To anyone who has tried to buy the Kindle eBook of Scandal or Indiscreet in North America, yes, those books should be available but no, at the moment they are not. For some reason, Amazon is showing that the books are not available for Kindle, even though Berkley has the rights, and even thought they USED to be available.

I’ve contacted my agent and she in turn has contacted Berkley so I’m hopeful this will be resolved quickly. In the meantime, all I can say is I’m really sorry.

Speculations about Why

I actually think this is mostly Amazon’s fault. Berkley, the publisher of my last four historicals, only acquired North American rights. This means Berkley can only sell those books in the US and Canada and I can sell the books everywhere else. Which I am doing.

A few weeks ago I got an email from Amazon asking me to prove I had the right to sell Scandal, Indiscreet, and Not Wicked Enough since they could see the exact same content being sold by another vendor (Berkley). This is a good thing as there have been cases of nefarious persons stealing an author’s content and selling the entire eBook via Kindle with sometimes only a few changes, or even none. That’s not piracy, that’s theft. I provided Amazon with scans of my contracts showing the rights acquired by Berkley and what rights were mine. Amazon replied promptly with OK! Awesome!

So, now Scandal and Indiscreet for Kindle are showing as not available to US customers… Kind of suspicious, eh? It’s possible the problem is something else, but for now, that’s my theory. Amazon has made a mistake.

I emailed Amazon setting out what had happened and my theory about why, and they promptly responded with, “Berkley needs to contact us.” Which makes sense even though, come on, this is surely Amazon’s fault. So I then emailed the whole thread to my agent and now we just have to wait for Berkley to address this with Amazon.

Anyway, I expect the books to be back on sale for Kindle shortly.

My apologies to everyone who tried to buy the books and could not, and my sincere thanks to everyone who emailed me about the problems with availability.