February recap and things

Hello there. I know it's mid March and I am just now getting around to giving a writing and self-pub update for February, but things got weird for me in February.

Writing stuff

No writing updates really. I have been feeling creatively blocked and I know it's because of how I have been feeling with everything going on lately. I have also been struggling at my full-time job. Without going into any details, any time I feel like this, my creativity completely disappears. So once again, I have gone another month without writing any new stories or ideas.

Newbie publishing stuff

I am projected to make around $5 for the month of February which is an increase from January so yay! I am still debating with myself on if I am going to get an instagram again. I feel like the older I get and the more my country goes to shambles with lack of privacy protections and all that, I become more and more averse to the various social media platforms. YouTube, Reddit, and this blog are my only social medias if they count as such.

Amazon stuff

As for my stories, I did not publish another story for the month of February like I had originally planned. I was initially just trying to get my final manuscript together for one of my stories so that I could have a paperback option. Well, I finally uploaded everything and ordered an author copy. It took so long to get to me and then when it finally did, it was garbage! Amazon's printing was absolute trash and I was so shocked. I mostly see great things about Amazon's printing and people rave about how easy it is, but the quality was really terrible! So, I unlisted the paperback option (good thing nobody bought any copies) and through this, I learned that you cannot delete a story off of Amazon. And for whatever reason, this really rattled me.

I searched online how to delete a published story off of Amazon and even the automatic AI on the Google homepage was still operating off of outdated information at the time and was explaining how to delete stories. But apparently, Amazon took this option away and you can no longer delete stories from KDP. You can only "unlist" them and leave them in draft form in your account.

This bothers me a lot because if they are my stories, I should have the say so in whether or not I want my stories uploaded anymore and whether or not I want them just sitting in Amazon's KDP database. But Amazon is yet another conglomerate that takes away autonomy. It bothered me so much that I did not publish anything else for February. I did publish something in March but I honestly don't feel very good about it. I posted it because I already published the first in the series and I would like to finish it. However, it's not like I have enough readers right now for it to matter if I delete the story or not. No one would miss it. But Idk...I might just post the third and final book in the series and then seek other publishing platforms. Would they be any better? I don't even know.

What's next?

I wish I knew. The combination of everything this past month has me feeling rather defeated and I hate that my creativity has taken such a huge hit.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finally hitting publish

Hello everyone and happy new year if you are reading this. I just wanted to stop by and say that I have finally taken the leap and published my first story on Amazon! It's been an interesting final month of 2025 and quite frankly, I am glad 2025 is over. I stayed home and brought in the new year by publishing my book lol. This first book is my shortest and called Rainy Day in . It's a sweet but steamy read about two best friends who finally admit to themselves that they like each other and take the next step in their relationship. This story is probably my least spicy story that I've written but I still like it. It's short and sweet and for the spice rating, on a scale of 1 to 5, this story would probably be a 3. However, the spice/steam rating scales confuse me as there are many out there and none quite align enough to make the ratings consistent. I just know that while there is an explicit scene in my story, many people would probably find it very vanilla, and I'm...
Read more

April wrap-up and a new book release!

 I meant to have this blog post up already, but we are now already a week into May and my newest book release has already gone live 😓  Writing & Publishing updates Yes, you read that right. My sixth story, Goddess Playhouse , has gone live on Kindle Unlimited and for some reason I feel really antsy about it. I don't even know why. I finished writing this story last year, as most of my stories were already written and I have been publishing my backlog. But for whatever reason, publishing this one has me fidgety and feeling nervous flutters in my stomach. This was another story that was completely out of my comfort zone, however, I felt so free when writing it. This was cathartic for me and I know I've said that before about my stories, but I don't know what other word to use to describe how I feel and felt during the drafting process. I guess I'm also nervous because I want people to like this one too. Well, I want people to like all my stories lol. This one just ha...
Read more