Glitch Mitchell and the Unseen Planet was my first full length indie publication. It grew out of an idea to recreate the episodic structure of the old Flash Gordon serials that I used to watch growing up. It’s a fun book, and it has its fans. You can still get it on Kindle.
What you can’t do, anymore is get it as an audiobook.
Glitch was my first and (so far) only audiobook. The narrator, Nik Magill, did an excellent job and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. Until a few days ago, the audiobook was available pretty much anywhere you can get them. And then this happened – Outrage Over New Terms of Use at Findaway Voices Forces Change.
To cut a long story short, the company that I used to create my audiobook, Findaway Voices (now owned by Spotify), change their terms to include a massive rights grab. Authors got angry. Findaway Voices/Spotify backtracked.
However, this isn’t the first time they’ve done this sort of thing and their terms still suck. So, I’ve pulled my book from distribution and deleted it from Findaway Voices.
Now, to be clear, I’m sure Spotify don’t care. The new terms were created deliberately and smarter people than me consider the whole thing to be a deliberate ploy to hide the fact their new terms are awful. Whether that’s true or not, Spotify has a history of screwing over creatives and my patience for such shenanigans ran out a long time ago. I’ll be switching to a different company for future audiobooks.
There’s another little wrinkle, though. The Glitch Mitchell books are going away. I’m doing a bit of a relaunch of my indie career and as part of that process, I’m cleaning up my brand. Glitch Mitchell and the Unseen Planet and it’s companion short story, Glitch Mitchell and the Island of Terror are both sort of out of place alongside my other books. People who like the Glitch books probably won’t like Serial Killer Z and vice versa. That makes building a fanbase (or even a decent mailing list) tricky.
So, I won’t be republishing the audiobook and at some point this year, I’ll be pulling down the Glitch Mitchell ebooks as well. No timeline yet, and I’ll probably run a promotion or two before then. If you’d like to know when that happens, you should join my mailing list.
Until next time, stay safe.
