Let’s start with the fun part: I looked back at the collection of public domain stories that I have formatted over the years, and I picked a great spooky story to share for Halloween. The Four-Fifteen Express, by Amelia B. Edwards is a great classic story. Check it out! And if you enjoy it, you might also enjoy the classic ghost stories in Small and Spooky.
I usually run a sale on Small and Spooky in October, since ghost stories go so well with the season. When I went to set up the sale this year, I ran into some trouble. Amazon has changed its rules around the publication of public domain works by publishers that go through KDP. Not only did they not process my request to drop the price of Small and Spooky to $0.99, they froze my entire account. To get my account back, I had to remove all public domain works from my account. This means that I can no longer publish my Taster Flights through Amazon. In all but one case (Love and Other Happy Endings), I published the paperback via Createspace, which is now folded into KDP… and so those paperbacks are removed from sale as well. I noticed tonight that Amazon still has the listings, but has them marked as “temporarily out of stock.” That is a laugh – they are semi-permanently out of stock, and Amazon’s insistence.
I say “semi-permanently” out of stock because I could republish the paperbacks via Ingram, which is the company I now use for most of my paperbacks. I plan to do so eventually, but I need to recreate the full paperback covers first, because I used a tool provided by Createspace to assemble them back when I first published the paperbacks. I hope to get to that soon.
In the meantime, the ebooks are still available from the other vendors, and I’ve dropped the price on all of them to $0.99. Since all Annorlunda ebooks are always DRM-free, you can buy at any vendor and read on any ereader. If you have a Kindle and need to convert the ePub file provided by Kobo or BN.com into a file the Kindle can read, the Kindle Previewer will do the conversion for you. This is the tool I use to create files for Kindle and it is very easy to use. Of course, you can also buy from Gumroad and then you’ll get the mobi file in your download.
I enjoyed making the Taster Flight collections and I want to keep them available, so I will get the paperback editions sorted out soon, I promise! I have also been thinking about how I can use the many classic public domain stories I have formatted for ereaders over the years. Watch this space for future appearances of these classic stories… and in the meantime, I hope you enjoy The Four-Fifteen Express!