The Lost Star Series (Part One)

 

The first book of the Lost Star Series is up for pre-order and will be released on August 1st, with the second and third volumes following, one a week on Thursdays, along with volumes four, five and six - hopefully.

Publishing this series has been interesting. First, I discovered that Amazon has a limit to the number of books you can set up for publishing at one time, unless you make prior arrangements. And that number seems to be three. I attempted to upload all six books in the series, and received that message. Probably a good rule to prevent spam-type books from being uploaded in bulk.

The second thing I discovered is that Amazon's algorisms either never forget, or that they pay attention to the blurb of what is uploaded. Back in February 2020 I discovered that some idiot had uploaded two of my books, A Summer in Amber and The Lost Star's Sea and enrolled them in the Kindle Unlimited Program (for which they were not eligible). This idiot did not even bother to change the author's name, they only slapped some generic covers on them. As a result, the two books showed up in my author central account. I immediately contacted Amazon about this. I had to prove that I was the author to remove them, which I did. However, ever since then, every time I make a revision to The Lost Star's Sea, I get an automated email from Amazon saying I need to prove that I'm the author. It seems that they never bother remove the flag on that file, even after they accepted that I was the author and owner of this book. Each time I just send them copies of their previous approvals, and several days later, the book gets approved, once again. 

The interesting part is that I received the same automated email letter for all three books, Castaways, Islands, and Secrets of the Lost Star, despite the fact that none of them are The Lost Star's Sea - each are just parts of it. Now, I don't know if Amazon scans the text of books to prevent copyright infringements (it seemingly didn't in 2020 when the idiot uploaded copies of my books) or if it was the fact that I mentioned in the blurb that these stories were previously published as part of The Lost Star's Sea, that generated the hold and automatic response, but as of this writing, they are currently on hold. I sent them copies of their previous approvals and I'm waiting to hear back from them. Interestingly enough, I never have this problem with A Summer in Amber. Go figure.

Long story short, though I have uploaded the final three books in the series, I am still waiting on approval for them. No big deal, since they follow the three books already approved, so I have three weeks to get them up and keep the release schedule. But it is mildly annoying that I have to go through this every time, and interesting that they discovered the fact that these books are drawn from a book with a different name. 

Regardless, the first three books in the series will soon be available as ebooks for $3.99 on Amazon only. Once they are live I will also offer them as audiobooks. For the time being I'm keeping the paperback versions of The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea available as omnibus versions. It would not take a great deal of work on my part to make paperback versions of all six books, a couple of hours at most. But, as I said, it would be a vanity project, just to have more of my books on my shelf, since I sell a couple of paperbacks per year. We'll see how bored I get.