I can be so stupid sometimes.

Up until now, all of my eBooks have been published on Amazon and through their Amazon Select program, which means it’s sold exclusively through Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) program. Instead of buying books, those Amazon readers who pay a monthly fee get to read it and any other books they desire for no other charge.  

Up until now, half of my eBook royalties have come from pages getting read. The other option author have to sell their eBooks would be to go wide, which means remove it from KU, though I can still sell it on Amazon as an eBook and selling it through additional distributors. The best places that my research revealed and was highly approved of by other authors was to use Draft2Digital (D2D) and Smashwords, the latter only because D2D doesn’t distribute to it. D2D does distribute to digital stores: Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Tolino, and Vivlio; the subscription service of Scribd; and Kobo plus territories: Belgium, Netherlands, and Canada.

But, which eBook(s) did I want to start with, experiment with? I did some investigative research. One of my books, Grendel’s Mother, does extremely well with pages read and eBooks purchased through Amazon. My romances: Love’s New Beginnings, Tomorrow’s Wishes, and Determined Hearts do not. So, it had to be one of these latter three.

When you put an eBook into KU, you do so for 90 days. I’ve always chosen to have that 90 days renewed automatically. This time, I unclicked that auto-renewal box for the first one that would renew: Love’s New Beginnings.

Then, I went to D2D and uploaded the book. I put in my desired publication date, which would be the day after it came out of KU. I pushed the publish button thinking it wouldn’t publish until my indicated date.

To my horror, the book published immediately as a preorder book! No, no, no! Turn it off, turn it off!  

I scurried like a frantic squirrel in the road with an oncoming car: where to go?

Ten minutes later, I saw the panic button I needed to push. It said DELIST. I clicked on it. Immediately, my book was delisted. No more preorders.

A huge sigh of relief.

The day it was free from KU came and went. I kept checking D2D to see how the book was doing.

No sales. Nothing.

What??? How can that be? I had the publishing date correct.

Today, two weeks and a day later, I went back into D2D to check on the book. Still no sales. And then, I saw it.

DELISTED

Stupid! You have to republish it!

I pushed the publish button. Everything turned green. Yay.