.

Here’s a quick list of the updated titles.

  • HELLCATS

  • ALIEN HAREM

  • FREEBIES

  • DEMONESS

  • WOMEN OF THE WILD

  • WANDERLUST

  • MY UNDEAD LOVER

  • ROYAL LUST

  • EXPLORATION

  • AMAZONIAN’S LOVE

  • HAVEN

  • PARASEXUAL

Here’s a quick list of what remains to be updated, which I hope to do as quickly as possible, but does take time and money.

  • DESIRE

  • LUST & ADVENTURE

  • ADVENTUROUS

  • SEX & SURVIVAL

  • PARANORMAL PASSIONS

  • VALKYRIES

After that, all the titles will finally be up-to-snuff!

Okay, quick recap with a few more added facts, roughly in intended chronological order.

  • Publish Demoness V.

  • Assemble (at least) the first two Quickies.

  • Finish Kyra’s Game.

  • Publish Haven 4.

  • Publish Lust & Adventure IV.

With the completion of Kyra’s Game and Lust & Adventure IV, I will officially be caught up. I’ve decided against writing another Sex & Survival, and although technically I’ll still have four series in progress (Haven, Demoness, Adventurous, and Women of the Wild), I don’t consider them loose ends to be tied off. Each is a series in its own right that will require significant investment. I’ll talk about this more in a big 2020 ‘look ahead’ post on January 1st, but I intend to finish the Haven series next year, and begin work on a brand new sci-fi series alongside it.

Finally, I’ll be doing a big, giant giveaway starting tomorrow!

A Question of Collections

Hey so, I was just kind of sitting there, and it hit me just now that I could, with ease, put together a collection of Parasexual 1 -3 for 9.99$.

Anyone who has followed me since before 2018 knows that Collections used to be half my fucking business model. To be honest, I didn’t super like doing them, because I was always riding what felt like a razor’s edge.

I wanted to write exclusive material for all the collections, because on the one hand, I wanted to make it worth purchasing, instead of just a generic repackaging, (which I have ended up breaking down and doing for Crystal Candy), but I didn’t want to make it too interesting, because then people who don’t want to or can’t afford to purchase the packs would feel like they’re missing out.

I looked at it as kind of DLC, which itself rides this line. You should be able to play the game without ever touching the DLC and enjoy it as a whole, but if you decide to buy the DLC, it should be worth buying and enrich your experience.

I think I got kinda good at it, but it WAS a bit of a pain.

So now I’m wondering if I should go ahead and keep doing it for future titles. And maybe even as a way to collect previous titles, (maybe like have a My Undead Lover/Exploration combo pack with bonus content or something?)

I don’t really know, because I also ride the line between trying to provide a fair service, and trying to make money. It gets hard to determine where that line is drawn, for obvious reasons.

Does anyone have any opinions? Because I have to admit, there is a part of me that is actually really into the idea of writing bonus content.

Probably Useless Updates

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.

General Update

Hey everyone, there really isn’t anything major or important in here, this is more of a sanity check for me than for anything else. But there are a few updates that you may find interesting.

So I’ve been talking about the editing my whole backlog thing for several months at this point, and I’ve finally just now, (it’s like 2AM, I couldn’t sleep), came to the realization, and decision, that it’s just not going to work, and more importantly, I’m letting it ruin my productivity. The reality of the situation is that all of my backlist has received at least one edit, most of them have gotten more than one. But what I think really made me realize that it’s just wasting time is that I had a system in place for this for years, and apparently it worked.

I would write the story. Then I would edit the story. Then I would publish the story.

Obviously, this was not perfect. Errors will get through. But honestly, no one really said much of anything because I think I managed to catch the most grievous of errors. And the fact that I went ahead and published Haven unedited has made it pretty obvious to me that I can’t do that, either, because too much slips through the initial writing.

So I’m just going back to that.

In fact, I’m going to begin implementing a new system that should really help streamline the whole process: I will edit the story as I’m writing it. That way, by the time it’s done writing, I’ll already be like 75-85% done editing it, and it’ll just take a little bit longer to finish up.

Now, that being said, I still have some things that I need to go ahead and edit, as they were edited already, and I don’t want to just waste that effort. These titles include:

  • THE WANDERLUST SERIES

  • LARGE & LOVELY

  • PINK

  • SNAKESKIN

  • BLIND DATE

  • THE PALE REDHEAD

  • DEMONESS III

  • DEMONESS - THE FORMER PRINCESS

  • DEMONESS - FAREWELL FOR NOW

  • MY UNDEAD LOVER

  • EXPLORATION

So if anyone actually really cared about these edits, those are the titles that will be edited, although hardly anything has changed about them.

Haven never received an edit, unfortunately, so I’ll have to go over that one myself. I’ll begin working on it just as soon as Haven 2 is out. Sorry this got so fucked up.

As for other news?

