Editing update and that Kobo kerfluffle…
Hubby went off to Lucca for Lucca Comics and Games, and as I started the beta reading phase for Alice’s first book, I had to do something besides revisions. I opted to edit some recent releases, and so far I’ve uploaded new versions for Bran of Greenwood and the Scary Fairy Princess and Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life. I’ve also edited Thicker Than Blood and added the updates to the Peter the Wolf omnibus edition, but last night both Amazon and Kobo had problems with their sites, preventing me from uploading. I’ve got the new files on Gumroad already, so you can find Peter’s updated books through my blog bookstore.
Editing will be my top priority this month, and I plan to update Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition next, followed by Saving Gabriel and A Frosty Girl’s Cure. I won’t say this is the last pass through the books, as every few months, I like to go back and see if I can find more typos. Additionally, folks will sometimes email me or tweet with mistakes they caught, and I will make passes through the books to fix whatever mistakes they found. No book is ever a done deal so long as there are mistakes left, and I hope I’m making it clear that my highest priority is giving you the best books I possibly can.
Moving on to other topics, most of you will probably know by now that Kobo pulled all indie-published titles from their UK store for a short time based on what they called “intense media scrutiny” over certain adult-oriented books. What really happened was that an online journal noted the names of some books and made up a story that Kobo was selling rape, incest, and bestiality porn. But here’s the thing: the books being brought up were not real books. These are fake ebooks with keyword-based titles meant to trick certain people into buying them. It’s a scam where the victims can’t report the crime, because who wants to complain that the rape porn book they bought was a fake?
In any case, with just a few vocal complaints, Kobo yanked all indie books for a time, and they stated over and over again, “this is not censorship. We’re merely deciding to clear out the books that don’t fit our standards.” In the end, they put most books back up, and so far as I can tell, none of my books were pulled from the site.
In the aftermath, a lot of indie writers began a campaign called Kobogeddon to push readers over to Smashwords and punish Kobo. It seems they’ve forgotten that Smashwords also pulled titles, but their PR campaign covered for them in a rather effective way. Mark Coker was writing on his blog that it was all PayPal’s fault that he couldn’t sell Lolita. Which is bullshit because when I emailed him to ask about some of my titles with similar themes, he said they had NEVER allowed such material on their site. He then pulled three of my books from the market, but left up many other books with similar themes, as well as my only porn title that also didn’t fit with their guidelines. It was his inconsistent approach and his false public PR campaign that made me choose to pull all of my books from Smashwords, and to this day I won’t promote books through Smashwords because I find Mark Coker’s lies to be more galling than those told by Kobo or Amazon. The thing I want to stress is, my decision not to work with Smashwords is a personal choice, and it’s not something I’d push on other people.
No vendor out there hasn’t dabbled in censorship at some point. Amazon blocked all books with GLBT themes, even children’s books, and then turned around and blamed it on “some guy in France.” So it’s important to keep in mind that all the major vendors have screwed over the indies at some point, all the while trumpeting that they were the indie’s best friends.
It’s my ability to remember events past the current year that prevents me from feeling outrage over Kobo’s current fuck-up. Indies, it’s not a question of if a vendor will screw you over, it’s a question of when. Everyone will do it at some point, and you really just have to grin and bear it. The alternative is trying to sell books on your own, and I can speak from past experience and tell you, that won’t work. People who use Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords will continue to shop where they’ve become accustomed, and you will lose sales by not pushing those markets.
And readers, really, just buy your ebooks where you like. I’d love for you to buy my books directly through my blog bookstore because I get the largest cut of the sales from Gumroad. But very few of you shop at my blog, and I don’t mind if you go to Amazon to pick up a book on your Kindle. And if you prefer Smashwords, well I’m sorry you can’t find my books over there. But I have a personal beef with the head honcho blatantly lying to people in public while doing something completely different in private. It angers me more that people continue to insist he’s a champion of the indies in the wake of Kobo’s fiasco precisely because they seem to have forgotten that he’s screwed some indies over as well.
In any case, use the vendor you feel most comfortable with, and don’t worry about shopping with whoever is the current darling. Sooner or later, the vendors all fuck us over, and there’s no need for you to play bookstore hopscotch to find the least scummy store. They’re all a bit scummy, really.
I want to close out this ramble by thanking those of you who bought books this month already, both at Amazon and Kobo. Like I said, I’d love if you could shop at my blog bookstore, but hey, a sale is a sale no matter where it comes from. I really do appreciate your continued support, and in addition to working on new releases, I’ll keep polishing the older books to make them nicer reads for you. Thanks again. Your support is what keeps me going despite all of these headaches and frustrations.
