This week had some fun to deal with. Not really, but I’ll get to it.

First of all, I made progress on Talyn: Repose! It’s up to ~24,000 words, and moving along steadily. Cover art for Seed of Chaos is in-progress, and expected in early March, and since that’s all I’m waiting on, I sent the manuscript to Podium to let them get the audiobook production started. Now for the unpleasant news.

Findaway Voices (owned by Spotify), the distributor I use to publish audiobooks of most of my series to places other than Amazon, Audible, and iTunes, attempted to change the Terms of Use this week, beginning in mid-March. I have no idea what they were thinking, but the changes were… overwhelmingly broad. It essentially would’ve allowed them to do anything they wanted with my IP, forever, without paying me anything. Translated it to other languages, licensed it for movies, made comics, data-mined it to train AI, anything. Now, I doubt they would. I’m a small-time operator, but the sheer breadth of rights would also put me in breach of contract for several other legal agreements, which is bad.

They quickly backpedaled and changed the update yesterday, but the damage is done in my eyes. I can’t trust them not to change it in the future, just in a sneakier fashion. I’ll admit their passive-aggressive email claiming authors misinterpreted their intentions didn’t make me any happier. So yesterday I sent an email telling them to remove all audiobooks of mine from their service.

This will not remove audiobooks if you’ve already purchased them. They have the rights to keep delivering them to you. I want to make that clear. However, I expect the audiobooks to come down over the next month as retailers comply. Again, this is only on sites other than Amazon, Audible, and iTunes, and it applies to the following series: Beesong Chronicles, Lilith’s Shadow, Mantles of Power, and Soul Bound, as well as Crisis of Faith, Marin’s Codex, and Touching Divinity.

There are a few other distributors I can go through as well, but I’ll have to take some time to decide who to go with (and comb through their Terms of Service). I’ve also been considering doing some direct sales via my website, using Bookfunnel to deliver the audiobooks, but I haven’t decided yet. Having to deal with sales taxes has been the main reason I haven’t done so before this, even if it’d cost less than half the price for all of you to double my income. Probably not doing it, honestly.

In any case, I wanted to let all of you know. I’m not happy to do this, but… it is what it is.