Readers,

Let me start by saying thank you to all who read the posts so far that included the rough draft serialization of THE IPPOS KING. I truly appreciate your support and kind comments. Unfortunately, in an abundance of caution, I’ve removed the last section and won’t be updating the remainder. Please keep reading for an explanation.

When I first started this series with RADIANCE, I wrote that book originally as a free serialized short story to highlight my newly designed website and blog. As I continued to write, RADIANCE grew from an intended short story to a novella-length story to a novel-length book to the first in a 6-book series. I continued to serialize it all the way to the end as I was having fun with it, and my readers enjoyed it.

No good deed goes unpunished.

I left the serialization up in its entirety until one week prior to the book going live. In that time at least three people had aggregated all the chapters from the blog, snagged the cover from Goodreads and loaded it to several different pirate sites.

Book pirating is a topic I won’t get into here, with some people arguing for it and others against it. That being said, because the book was loaded to these sites to be read for free (so those sites can scrape your financial information or send back some lovely malware for you load onto your computer), Amazon put a hold on RADIANCE’s release until I could prove I was not only the copyright holder of the book but that I wasn’t in violation of their TOS regarding pricing. I always officially register my copyright, so I had the necessary documentation for the first and had to argue the second. It was resolved, but you can see the time and stress something like this can cause, and the book wasn’t on as a preorder.

Thanks to Amazon’s roving bots which picked up on my blog, Amazon has already requested that I provide similar proof for TIK, which I did, and which they approved. However, they’ve been known to ask for this kind of thing more than once, and their approach in combating piracy and copyright infringement is more along the lines of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They can be as much of an adversary to the legitimate author as they are the business partner they claim to be. That being said, they’re the big gun in town, and small fry like me play by their rules.

As such, to keep this process flowing smoothly and have TIK roll out on time (October 6th) without serious glitches, or worse, catastrophic delays, I won’t be able to serialize anything more on TIK. The actions of a few bad actors make it so the rest of us can’t have nice things.

Thank you for your understanding and for your support – Grace