Where have all the novels gone?

As some of y’all know, I just had a birthday, one of those big ending-in-0 ones. And the universe just gave me a huge gift – I’m getting the rights to my backlist back!

How did this happen? It’s a somewhat convoluted story. About a year ago, just as I was about to head to Anachrocon 2016, I got an email from my fiction publisher, Samhain Publishing (sorry, pagan friends, they pronounce it Sam-Hane) that they were closing. I mourned through the weekend, and then the following Monday we got another email that hey, there was hope. Then a couple of months later, nope, they were proceeding with “shutting down.” Then in June, they emailed again saying nope, never were gonna close, they were just saying they were reorganizing.

Well, by that time, I’d decided not to send them anything else and just wait out my contracts and request my rights to be reverted to me when it came time, five years after I’d signed each contract. I went ahead to self-publish a Lycanthropy Files novella as part of a Halloween box set and then the fourth Aether Psychics book in January. Imagine my surprise when I got an email in mid-February that said they had decided to close for good.

I decided to wait before saying anything publicly – I’d heard that story before, after all. But it’s for real this time. As of March 1, the ebooks I published with Samhain have been pulled from the vendor sites, and I’m waiting for that email that will give me back the rights to all seven of them.

The good news – I’m getting all my books back. The bad news – oh, crap, I have to put them all back out myself. That means formatting and new ISBN numbers and blurbs and…

Deep breath. I can do this. My backlist isn’t as big as some, and I’m actually going to wait a little bit before re-releasing the Lycanthropy Files because they were my first series, and I’m itching to go in and re-edit them. I won’t change the stories in a major way, but I’m going to correct some plot holes and fix other newbie writer things. The main priority is the Aether Psychics books since I self-published the prequel novella and the fourth in the series, and it’s kind of silly to have a prequel and last in a series out without the ones in the middle there, too.

What does this mean for y’all? Well, I’ll be able to be more flexible with pricing, and I can now participate in promotional opportunities I wasn’t able to before. Even better, I get to continue the series earlier than anticipated.

If you’d like to stay abreast of what’s going on, find out when stuff is coming out again, and what new books may happen, please subscribe to my newsletter if you haven’t already done so. You’ll get a free short story. 🙂