I’m writing this post mainly to share the annoying struggle of getting an ebook uploaded to several online retailers. I wasn’t sure whether retaining each chapter of my novel ‘My Own Desert Places’ online as entries in this blog, as they were originally intended, would make Amazon and such sites unwilling to sell the ebook on their sites. Turns out that’s likely the case, as I received the following message:

The content uploaded on this account has been found to be duplicate content which is classified as either the same or similar to content uploaded on multiple other accounts. Books that fall in the Creative Common License, Public Domain, Master Resell, PLR rights or consists of nothing more than google internet searches offer no value to user, and lead to both buyer and vendor complaints. Books with the same or similar topics to other content already uploaded to our site, repurposed PLR content or PLR content ran through content spinners and plagiarism scans is still going to be considered non-unique and at risk of being rejected to prevent complaints.

I wrote the intermediary, Draft2Digital, to figure out whether setting the chapters to private will solve the issue and unblock my ebook. It’s unfortunate that either I’ll likely have to sell it or else keep it online on my blog. I’d love to have it both ways, because the ebook format is way more convenient and I also want to receive some money for my efforts, but ideally whoever wanted to read the novel should also be able to read it online. Let’s see how this goes.

Also, some unspecified retailer(s) has blocked the ebook solely because it contains explicit descriptions of sexual activities. Oh well.