I’m just going to start on the first issue that struck me without warning and is going to turn into a warning/rant.  I’m supposed to be publishing War of Nytefall: Ravenous this weekend and I did hit publish Thursday night.  In fact, I’m writing this on Thursday because Friday is going to be a scramble.  Why?  Because I just stumbled onto a really big problem with Amazon.  A few actually:

• War of Nytefall gets changed to ‘War of Nitefall’ when you search for it.  This is a series that doesn’t exist, so people who search this way don’t find my books.
• Rivalry and Eradication don’t appear even if you search with the full series and book title.  They’re invisible unless you go to the other books and see them listed as part of the series.
• Family of the Tri-Rune, Curse of the Dark Wind, The Mercenary Prince, and The Spirit Well  do not show up if I search by their names or ‘Legends of Windemere.  All are seen if you search for one of the other books and look under the series page.
• Allure of the Gypsies and Tribe of the Snow Tiger only show up if I search by book names and not by series.

That’s 8 books that are scattered about 2 series that DO NOT show up under searches.  I’m worried that War of Nytefall: Ravenous is going to start like this. Worse is that I have no idea how long it’s been like this.  Why did this happen?  How did this happen?  Can it get fixed?  If it doesn’t then what am I going to do?  This is one of the worst things that could happen to an author who just hit publish.  They’re all in the middle of the series too, so it could explain why even ‘Legends of Windemere’ abruptly died a few months ago.  I don’t even know where to go with this post after writing about this.  Pretty sure this is what’s going to get everyone’s attention.  Really hope it’s been fixed by the time this goes live, but I’m keeping it so people may considering searching their own stuff.

(Friday Update–  I heard from Amazon and did some digging.  The disappearing books only happen when searching on Chrome.  By phone or Firefox, they show up.  Thank god because it isn’t like schools supply Chromebooks and there are a ton of people who use that specific browser.  Fuck.  As far as ‘Nytefall vs Nitefall’, I have to keep doing the search and clicking on the tiny ‘Search instead for War of Nytefall’ link that shows up under the ‘Showing results for War of Nitefall’.  Apparently, the system is supposed to get the point eventually.  I’ve been doing it for 10 minutes now and it’s not learning.  I doubt any potential readers are going to go through the hassle and many might not even realize the switch.  I had to email Amazon again and ask if there was anything that they could do on their end.  Feel free to check these things out on your own and let me know in the comments if it works better for you.)

This really makes me wonder if I should bother dropping certain books to 99 cents.  What’s the point if people aren’t seeing them anyway?

I went back to work and helped get things set up.  As usual, I can’t really go into details because of privacy and such.  It’s going to be an interesting year. Not only for me, but my son too.  Things will be getting adjusted as we go along because we have no idea what the future will bring.  Gotta stay fluid, so planning is going to be rather vague.  The only other thing in this arena was that I got 2 days with my son where we had some casual fun.  Went to a park, played frisbee, did more drawing, played board games, and did some video games.  I made sure to have some dramamine before that last one, so I didn’t end up hugging the toilet like last time.  The camera in Lego Harry Potter is brutal.

I didn’t get any book writing done since I had my son and then work.  I did finish the rest of the December blog posts, so I’m set for the rest of the year outside of Tuesdays and weekends starting in November. Might do a poll about Tuesdays.  I’m running out of blog topics as well.  Hard to think straight tonight because of the messes I’ve been having to tackle.

Oh yeah, I witnessed my first ‘Zoom Bombing’.  Not going into details about what the meeting was about, but here is what I’m talking about.  Somebody finds a way to bust into a Zoom call and causes a big enough disruption to end it.  Guess they go running off to the rest of their buddies to gloat and get a congratulatory wank.  This one used swastikas, the n-word, mention of rape, death threats, f-bombs, lots of insults, comment bombing with the n-word, and just going full on berserk.  I’ve heard of this happening and it’s why I don’t really like Zoom.  Seeing it in action is horrifying, especially when you see that some people in the meeting had their kids with them.  Just another reason why I’m not in the best mood when writing this.

Next week is the first official week of school, so that’s where my focus is going to be.  I might do some outlining at night, but writing more of War of Nytefall: Eulogy isn’t going to happen.  Then again, I might have to pause that until I can figure out what to do about the Amazon issue.  I’m just not feeling a lot today and probably won’t for a while because that blow is severe.  We work our asses off to write and publish books.  We try our best to promote within our budget.  Then, we have something like this happen.  How do you combat that?

Goals for the week:

1. Promote War of Nytefall: Ravenous.  Any help and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
2. Work.
3. Time with son.  Mostly homework.
4. Outlining at night or maybe set up Sunday posts.  Just do something.
5. Finish watching ‘Cobra Kai’.  Maybe I did this last night if my mood improved.
6. Puzzle work, I guess.
7. Fix the Amazon issue, I hope.