The Tale of Dread November (An Update)

Hey peeps,

Time for a big update. November has been a rough month. To give you some perspective on the “glamourous life of an author”, I’ll tell you a little bit about what it’s been like.

First, it started toward the end of September when I found out that book pirates had uploaded four of my books to Amazon under my name, and they were getting the money for it. I’m not sure how they managed it, though I know it’s possible, but it freaked me out. Because these were Otherworld books that I had the rights back to but had not yet re-released. Immediately, I knew I had to do something before they tried it with more books.

I had to do something I didn’t want to: upload the books I have the rights back to before I got the rest of the series back. That caused a lot of internal conflict, because if the books they have left start selling better, I won’t get the rights back to the rest of the series. And if I don’t have the rights back to the whole series, I can’t make book bundles or promote it the way I truly hoped to.

Yet, I couldn’t let the fucking thieves do that to me. I hate scammers and book pirates and thieves (there are so many ways to screw over authors, trust me). I truly do.

First, I had to contact Amazon and prove to them that I had the rights to my books and that the people who were on the other end of whatever account it was, didn’t.

Then, I had to contact my cover artist and see if she had the time to make them (thank gods she did), and I needed to order 22 books covers (which cost a rather terrifying sum of money in a short amount of time—but I have to say, for short notice and because she’s so nice, it was half what I could have ended up paying). I needed covers for:

• 12 (out of 18) Otherworld books
• 4 Otherworld novellas
• 1 Fly By Night Book)
• And because I was trying to make sure the look for all of them was the same it meant I also had to buy 5 more covers (for books 19-21 that I wrote in indie to finish the series, and 2 anthologies that I had released in indie.

Then came the incredibly labor intensive tasks of:

• Approving the cover art.
• Preparing the manuscripts and getting them into shape so we could format them.
• Formatting them.
• Uploading them.

And that took so much time out of my schedule that it threw off my writing on Shadow Stealing and the chapters for The Glass Unicorn. Which meant I got horribly behind, and it seemed like every other day something else happened to put me even further behind. Not necessarily with my writing, but just every day life events.

Like I had to find a repair man for the dishwasher, which decided to break down a month after the warranty expired. Then the other day the over-the-range microwave decided to give us a marvelous swan song. It wouldn’t turn off when you began to microwave something unless you just opened the door and left it open. Which meant fire hazard because that’s just…not the way electricity is supposed to work. So I had to deal with that, and now I have to find the money to buy a new microwave. (Before anybody says ‘just use the stove’…with the disabilities my husband has, and my own time limitations, um…microwaves are a necessary tool).

And while this isn’t as ‘important’…I love decorating for the holidays and because I’ve been so far behind, I’ve had to let my assistant do the work. Which makes me a little sad, but hey, at least it’s sparkly and pretty and that goes a long way.

And if that weren’t enough, during November, we had to migrate my shop to a different web host. Which meant finding a new host, preparing the site, and all the accompanying work.

Our previous webhost totally dropped the ball and I wasn’t able to update my site in a timely manner. I’m not sure what they weren’t doing, but it was fucked up. We were also getting THOUSANDS of scammers/spammer bots signing up for my site because their firewalls weren’t that effective. And when I complained, they tried to upsell me all sorts of what should be basic services, and it was pissing me off. Thank the gods the new site host actually moved everything over for us. That was a huge relief.

When that was done, I went in to delete my account but GoDaddy made me call (and spend a stupid amount of time) them so they could do it. Talk about wanting to keep your customers when they don’t want to stay!

All in all, it’s been an extremely stressful month and that’s why I fell so far behind. I truly appreciate your patience — it’s so incredibly helpful when readers understand that writers are people as well as creatives, and we have problems, too. I couldn’t ask for a better group of readers.

So yesterday, I finally caved in and contacted Amazon and told them I needed to delay Shadow Stealing for a second time. (The first time was just when I was reorganizing my release scheduled).

Now, usually — and I was terrified of this — if you delay a preorder for a second time, Amazon won’t let you create new preorders for a year. However, I lucked out and their reps were understanding on how this was taking a toll on my health (because, yeah, it has), and they have waived the preorder penalty.

I’m so grateful that I’ve got my Shopify shop back up, because now I can put preorders up again, which means if I have to delay then there’s no real problem and people get notified about it.

One things for sure: if I delay a preorder please know it’s for a really good reason. I don’t like doing it, but sometimes life leaves you no choice.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on and why I’ve been slow on updating Patreon and not able to update my site.

By the way, if you registered for my website, you’re going to have to do so again. We had so many spammers get through Go Daddy’s firewalls that we had to delete every user there except for our admin staff. There were thousands of spammers that got through and signed up to my site. Now, we don’t seem to have that issue with the new webhost, so if you were signed up for the site before, please re-sign up.

Okay, enough with this. I have things to do kitties to pet and a long breath to take. Bright blessings,