New releases
It's been a very busy year, especially after Max wiped out a knee back in June that ultimately needed surgery in November, so things have hit crunch time right in time for the holidays. We're working hard on four fronts, with two key priorities for the coming month: Very Dirty Stories titles re-releases and new releases. Alongside that effort will be the on-going rennovation of the Blogger web sites and updates to existing paperback formats as well as new paperbacks for key Cherish Desire Singles titles.
In the past, we tried to keep to a quarterly release schedule, but that hasn't worked well for 2017 and 2018. So some amazing stories have been piling up, and it's time to get them released! With over 280,000 words of content, Very Dirty Stories 206 to Very Dirty Stories 234 include some amazing Ladies of Object Confessions stories, lots of D/s content about Niki and Angel, and two Very Wicked Dirty Stories titles you won't want to miss.
The new titles will be uploaded to Smashwords, Amazon, and Kobo with the re-releases. We'll post an update here once they are live.
Revised releases
Since 2017, there's been a need to revisit all Very Dirty Stories titles for basic format updates as well as the author name change (from "Max" to "Max D") foisted on us by Apple. That process began with reconciling story code tags for consistency, creating new covers (and contracting the photography and image work), and working through how to enhance the existing formats. In the midst of all that, Smashwords had a policy change on declaring "taboo erotica," and there were numerous storylines in flight which had substantial amount sof content that needed editing and refinement.
Following the releases of new Cherish Desire Singles titles in Spring of 2018, we did a test run of the new Very Dirty Stories title enhancements with Very Wicked Dirty Stories titles. The focus shifted to getting all free content released in the new format to support the upcoming rennovation of the Blogger websites with the launch of the Cherish Desire Free Content site. As always, we learned some lessons along the way, and began planning the re-release strategy.
It's not as easy as we ever hope it will be. Very Dirty Stories 1 through 25 are curently prepared for re-release. There's some description clean up to finish, and then they will be pushed to Amazon, Kobo, and Smashwords. Smashwords distributes to Apple Books which is strangely not deleting Cherish Desire titles. (Apple Books is notorious for randomly deleting titles as soon as we start any linking or promotional campaigns that draw traffic to the books.) Smashwords and Kobo are also distributing to a handful of other online retailers, so we'd like to see how far our reach goes and update our retailers list accordingly.
Our goal is a complete re-release of the Very Dirty Stories titles from 1 to 201 by the end of January 2019. That's pretty aggressive but plausible.
Site updates
Blogger site rennovations are under way. Cherish Desire Free Content is live and we're verifying links, formatting, and text. The Goddess has an eye for spotting glitches Max has gone too cross-eyed to notice. News is the second site undergoing reonnvation, and archived post content is being migrated to new templates. Catalog, which is the largest undertaking and which may break links in existing book releases, is targeted for being revised by 10 December. We'll see if that works as planned.
Paperback editions
One of the things friends often ask for are physical print copies of titles. We did a test run back in 2015, and the sales for paperbacks were so minimal that it wasn't worth the effort. Since then, Amazon has merged CreateSpace into their KDP publishing environment. So, it's time to look again, come up with covers based on the revised 2018 digital covers, and give it another shot. Even if it's not a commercially viable approach, at least we can gift some of our loyal supporters and friends with something they can unwrap for the holidays.