Our ebook launches continue at a good pace and the first print books are nearly ready to launch. Meanwhile, we have been evaluating bids with web developers on the site rebuild and taking on several new staff members. A lot of growth happening, with both the work and improvements that go along with it.
On a down note, our publisher and her family have suffered a great personal loss recently. Trying to keep their work on track while they figure out the changes it will make in their lives may slow things up a bit. Please bear with us.
We're still in the alpha stage (start-up) and are expecting even more good things for FFP as we grow.
Well, folks, we spent most of the last month reconstructing the email information deleted by our old website host. We've had reports of some email to and from us not getting through on the new server as well. With the new email, we'd like people to check their spam filters and junk mail boxes. You may have to approve us for passing those. One of the downsides of running an erotic fiction site is that some filters arbitrarily flag sexual content as spam. If you haven't heard back from us in the last three weeks (and were expecting to), try these steps:
1) Check your spam filters, junk mail and any other area where you email might have been intercepted before getting to your inbox. If we are in your junk mail, make sure to mark us as "not spam" for the future.
2) If you still think there might be a problem, try contacting us with a "check in" email. (Please don't flood us with these. Try the first option before doing so and be patient when you wait for a reply.)
3) If you've done both 1 & 2, and no reply in the next 72-hours, then you can send email to our back-up address and see if that works. Our auxiliary email is forbiddenfictionpub at gmail.
4) If none of the above work, you can use the "Contact Us" form on the website.
Also, there is one author who recently submitted a work to us (8/10) but every attempt to email that author has bounced back. And two more who we have sent contracts to but haven't had a reply since the change. If you think you are one of these authors, please see the above steps.
We hope this fixes everything. Let us know if there is anything we aren't aware of yet.
This website is like the tiny cramped apartment we're living in while we wait on the builders to finish the home we spent so much time designing. We've done a lot of re-design on the schematics lately, using what we have learned from the older version. Yet, it's still frustrating living in this cramped, and quite frankly, not entirely function old place.
This last month's server crisis was liking finding out that bad smell you were worried about was actually mold in your apartment (because of a leak the landlord hadn't fixed) and then having to make an emergency move into another small apartment (hopefully with better plumbing)—all the while cursing because you know you are going to be moving again once the new house is finished. Yet, you're grateful to be away from the bad smell, even if you are still trying to find things in your hastily packed boxes and not sure if your mail has been forwarded correctly and so on. Now you're trying to figure out how what to just leave packed until the house is done, but you need a better idea of how long that is going to take. And the sudden move has made it hard for your to get your work done as well.
We have completed the bulk of our move of all our websites and email service from our previous host, (who we have now dubbed "Nightmarehost") to the new provide, LiquidWeb. So far, LiquidWeb's support team is an improvement. We expect the move to not only give us better reliability, stability and extra features.
We have one of those bad news turned to good news weeks. The bad news is that the web host service we have used for the last couple years had a massive fail. They've had them before and we almost left lasts time. Except that they said they had cleaned up and that if we went to a dedicated servicer it wouldn't happen again. Well, it was different this time, it was worse. Not only did the websites go down (not just ours, but thousands), but so did our email service. And then, to top it all off, while they claimed all issues "resolved" – they had accidently deleted all the items in our dozen or so email inboxes. They are claiming they can't do anything about it. We're still working on that portion, but there is some possibility that they really were that incompetent.
The good news is that we had already been researching and planning to move to a different server host when we completed our site rebuild. So, we changed the order of the plan to move first, then finish the rebuild. This weekend, our IT department will be working on moving both websites and our mail will be moving to the new provider. That means, beginning from the sending of this email/post until we a follow up email/post, the site will not save new posts. We are backing it up and moving it to the new server. The web-addresses will be the same as will our email addresses, but they will be unreliable until the move it complete.
Despite being a weekend, we were very busy over the past few days.
We found glitches in two of our works and have reissued some versions:
Pathfinder by J.A. Jaken- PDF had some text missing. We fixed and reloaded to FFP & ARE, the only places the PDF was affected. Readers who bought them before can easily download the new versions for free from those places.
Whatever the Costby Lynn Kelling - Has received positive reveiws but also comments on a couple of errors. We re-proofed and re-issued a corrected version. Again, readers who bought the previous version can easily re-download the better version at no additional cost. New readers will automatically get the corrected version. Congrats to Kelling that both this and her other novel, Deliver Us, have lots of Five Star reviews on ARE and Amazon.
D.M. Atkins and Erika L Franc spent most of the last week creating and uploading the versions of the entire backlist for distribution on Barnes and Noble and Smashwords. We also found a few errors along the way and did some formatting improvements. (And reloaded to other sites when that affected those.) This means that within the next 72 hours, we expect most if not all works in our catalog will be for sale on Amazon, ARE, B&N and Smashwords. We are still waiting for Sony to get back to us with how to proceed there and have copies waiting for upload through them as well.
Meanwhile, TM McKee and Soilnatine spent much of their weekend translating the staff re-design of the ForbiddenFiction website into a document for the webdevelopers (complete with appropriate tech speak).
And if that wasn't enough, the design phase brought up some holes in our current Content Labels list, which we have expanded and refined, which also means re-evaluating all current stories to fit the new list. We waiting for hear from our new database manager and hope soon to be migrating all our spreadsheets into a new system.
If we've been slow to answer your email this week, at least you know it's not your email but our overloaded schedule. We're hoping to catch up on other business this week now that we have these aspects done.
This week we created a Fantastic Fiction Publishing account on Goodreads. (For those just joining us, ForbiddenFiction is an imprint of Fantastic Fiction Publishing.) Then we added all the current and nearly ready to launch stories we had to the Goodreads system. Some of them were listed, but nearly all those listing had some missing and/or wrong. They are all corrected now.
We solicited bids on our website design, only to find that the developers were not clear on the details of how our site(s) will differ significantly from a blog site. It's the complex interactive nature of serialized fiction based on models from online fiction archives and combined with social media forms like LJ that throws them.
I guess having to explain a lot is to be expected when you are doing something new. So the least few weeks have been staff hammering out verbally (and taking notes in detail) exactly how the structure of such interactivity should work.
We keep playing around with the best place to post site news. Forums don't seem to work well for it, so we are now testing out using the blog module for site news instead. Let us know if you think it works better here or in forums.
