Submerging launch (Or why I don’t believe in exclusivity)

Sunday afternoon I uploaded Submerging to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes, Smashwords, and OmniLit. When I checked Monday morning it had already appeared on most of the sites. Yay! It’s out there!

Buy from: Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes, Smashwords, OmniLit

Notice there is no Amazon buy link in there. That’s because as of Tuesday morning, the ebook is still not available for sale on Amazon. Grr! It’s finished processing, I got the email saying “Congratulations, you’ve successfully published on the Kindle Store!” and the KDP admin says the book is live. But when you go to the page, there’s no way to buy it and it just says “Not currently available.” Amazon tells you when you publish a book that it can take 24 to 48 hours for it to go on sale, but for every other book I’ve done it’s gone on sale within a few hours. I’ve never had it take this long and it is FRUSTRATING. This afternoon will be 48 hours since I uploaded it, so I’m hoping something happens soon or else I get the fun of sending emails and trying to reupload and getting even more frustrated.

This is why I don’t participate in programs like Kindle Select or Nook First. If I had decided to enroll this book in Kindle Select, I might still be sitting here with my book not for sale anywhere. That is not an acceptable scenario for me. Thankfully, readers can still get the book from other sites and if you need a .mobi file for your Kindle you can either convert the epub from one of the other online stores (my books are DRM-free) or buy the Smashwords or OmniLit version. Yes, Amazon is the current big dog in the pack and I hope the buy button goes up ASAP, but I’ve done all I can at the moment and I’m relieved that I didn’t put all my hopes into this one site. Diversifying is good for business, especially when things you can’t control happen. For me, being exclusive to one site isn’t right for my business.

So happy launch day, Submerging. Sorry it’s a rough ride. Thank you to everyone who has bought a copy from the sites where it’s available! And for those holding out for the Kindle version (I’m right there with you, I always buy a copy once it’s live to make sure there are no formatting problems), I’m hoping it won’t be too much longer!