I missed you!

Hi!  I've missed you.  Sorry it has taken me so long to write a new blog.  My crazy life has gotten surreal (people are starting to know who I am, can you believe it? Yeah, me either—it's insane). 

Let me bring you up to speed on what I've been doing since Indebted was released on Kindle.  I was formatting the file to upload to Smashwords.com so that I could have them act as my aggregator to publish Indebted on Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, etc.  But...I have since been reconsidering that option.  I have two reasons for not uploading the Indebted file to Smashwords: 

The first is because Smashwords still hasn't been successful in uploading Intuition to Barnes and Noble or Apple.  It's been over 2 months.  That is totally unacceptable.  I pointed this out to them and they admitted it was an error on their part, but they still haven't fixed it. 

The second reason is that Smashwords doesn't have DRM (digital rights management) available for my books.  That means it is easy for pirates to take my work and sell it on their websites.  Don't get me wrong; I don't mind as much if you read it for free—I want to get my work into libraries and other places where it is accessible.  I allow you to freely share your books with one another on Kindle (I have the option not to do that, but I think it's cool to share it with your friends).  I do mind, however,  if you have to pay for it on a pirate site, get a really inferior product that you can't even return, and then they keep all the profits.  It seems a little unfair to me.

So now I have to figure out how to protect my digital books when they're not sold on Amazon.com (because Amazon is the man and does it for me on their site.   Thank you, Amazon, for being completely awesome like that).  Anyway, that is a problem I'm trying to solve.  (I know Nook people; I feel your pain!  This is bad news!  I'm sorry!  Go ahead and vent your frustration here.  You are entitled.  I want to work directly with B&N for you so that you can get it.  I will figure it out.  Apple iPad/iPhone people: there is a free app for Kindle that you can download so that you can buy my eBooks directly from Amazon for your Apple devices, so I'll figure out Apple after B&N.)  Kobo and Sony e-reader people, we might be in trouble.  I don't know how to protect my content on your sites.  I'll research that as well. 

Also, I'm working on Incendiary.  I really liked keeping all of you updated on the progress of Indebted.  It gave you insight into where I was in the publishing process and it gave me an avenue to "talk" about it with people who get it and who want to know about my books and publishing in general (because you are a rare species I've only found on the internet).  It was also really cathartic, like having a journal that talks back and gives advice.  It was priceless, so I'm doing it again.  (See that new page at the top of my blog that says, "Incendiary Updates?" Yeah, that's it.) 

I have to say now that I haven't answered anyone on this blog in a couple of weeks.  I know! I completely suck!  I'll definitely work on that going forward.  I really want to try to respond to everyone because you are important to me.  (You guys are growing in number, which I love, but I'm a little afraid I'll neglect you—we'll see how it goes.)

Okay, so like before, feel free to ask me about publishing, or my books/ the characters, or you can tell me about the music you love.  I read it all, even if I haven't responded due to the insanity that is my life.  So here we go, I'm about to post my first Incendiary blog.  Check it out! :)  Thank you!