Welp, Shifter Woods: Claw technically turned out to be a novel as it clocks in at a touch over 42,000 words, but I declared it soup at 5:30 AM this morning (I’m backdating this post so that it’s dated as February 9, just in case anyone’s confused).

Claw is also quite a bit longer than I expected, but with the FMC having to discover her wolf shifter heritage I really needed more space for all that. I am going to let this simmer over the weekend while I work on Crystal Blade, give it another pass, then send it off to the editor and betas. While I’m doing that I’ll start work on the Esposito County Shifters omnibus edition cover (I can’t go with just a Photoshopped box set cover because this will be coming out in print), then once Shifter Woods: Growl comes out of KU I’ll publish all the individual novellas and the omnibus wide.

Why wide when I specifically went over to KU last year with the bulk of my titles and saw my income jump? Because more and more authors are getting their accounts yanked over KU titles that have been pirated (technically having a KU title on a pirate site violates Amazon rules because your KU title is supposed to be exclusive to Amazon. But Amazon is penalizing the wrong people over this, and nobody has time for that crap).

Also, people I trust in the indie publishing business are now recommending that indie authors go wide if possible because it’s looking more and more like KU’s days are numbered. I still have my Smashwords/D2D and Google Play accounts so taking the ECS titles wide will just mean a couple days’ work of creating or updating the non-Amazon versions before publishing them. Plus I keep hearing that there’s a rather tasty market for omnibus editions of a series on the non-Amazon platforms, so now that I’m about to possess an omnibus edition of a series I would like to take advantage of that.

Mind you, I’m not pulling everything out of KU. I’m still making money from page reads, especially on the Hidden Empire and Paladins of Crystal books, and I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by taking those titles out of KU. But the ECS titles will be a good way of dipping my toe back into wide publishing and judging for myself if I want to move more titles (like To My Muse, which is a standalone) wide.