Friday 25 September 2026: Request declined

And here we are, the last Friday in September. Wow.

First thing Thursday morning I received an email from the support team at KDP. My request for an exemption from the 2-book-a-week limit due to backlist migration was declined. No reason given. Not even a temporary reprise. I really do understand why they’re doing this, but I do think it may be a bit harsh.

Lots of people I know do write and publish fairly quickly. But there are also those who make translations of their books, which can be six or more different languages. Every one is considered a new creation. My own requirement would only be temporary, but now I’m forced to delay publication on KDP right down to a maximum of two new books a week.

Not only that, but we’re also only allowed to publish up to 10 pre-orders. So when you’re publishing 5 books a day scheduled to publish on different days in the future, you can only have 10 pre-orders.

There are so many problems with this, such as people who translate their books into 6 different languages, or people who want to rapid release an entire series in one go, or people like me who just want to migrate their backlist.

I have between now and Monday to decide whether or not I carry on publishing direct to KDP, whether I just tick the Amazon box on Draft2Digital, or if I just don’t bother and remove everything from Amazon. I still have 67 books to republish all together. If I carry on publishing direct to KDP, most of those books are going to be published several weeks after they’re published everywhere else.

As if I need any more reasons not to love Amazon…And people wonder why I don’t rate it. It’s just another nail in the Amazon coffin as far as I’m concerned. If it disappeared tomorrow, which Bezos has said it could well do, well, not tomorrow per se, but any day after what is today, I won’t miss it and I won’t mourn its passing.

I still had a bone to pick with them, though, because 3 books I deleted a long time ago were still appearing for sale on there. The Tales From Baggins Bottom ebooks were all still there and for sale, but I couldn’t find them on any of my publishing shelves. I tried buying one, for 79p, and it worked. So I had to open a new ticket to ask why these books are still live.

“They’re all live,” said the person I was connected to. Yes, that was why I was asking. S/he looked into it and came back saying they were all in my Archived list. Eh? Books that are archived are still available? S/he gave me the necessary instructions and they’ve all gone now.

For some reason I then went to check my sales reports, and there it is, at the top of my KDP sales! A whole one ebook sale from my direct publishing to Kindle. D2D Print has also sold a few books this month, including 2 copies of Night Crawler. That was a nice surprise too. My sales started to creep up last month there, and they’ve continued into this month. I wonder if my books are finally appearing on a radar somewhere…I’d love to know who’s buying them all, though.

I had to try not to worry about any of this, though, as I still had a short story to write. I’d asked the Cosmos the night before for some assistance, and I did wake up with a solution. I should have just sat down and rattled it off as soon as I got up, rather than start ruminating over all of this, because it was hard to shift my mindset from mild outrage to creative flow under the circumstances.

When I can’t sleep, I do a reset, as do a lot of people I think. I get up, do something else, like get a drink of water, then try again. And it often works. So I decided to try the same thing with my short story. First of all I went and sat in the garden for 5 minutes with the dog. Then I made myself a cup of hot chocolate (I’ve tried coffee, now I was trying hot chocolate) – and the poet a cold drink. Then I donned a snuggly old cardigan to make me feel cosy. I opened the short story master file in Scrivener and put a rain sounds app on…

The app didn’t work as it kept cutting out after 15 minutes. The hot chocolate didn’t work either. It needed sugar and I didn’t want to get up again until I’d started to do some writing. However, I’d faffed and fannied around for so long it was time for our afternoon meal, and it was already on the table. (I shall miss this when he goes back to work next week…) So I paused for 15 minutes before going back to it.

I found my go-to 10-hour rain video on YouTube and tried again. This time I managed just over 1,000 words in the opening alone. I’ve been learning how to open with depth and it takes more words than jumping straight into the action, which I’ve done for decades in order to grab the women’s weekly readers. A lot more words. The target is 2,000 to 4,000 words, so I’m either halfway along or a quarter of the way along. Judging by the fact I just finished the opening, I’d say it’s the latter.

Today I’ll try and get to it first. If I can manage a thousand words at the end of the day, I should be able to manage a couple of thousand at the top of the day. If it comes out too long, then cutting is always better than padding anyway. They will consider longer stories, but I’d like to get it under 4,000 words if I can.

I didn’t feel like doing anything else, so I closed it down, wrote and scheduled today’s blog post, and called it a day.

I want to finish the story today and leave it to cool overnight. It’s a UK market and the deadline is Sunday, so if I can get it submitted on Saturday, all the better. I also need to get back to that editing job I printed off plus the usual weekly admin at the end of the day.

Have a great weekend!

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