Well, I’ve made good progress on Haven 2. I’m about 75% done, I think, and like half of that is already edited. (Again, hard to tell with the way I plan things. And a lot of times what I think is one chapter overflows severely and sometimes actually makes two whole chapters. This happened a lot in Demoness IV.) I’m really, really going to try and have that published by the end of the month. Honestly, I’m shooting for within the next two weeks.

After that, I want to dive back into Parasexual.

I’m still going full steam ahead with the covers. I’ve just begun the process of commissioning the Wanderlust IV cover. If I can bust some ass, I might have Wanderlust ‘relaunched’ by the end of the month too, (i.e. new cover art, new edits, nothing else though. Like, I’m not republishing it or anything, just updating.)

After that, I’m going to get new covers for all of my freebie titles currently available.

And so yeah, that’s about the size of it. Honestly, deciding to stop fucking around with this is a pretty big weight off my shoulders. I’m also going to be taking a break near the end of the month, like a real, actual one where I can’t get any work done, so I’m hoping I can come back in August with a clear head ready to write.

My Condition & Releasing Parasexual 3 Early.

Hey everyone, this is just a quick update.

So I’ve come to a decision. I’m going to be releasing Parasexual 3 even though I haven’t yet finished editing it. I’ve never done this before. So why am I doing it now?

Basically, something is wrong with my head. For about two weeks now, I’ve been suffering from headaches and dizzness/light-headedness. I’m in the process of figuring out what’s going on with my doctor, right now we’re largely just ruling things out. While this isn’t exactly debilitating, it is making some things harder. Some things much harder.

I can still write decently well, but for some reason it’s very difficult to read. The best way I can describe the problem is that my mind just keeps wandering away from the words, and on top of that, imagine trying to read while you are lightheaded. I don’t know, maybe it’d be easy for you, but apparently it’s really hard for me. I’m barely managing to edit a few pages per DAY with Parasexual 3, and the pace I’m moving at is way, WAY too slow, and I really need to get a new title out.

Now, if I thought it was going to severely compromise the quality of the story, I wouldn’t do this. I’d just bite the bullet and take the time. But to be honest, my own personal edits don’t really change a lot. At most, I fix a few words and change up the phrasing here and there. So my point is, there honestly isn’t a lot of difference between an unedited version of my story, and an edited one. Honestly, I can only catch so much, the main reasons being that A) I’m not a great editor, and B) I’m blind to a lot of my own mistakes, because my brain autocorrects for me, because I know what it’s supposed to say, so I’ll read over some kind of obvious mistakes.

Now, I will still be editing it in the meantime, and when I finally finish it, I will update the fully edited version, but again, there really won’t be much of a difference. I am sorry about this, I wish I could do better, but it’s an actual physical limitation at the moment.

Parasexual 3 will be up within a day or two. Here’s the cover. Thank you for your support and, hopefully, your understanding.

Apparently Amazon Hates the Valkyries Trilogy...

Oh holy fuck.

Allow me to shine a light on the flat out fucking ridiculous situation I’ve been dealing with since late December 2018.

So, first of all, I’m not convinced that the original problem I encountered has anything to do with everything that came after. Unfortunately, Amazon is so nebulous and opaque with regards to how they communicate LITERALLY FUCKING EVERYTHING, that I have no idea if this is true or not. I’ll provide information on what happened and theories.

This began at the end of last year, when I was finally wrapping up re-publishing my backlog. I published Valkyries 3, but it was blocked during the process. After some digging, I finally pieced together the problem. It’s one I’ve run into before, but one that always slips past my initial thought process, because it’s so fucking stupid.

The inciting incident of Valkyries 3 involves a woman coming to the Valkyries, (a team of mercenaries in a sci-fi setting for those who aren’t in the know), begging them for help after her brother was kidnapped by slavers at the edge of space. They decide to help, and end up going after the slavers. Given the importance of this, I put it in the plot description.

Unfortunately, because it was labeled as erotica, use of the word ‘brother’ in the official synopsis meant (I’m guessing but I feel about 100% confident in my guess, again, this is trial-and-error, not anything Amazon ACTUALLY told me), that it was auto-flagged. I tried publishing it again, removed the word brother and replaced it with ‘someone close to her’. It went through without a problem. Okay, problem solved.

But then, about a week later, it gets blocked again.

The official reason?

Hello,

We’re contacting you regarding the following book:

Valkyries 3 by Misty Vixen

During our review process, we found that this content is in violation of our content guidelines. As a result, we cannot offer this book for sale. If we identify additional submissions with similar content that violates our guidelines you may lose access to optional KDP services and/or face account level actions up to and including termination.

You can find our content guidelines on the KDP website:

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2TOZW0SV7IR1U

Best regards,

Amazon KDP

Now, as I’ve said, I’ve run into this before. But other times I at least had a clue as to what the problem was. The same day, I received the exact same message about the paperback version.

At this point, I was confused, as I had no idea what could be doing it. So I decided to roll the dice and reach out. This is where it gets to be a bit of a mess, with long, awkward pauses between responses, and basically just a loop of the exact same shit happening over and over again, so I’ll truncate it and highlight the important parts.

