Problem with publishing rights for "A Succubus for Valentine's Day" on Amazon

About this time I was expecting to start promotion for "A Succubus for Valentine's Day" and giving you the link to pre-order it.  In fact, on some other ebook sites, eg Kobo, it is available for pre-order:
https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/a-succubus-for-valentine-s-day

But not currently on Amazon.  This is where it gets complicated.

I finished preparing the manuscript and uploaded it to the regular ebook sites last Sunday, setting an official release date of the 29th.  Amazon came back to me with an email warning of possible rights infringement.  I wasn't too fussed about this.  The same thing happened while I was republishing "A Succubus for Christmas".  Thankfully, Selina Kitt, the owner of my previous publisher, Excessica, was ahead of the game, and so when Excessica closed its doors at the end of 2021, she sent out letters to all authors officially reverting their rights back to them.  I replied to Amazon attaching that letter and "A Succubus for Christmas" was available for pre-order the next day.

I figured it would be the same here.  Except nothing happened.

I waited a week and then gave them a prod, thinking it had just been forgotten and that would jog them into making the book go live for pre-order.

This wasn't the case.  I got a response indicating they hadn't received the necessary documentation... despite me already sending them the relevant documentation.

So, I'm not really sure what's going on here.  It's unfortunately stressful and concerning.  It could be a mix-up that's easily fixed in the next couple of days, but then I thought that last weekend.  The problem with being the little guy dealing with the massive corporation is you can be in the right and it not matter a jot.  If something gets stuck, it gets stuck, and then you're shit out of luck.

I'm going to proceed with the July 29th release date as planned for everywhere else and hope I can resolve whatever is blocking things at Amazon.

It does have me concerned.  Amazon is 90% of sales and I was hoping to put all 6 collections back up as a series.  Amazon are not something I can just route around if they fuck up and don't fix it.

Coming soon... I hope!

A Succubus for Freedom: Out Now!

You can’t escape . . . You won’t want to escape . . .

Succubi and other monstrous femme fatales abound in M.E. Hydra’s fourth collection of wild, warped and wickedly dark erotica. Lie back and enjoy as alluring sirens ensnare helpless prey in thirteen weird tales of sex and horror. They'll give you pleasures beyond your wildest dreams, and terrors beyond your darkest nightmares . . .



Here's the full list of the stories:

A Succubus for Freedom
Exile
Guard Duty
Don't Fuck the Flowers
The Biggest Tits in the World
A Night at McHooligans
Barbarian vs. Succubus
Onychophoral Dreams (The Soul Worm II)
Naga Massage Review
Come on the Candle
What Bad Boys Get For Christmas
Riding the Medusa
Locked in with a Succubus

Some of the titles will be familiar, but I managed to boost the original story content up to nearly half. Six of the stories are brand new and only appear in this book. I also modified a couple. "Locked in with a Succubus" should now have an ending that makes more sense. "The Biggest Tits in the World" is actually my lowest rated Lit story, partly because of some scale issues in what happens. No problem - Lovecraftian Geometry to the rescue!

The six brand new stories feature the stone tablet succubus being thoroughly evil in a hefty 11K word novella (if you like your demon girls BAD, you'll really enjoy this), the Robert E Howard 'Conan' homage I mentioned in previous posts, something a little experimental with some lush descriptions of hell, an odd succubus summoning rite with candles and smoke, and two Hell-space stories featuring some bizarre (and sexy) monster girls.

Why are the chapters for "Locked in with a Succubus" alternating with the other stories instead of in one place?
Originally it was a weekly serial and I wanted to preserve that feeling of having a 'pause' between each chapter. It's one of those things that might work or could suck. It wouldn't be any fun being independent if I couldn't do the odd bit of experimental craziness now and again...

The book can be found on amazon, and in amazon UK (where no one actually reads me, which is ironic considering they're the only people that might understand some of my more obscurer references! :) ). It's also on B&N, smashwords and also directly from eXcessica's own site. I even put it on various romance fiction sites, because that's where we upload books, although I pity the poor person downloading it in search of fuzzy paranormal romance.

I hope everyone enjoys it anyway. Sorry it was so late coming out. It does mean I can now finally get back to Succubus Summoning 201, another project I've fallen a little (okay a lot!) behind on. I would love for people to leave reviews, but appreciate that amazon's insistence on real names might make that unappealing for some people. Please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments below or even email me directly at manyeyedhydraATgooglemail.com. The same for any suggestions. I can't guarantee I can satisfy all of them, but I don't mind tweaking scenarios to cater to specific fetishes (especially ones I haven't got around to covering yet) or even tweaking character descriptions if there's someone/thing you'd like to see in a story.

