International Authors' Day!

That's right - it was about time we had one of those! After all, there's Mother's Day, Father's Day, Labour Day, Valentine's Day... all pretty important. And since books are important to me because I happen to write them, I've decided to dedicate a short post to the reason I started writing a series despite having sworn I never would. And at the bottom of this post, you can enter my giveaway to win a print copy of the entire trilogy I wrote :)

What started it all? A writing contest. I entered the dystopian writing contest organized by young-adults.nl (a well-known YA forum in the Netherlands) and struggled to keep my story below 20,000 words. No mean feat, I tell you, because I'm known to ramble on quite a bit once I get started. After submitting the story to the woman who'd set up the contest, I translated it to English (because I do that to all my books in order to reach a wider audience) and published it on Kindle. To my surprise, it was a big hit (even though some people mistook my novella for fanfic, for some obscure reason). Soon, I was getting reviews saying that the book was too short (I sort of agreed with them) and it should be expanded. So after a few months of reading reviews from people begging me to write more, I caved and wrote two more books. It was an absolute thrill ride, and I can't wait to write another series. I'm hooked on revisiting my own characters!

If you want to get hooked on Leia, Walt, and other people populating the world of the Island, you can win the entire trilogy by entering the Rafflecopter below! :)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

What's the Spanish word for 'sadsack'?

Sorry, I hardly ever rant on this blog, but now I feel the need to do so.
Last month, one of my books was published in Spanish! What a thrill! The translator worked under a royalty split agreement, meaning that she'll get paid half of the royalties for every sold book. I had a fantastic cover, I had some reviews lined up, I was ready to see what the book would do.
Well, this is what it did: it sold 13 copies. In an entire month. So, let's see - the translator made about 7 dollars. But that's not what I am pissed off about. It is this: someone stole my book, pirated it, and now it is being plastered all over the internet for free. And I don't just mean shady torrent sites. I mean actual YA blogs. That's right, bloggers who write reviews about books and apparently are 'passionate' about books are shamelessly putting up my book FOR FREE DOWNLOAD on their sites. Meanwhile, the translator gets $0.00. I'm not even that sad about myself (I make enough money off my English books for the moment) but what about this poor woman who slaved away at my book and is not compensated for it by seeing some actual sales? She's currently working on another title of mine, and I have half a mind to just tell her to stop, because I sure as heck can't afford to pay for it upfront (not with sales figures like those) and I can't in good conscience offer her another 'royalty split' deal if this is how young adults in Spain treat their authors.

If you think this is a disgrace, share this post and make people aware of what they're actually doing by stealing books! They made me decide to just give up on the Spanish ebook market. I won't be publishing any more books in digital format if this is what will happen.