I first went through e-mail, then the phone. (For anyone wondering how in the FUCK I talked to Amazon on the phone, three things. First, they call you, you don’t call them. Second, the only possible way is to send them a message through the Contact Us form, specifically requesting a phone call. And even then, it’s no guarantee that they’ll do it. Third, don’t expect genuine help. The people on the other end range from robotic to sounding like they genuinely want to help, but the reality of the situation is that there’s an almost 100% chance they have no knowledge of how to solve your problem, nor do they have the power to solve your problem. Literally all they can do is ask the people in the other department who actually handle this shit to solve the problem, and those people are apparently assholes, as I’ll demonstrate in the following text.)

I think I talked on the phone SIX times over the past month and a half or so. The first few times, I spoke with whoever answered, explained the situation, and ultimately they told me they would get in touch with the Content Review Team, who are the ones actually doing this fucking shit, and try to get a straight answer out of them. The last few times, I escalated it, and spoke with someone from the next tier, basically a manager, and was told…basically the same thing.

The result? Always the same. I would receive a form letter from the Kindle Content Review Team that was an actual, literal copy-paste of the initial message. Sometimes I would get a simple message from the person I’d just gotten off the phone with, basically verifying that they were sending out their own message to the Content Review Team. When I got back my bullshit copy-paste response from the Content Review Team, I eventually e-mailed that initial person who had helped me over the phone, requesting further assistance, AS THE EXACT THING I HAD WARNED THEM WOULD HAPPEN DID IN FACT HAPPEN. (I specifically stated that I was tired of receiving a literally useless copy-paste response.)

What happened? I got a response to that initial email, only it was a DIFFERENT person responding, AND IT WAS ANOTHER COPY-PASTE OF THAT SAME FUCKING MESSAGE!

I feel like I’m in a fucking M. Night Shyamalan movie. Like, I’ll start seeing that fucking copy-paste response about violating content guidelines on billboards and the sides of buses and in my fucking dreams.

Well, then the situation got worse.

While at first it was initially contained to just Valkyries 3, it has since spread. Suddenly, I got a message that the Valkyries 1 paperback had been taken down for…copyright violations? This was actually the same reason the Valkyries 3 paperback was taken down…in addition to the content guidelines shit. Two completely separate issues.

Then I was informed that the Valkyries Trilogy, both eBook and paperback versions, were blocked.

It was like a fucking virus, and it was spreading.

The 17th of February was when I realized that Amazon has lost their shit.

I received take-down notices for the paperback & eBook versions of Valkyries: The Complete First Season, and Valkyries: The Complete Third Season. THOSE AREN’T EVEN FUCKING AVAILABLE ANYMORE!

So what IS the problem!?

Amazon literally won’t tell me. Like, they actually REFUSE to tell me what the problem is. I have no idea what it is, but I think it may lay somewhere within the actual text itself. I’ve been struggling for weeks, racking my brain trying to think of what could possibly be triggering their bots or algorithm or whatever fucking broken thing they’ve implemented. I’m almost positive at this point that it must be something actually within the story itself. It isn’t the title, nor the cover, nor the synopsis, because multiple titles have been taken down. Literally the only consistencies between the new versions and the old versions that have been blocked is the actual text within the book itself, everything else is different.

Initially, I thought it was something just in Valkyries 3, when both it and The Complete Trilogy got taken down, because whatever is in Valkyries 3, is obviously in The Complete Trilogy. I figured it was some word, some phrase that Amazon was picking up on. I have no idea WHAT, but it must be something. But then the mystery widened when Valkyries 1 got hit too. So it has to be some kind of recurring phrase or word. But what is it?!

I’ve thought and thought, and literally the only thing that comes to mind at all that Valkyries deals with that none of my other stories deals with is slavery. The protagonists are taking down slavers. I don’t understand why this is a bad thing, but there’s some stuff that if you pair with something labeled as erotica, no matter the context at all, it gets auto-banned. Maybe that’s just some new hot-button issue for them? But then that doesn’t make sense, because it isn’t brought up at all in Valkyries 1. So what the fuck?

The problem here is that I have no fucking clue. If they would just work with me and TELL ME what the fucking problem is, I’d be glad to work with them and try to fix it. If it’s just one phrase or something, you know? But I have no idea what it could possibly be. I’ve got nothing!

About two weeks ago, I sent a lengthy email to the Content Review Team basically pleading with them to help me out SOMEHOW. Well, as of today, not only have I not received even the basic response of another copy-paste, I HAVE RECEIVED NO RESPONSE AT ALL. Literally none. They never responded to the message.

Due to this, I’ve been forced to give up and just take down Valkyries 2. I have no idea what the problem is, Amazon refuses to tell me, so I’m going to instead be republishing the trilogy to other sites like Barnes & Nobles, Smashwords, Kobo, etc.

Goddamnit. Fuck Amazon.