Follow-up on Robin Scott, Plagiarist

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A Succubus for Halloween is out!

She's out in the wild and eager to snare fresh prey with her seductive wiles:



My third collection of short stories is available to buy from eXcessica, amazon, smashwords, B & N and others. And if you'd prefer a more tangible copy, the print version is also available from CreateSpace (and probably amazon too, shortly).

So go on, enjoy a slice of darker erotica this Halloween...

Praise be the Kindle!

Ugh! Now that was a horror journey. Stuck in Schipol airport for over twenty-four hours while KLM did a passable impression of a headless chicken repeatedly running into the same brick wall. To be fair, I can’t really begrudge an airline when their planes are grounded by snow. The frustration arose when the snow cleared, the sun came out and KLM’s systems went into meltdown trying to clear a day’s backlog of passengers.

I say system, but there was little evidence of any system or process here.

I’ve always hated the automated systems airlines have been sneaking in to replace human operators. Machines are only really useful when they’re carrying out the same simple function every single time. Deviate from this and the machine becomes useless, which was exactly what happened here. Want a new boarding pass for the next available flight because your last flight was cancelled? Gronk. Fizzle. Klunk. Bleugh.

So it was time to join the queues. Oh, the queuing!

Thank god for my shiny new kindle. Amazon have done some fairly bone-headed things of late, but they’ve got a winner here (unless they keep up with the bone-headed practises of going in and deleting books their punters have already bought—sigh). I picked mine up about a month back. As a replacement for print books, it’s a little on the expensive side, but I was fortunate enough to have a $100 gift voucher lying around after coming second in one of Literotica’s competitions.

Buying new books was a little on the non-intuitive side, mainly because the little shopping basket appears to have vanished and it took me a little while to find the Download-to-Computer option (no Orwelling books I’ve already bought, thank you Amazon!). .pdf files can also be uploaded to the kindle, but I found the display of them to be extremely variable (and I haven’t got round to reading the manual to figure out anything beyond Open, Read, Go!).

I couldn’t determine if there was a back light option, so when the lights went out on the plane, that was the end of reading for me (and those extra hours of Zzz’s turned out to be damn useful as it happened), but this is no different to dead-tree technology anyway. While queuing the kindle really came into its own. I worked through more books than I’d normally carry and it was slimline enough to fit in my jacket pocket without threatening to burst it like the latest Stephen King doorstopper. One downside is either the extreme cold weather or being bashed in my bag has caused the on/off switch to stick a little.

It’s a nice piece of tech anyway and I’m hoping to catch up on some reading and maybe discover something fresher than the usual bookstore dross. Please don’t kill it through your idiocy, Amazon.

More Amazon Censorshit

Amazon is at it again.

Selena Kitt and other writers have reported some of their titles have been pulled from Amazon's store with little warning or explanation. You can follow the discussion here.

This time the offending subject matter appears to be incest. I'll be honest and admit incest isn't really my cup of tea. I don't read stories featuring it and I won't write stories about it. That's my decision and my choice. What I don't agree with is when that choice is taken away from someone who wants to read this material, especially when it's fiction and nothing more than harmless fantasy.

I wish Amazon would grow a spine or draw a line in the sand here. They're either selling erotica or they're not. Currently, they're constantly tying themselves in knots trying to second guess public opinion. Some people complain about a book, so they remove it. More people complain about censorship, so they quickly reverse the decision in order to save face. It's all very wishy washy.

They're a bookseller; they don't have to be the public's moral compass. They sell books. Some of those books are going to be offensive to some people. Sorry, but those people are going to have to accept being offended. After all, they can always make the choice not to read the book in the first place.

"A Succubus for Christmas" is available!!!

It's out!!!

I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. My first collection of short stories is out from eXcessica.

You can buy it directly from them here.

The ebook is also available from smashwords here.

The print version can be bought from Amazon right here. Currently it's ranked #5,585,978 in books. There could be room for improvement there... :)

If you have one of those new-fangled Kindle things (I envy you!), you can even get the Kindle version here. I have no idea how good/bad being ranked #42,575 is, but having a ranking means someone's at least already bought a copy (I think), so yay!

Huge thanks to Selena and eXcessica for the formatting and getting the book out there. I hope everyone enjoys the anthology as much as I did writing it.

This is where I go out drinking to celebrate.

In a few months I'll be out drinking again to drown my sorrows when I find out I've only shifted five copies. :)