The Great Migration-Oh! We’re Halfway There

Oh-Oh! Livin’ on a prayer.

Nope, nothing ever runs smooth.

I really wanted to move all of my stuff into their new homes in a strategic manner but Draft2Digital was making the impossible. I deleted/delisted the paperbacks almost two weeks ago along with “Heart” and “Genesis” and they’re still showing up. That means they’re getting in my way. They will continue to do that long past my original plan should have been completed.

Slowly I’d been taking books off D2D, I deleted everything old or funky. I took those off Amazon too. Stuff that I wasn’t all that thrilled with like The Doc series–which will get a face lift and be re-released as one novel. I got rid of the foreign language versions almost two weeks ago–with the paperbacks– and they’re still showing up.

On April 28th, I went to D2D and delisted/deleted every single book in every form that was listed with D2D. I then asked them to please permanently delete my account and all information associated with it. Three emails later they finally did that. Yeah, 2 ‘oh please stay with us’ emails including 1 advising me to check my payment/tax status before I could receive the whopping $7.25 they owe me. I told them there was nothing wrong with that information so I didn’t need to sign back into their site…ever. If that was going to be a problem they could consider the $7.25 a parting gift from me to them. After all, they really need the money, right? Call it my donation to their cause.

Luckily, before that, I was able to get all moved in to GooglePlay and Apple. Still being held up with the paperbacks on Nook but I did get all of the ebooks up.

This leaves Kobo. They are insisting my ISBNs are not mine, they belong to Ingram Spark.

The hell they do!

Hal helped me draft a nice letter to them today letting them know I have parted ways with D2D and never had an IS account. I sent a list of book titles with the ISBNs owned by me and the email from D2D showing my account is permanently closed. While I was at it, we drafted and sent a similar one to Nook letting them know the same thing.

Now….the Waiting Game begins.

Apple has yet to fully index all of my stuff so the links are not working properly even though the books are ‘available in 51 markets’. They’re also not showing on my Apple Author page but the audio books are there along with ebooks for “Heart” and “Genesis”. I just have to wait until their system catches up.

Oh, well, I did change ALL of the links on my site. What a pain! As of right this moment all of the books link properly to every place you can actually buy one of my books.

The good news is, while I’m helplessly stuck here in the messy middle, when I get to the end of the process I’ll have completely rebranded myself and my books. I’ll emerge from this New & Improved. Maybe, just maybe, when all of this house cleaning is done, I’ll be inspired to write again.

That is the ultimate goal.

To get rid of the mess and the muck and the stuff that just looks like shit….start again clean and fresh on a foundation that’s not so wobbly anymore.

Yeah…AND to forget about the audience and the algorithm. Just WRITE whatever the hell the Muse sends me. Stop trying to force a story to do something it doesn’t want to do just for the chance at a few sales. It’s a nasty trap and it’s very hard to get out of. I’d really love to publish “Harvest Coomb” but there’s this insidious little voice in me that says it’s not good enough, there’s something wrong with it, it’s off the rails somewhere, people will hate it, it doesn’t make any damn sense! But the few people who READ it liked it and they didn’t seem to feel it was nonsensical.

Oh bother.

Let’s just finish this Herculean task first. But, it should would be nice, at the end of all of this, to release a new novel. Yep. That would be good.