Among doing various other things today I:
Opened author accounts with Apple, Kobo, and Bookshop.org
Reclaimed my NookPress account…OMG what a mess!
That one took me the longest. When I originally went with Smashwords for my aggregate I just unpublished all the books I had running through Nook Press already. I did NOT delete them. I should have. I did not realize there were soooooo many of them. I dumped all of them to start refresh in a few days. I also remembered just why I put B&N into the aggregate; they put a hold on my account and I could never figure out why.
Turns out…neither could they! I contacted them through their little chatbot (which is nice because years ago there was only the FAQ, trying to get some real help from a person was damn near impossible! Hence the year long ‘hold’.) and in an hour or so my account was unlocked and everything is nice-nice now.
On Draft2Digital. I delisted all paperbacks and outright deleted all foreign language versions and a few older things. Paperback migration should be easy in a few days.
Slowly I’ll start delisting ebooks. Wait a few days let them clear the system. Then I’ll start uploading them to their new homes. The whole process will probably take two or three weeks. At the end I can close out the D2D account altogether.
This is a royal pain, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve always been an independent sort of a gal so I don’t mind too much and, actually, if I’m honest, I will enjoy having this much control over my work once more. Having been in the game this long this is a lot easier for me than it is for Younger Authors. Some of them are losing it.
Like really Losing It.
They don’t know what to do but they know they want to do something. They’re stuck. Frozen. As they bicker over the decision and the ‘reasons’ behind it. It’s distracting them from doing something about their current situation instead they argue over ‘AI slop’ and ‘low content’ books and-my personal favorite–‘any serious author would___’.
I have a love/hate relationship with watching them do it. I don’t jump in anymore but it can be an interesting Study in Human Behavior and how easily the right hand can distract from what the left hand is really doing. You know, if you just hang back and lurk.
As they’re mired in their distraction, Amazon is going to be The Big Winner from D2Ds bad decision.
Amazon/KDP is the only other thing those authors feel they know. Since Amazon decided to offer ebooks not just in mobi but in ePub and PDF…NO DMR on those….those authors will just risk having their stuff stolen so they can still be available in the two most popular formats.
Some might migrate to IngramSpark until they realize it’s a horrible deal and it works best for print books…not ebooks or audio books.
Old Broads like me…sorry…Old Authors like me….we’ll just go back to doing it the way it used to be done if you wanted to be on those retailers nearly 20 years ago. We’ll handle it ourselves. Besides, it gives us Old Folks a means to learn new things and spruce up some other stuff…like the Nook Press account–ooo that was bad. We’ll be able to run different sales on different sites at different times if we like. Make book descriptions that are tailored to the type of reader each site tends to attract and more. You know, the way it used to be. The way it should be. Control in the hands of the author.
Not the algorithim.
Not the false prophet, El Jefe.
Lisa Beth Darling 