A Peek At My Week! #52

ChristinaEngela

2 years ago

Good morning, friends and fans!

Welcome to a “Peek Into My Week”, a behind the scenes look into the (I hope) noteworthy events in my life – May 16, 2022!

Here then, are some things that happened in my life this past week:

News About Writing & Publishing:

New Release Of “Sentinel”

Last week I published “Sentinel“, the long-awaited fourth title in Galaxii via Smashwords and KDP. The book is 81,828 words long and is available in eBook, paperback and hardcover formats – and it’s the second-longest book I’ve ever written!

Reviews

Buy Now:

More Drama With Problematic Amazon, But Also Some Success

I also uploaded new eBook versions of all six Quantum titles to KDP, and I’m relieved to say that all but one sailed smoothly through KDP’s publishing process. There have already been a few sales of these in the past week, I’m happy to say. There was just a little drama relating to one of them, “Prodigal Sun“, which they say I need to provide documentary proof that I am the rights holder. Funnily enough, they didn’t give me the same cheek with the others, which have all been published the exact same way!

Anyway, I contacted the widow of my former late publisher, and she promised to send me a letter to the effect that I am the rights holder for my own books – which in my view is about as stupid as having to send KDP a letter last time saying “I am a self-publishing author and have given myself permission to publish my own books”. I kid you not. Though that worked last time, this time apparently there was a different problem (on their side of course) so that wasn’t enough.

Basically where I’m at now, is waiting for the letter from Elizabeth before I reply again to KDP’s bot army… it’s all I can to to hold back a flood of expletives in dealing with those things! Tell me again how A.I. is in any way, shape or form “a good idea”! I dunno – is it unusual for a sci-fi author to hate A.I.?

Anyway, so I’ll be holding off on putting the rest of the books up again in the meantime, while I wait for Elizabeth.

…And Now A Little Drama From Smashwords!

Not to be outdone by KDP, Smashwords also decided to give me some uphill this past week.

Aside from a few hiccups with Smashwords being pedantic about “styles” in Word of the manuscript as usual, the book should also appear on my Smashwords listing shortly as well. Aside from that, having uploaded the book on the 7th of May, it was in review until the 13th – almost an entire week – before they eventually notified me that they didn’t like the “style” of the layout, and I had to rearrange a few paragraphs just to make the layout of the manuscript acceptable to Mark Coker.

Three days later, it is now STILL pending review, which makes me wonder whether it will be there until next Friday? This sort of slow-poke service makes me wonder: does Smashwords have any staff at all left after their takeover by Draft2Digital, other than Mr. Coker?

That’s all for this week!

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

With that, I’m all out of news for this week… Until next time, keep reading!

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

Cheers!