Trying to rescue my books | Free PDF download of the novel Skol

Once again I find myself regretting the lack of posts here. This is still connected with my new book, Autism dreaming, but not because I’m still writing. The book’s first draft was finished in January.

What’s going on now is hard to explain.

My three previous books – The Birdcatcher (2006, 2016), The Shyness Guide (2013, 2017), and Skol (2019) – were published through the KDP (Amazon/Kindle Direct Publishing system. Over the years I’d learned the KDP formatting program well enough that the last time I used it, in 2019, I was able to move Skol through it remarkably fast. I was happy with KDP.

But times have changed. I won’t go into the details, but because of an innocuous error I made as I was logging into my KDP account one day about ten years ago, which for several years just made signing in a longer process, recently the KDP system decided to block me from KDP.altogether. I have, it seems, become an enemy of KDP.

Not only am I not able to publish Autism Dreaming on KDP, but I’m blocked from access to my other books. I can’t change anything re their promotion, pricing, etc. Though I’d planned to return to actively promoting them along with Autism Dreaming, all four at the same time, instead I can’t do anything.

To be fair, for several weeks the KDP support team sincerely tried to help, but the KDP system seems to have defeated them, so far anyway.

Why don’t I go elsewhere? I do pay a lot of attention to the other ‘indie’ publishers. Until now, I’ve considered KDP the best of them. The only one that was better, Createspace (which I was originally published in), was bought by Amazon then merged with KDP. The Createspace system that many of us loved disappeared. That’s how I became a KDP customer.

The chief rival to KDP now is IngramSpark. Ingram have been involved with publishing, particularly the traditional/ commercial publishing industry, for a long time. Because they claim to offer the possibility of getting your books into libraries, something I’ve always longed for (I chose the pen name Alan Conrad in hope of one day seeing my books on a shelf side by side with those of Joseph Conrad) I decided to give them a try.

I quickly found myself in an astonishing labyrinth, a maze where every step you take requires a re-read of instructions, often without finding a solution. Many authors report this. Through trial and error I have made a little headway, but last week I reached an impass that has defied my attempts to get past it.

For the time being, I’ve given up on IngramSpark and KDP.

Am I the only one who wonders why today’s technology, which, at its best, is far beyond what existed only ten years ago, is so dysfunctional at everyday levels? Are we being led into a world that can only be run by superintelligent AI? That’s a subject for another day.

But let me back up a bit – I should say that two of my books, The Birdcatcher and The Shyness Guide, are still available on Amazon. Though I’m unable to do anything with them, you can still buy them, and I hope you will.

Unfortunately, I terminated sales of my SF novel Skol last fall. Though it’s unquestionably my best book, it wasn’t selling at all, so I decided to pause it while I contemplated what I could do to help it. Then KDP cut me off from it.

Meanwhile, as reported in my Feb 4 post, with no help from me, visits to this website have been increasing, and this has included new interest in Skol. There have been many downloads of the six free Skol PDF chapters offered here.

Rather than have the visitors who would like to read Skol entirely, I’ve decided to publish the book temporarily as PDF’s. It remains under full copyright of course, but you can download a copy of it from the links below FREE until I’m able to get it published somewhere.

These two versions were designed as one for PCs, and one for mobile. But I would check them both out to see which works best for you.