A Peek At My Week! #47

It’s been a little while since my previous update to you, and a few good things have happened in the meantime. Here then, are some things that happened in my life this past week:

News About Writing & Publishing:

After some months of complete stagnation, finally something started happening! In my most recent newsletter I told you about the new covers I designed for my books and mentioned that I was considering a return to Lulu. Here they are below for your viewing pleasure – plus a few extra!

On Monday I set about investigating the new Lulu publishing process, and all was going well until I hit the end of the process – where I was faced with a pay wall! $4.50 doesn’t sound like a lot to publish an eBook, but if you convert that into Rands, it’s R65.91 to publish one eBook. Then if you consider I have around 30 books to put through that process, it works out to R1977.30! Added to that, considering that it was completely free to do this until Lulu lost their marbles back in 2020, it’s really just a total bitch-slap to the faces of countless struggling indie authors from one of the founders of the publish on demand industry!

No thanks!

So off I toddled again, pondering my next possible move. EBooks2Go perhaps? Sure, they were still there, and they were still free – but they still had that nasty policy of allowing buyers of eBooks to “return” them for a refund… which makes no kind of sense at all. Just how do you “return” an eBook anyway? Basically they’re ripping off authors who publish with them, because these people get the books for free, while teasing the author with “sales” and “royalties” which disappear from the balance sheet whenever these pirates strike!

I looked at some of my other previous platforms in turn, and then decided to take another look at KDP. I’d last logged into my creator account there in about 2019, shortly before I signed on with Moon Books Publishing, mainly because due to KDP’s policies at that time, I couldn’t register a payment method that made sense. At that time, I could only be paid via Payoneer, which was a rip-off as it had previously cost me more than I made in a year just in service fees alone! On Monday, I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only could I now register my South African bank account to my KDP account, but could also complete tax withholding registration with a few simple keystrokes! This I all did, and so now I can actually publish through KDP from South Africa, for a worthwhile profit!

Before I set about doing that though, I got in touch with Elizabeth, the widow of my friend and publisher, Brandon Mullins, to ask whether she might be able to transfer my books from Brandon’s accounts on KDP and ACX (for the audiobooks) to mine. Unfortunately poor Elizabeth had no idea how to go about doing that, so I took the initiative and contacted the helpdesks for both KDP and ACX on behalf of both of us.

She also informed me that she was still experiencing issues with deciphering what was going on with the payments, as it appears Brandon had different percentage agreements with his authors, and also where audiobook narrators were involved, there were royalty split agreements, which means it will take a bit longer to sort out.

Sadly, by Wednesday, I had responses from both entities in the negative; unfortunately the only way this could be done is if my books with MBP were taken down on Brandon’s KDP account first, and then I would have to republish them on mine. This means of course that all the links to the books would change, which is unfortunate for the sake of marketing and advertising, but what’s even more frustrating is the fact that ACX still doesn’t allow creators from South Africa to contract with narrators or to post audiobooks on Audible. This means that either the audiobooks I already have via MBP will have to remain on Brandon’s ACX account for the time being, or I’ll have to find some other increasingly ethereal solution. I’ve asked a few of my audiobook narrator contacts for advice in this regard.

Meanwhile, I’ve given Elizabeth feedback on this matter, and it seems that she will have to either log in to Brandon’s KDP account and remove my books from there, or contact KDP to ask them to do it for her. As soon as this occurs (which I have no idea how long it will take) I will be able to upload and replace the existing versions on my own KDP account.

Again in the meantime, I also uploaded three books which had been published exclusively through Moon Books Publishing, to Smashwords: “Mirror, Mirror“, “Lifetime” and “Opsaal“.

This is at least some progress, and I feel positive about it.

As always, I’ll keep you posted about any further developments.

Thanks a lot for all your friendship and support, I hope you know it is all deeply appreciated.