I already did origin stories for the three books included in Omega Reimagined volume 1: Omega Reclaimed, Omega Revealed, and Omega Released. If you want to read those posts, just click the links. So this is a different sort of Happy Birthday post. Omega Reimagined volume 1 is being born again—on platforms other than Amazon.
I started my publishing career on Amazon. It’s where I buy the books I read, and Amazon makes it easy for indies to publish with them. The Kindle Unlimited program, in particular, was a draw. When I published my very first book, Deep Under, I didn’t expect anyone to buy it. Why would they? How would they even notice it was there? And for the most part, no one did buy it. But people read it. In searching for new M/M books on KU, they found it, tried it, and sometimes even liked it. That’s the beauty of KU, of course, and I’ll be forever indebted to it for bringing me my initial readership.
But the evil of KU is that it’s exclusive. Regardless of how you may feel about Amazon’s almost-monopoly on all things retail and the way they treat their workers in order to save customers a few pennies, when it comes to KU, they don’t just have an almost-monopoly, they have a explicit, rigidly enforced monopoly. If your book is enrolled in KU, you can’t publish it in an ebook format elsewhere. At all. Anywhere.
For various reasons, I’m at a point of wanting my books to be available elsewhere, even though I know going wide is more likely to lose me money than make me money. So I’ve started pulling my books out of KU and publishing them on B&N, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, etc. And funnily enough, the books have done exactly what I expected Deep Under to do all those years ago—absolutely nothing.
Oh well. I have quite a few of them out there now if you want to buy from someone other than Amazon, and today Omega Reclaimed, the first book in Omega Reimagined volume 1 is live on sites other than Amazon. The other two will be published over the next month. Perhaps now a B&N reader will discover my little wolves and enjoy them.
If you’re one of my loyal KU readers, don’t worry! I still plan to put my books into KU for at least one 90-day period when they first come out. So grab them when they’re new, and if there are any on my backlist you haven’t gotten to yet, now’s the time.