Marketing Strategy or Self-Sabotage? You be the judge.
So here is a mistake I made that may be familiar to other writers. I'd added the first chapter of my book, Knucklebone, at the end of Seven Little Secrets. I figured it would be a great tool for increasing awareness and intrigue about it, thus encouraging more readers to purchase it.
I'd seen plenty of authors do this, and naturally felt it was a super-duper idea.
But guess what, folks? Amazon's review process includes a search for #plagiarism. Which is fantastic. Except if you've written an excerpt of your next novel into your book. Because guess what? You've committed plagiarism in the eyes of Amazon.
So my ebook was subsequently banned from publication until I, K.L. Gore, could prove I had received permission from the author, K.L. Gore, to use this work in my book. This is actually trickier than it sounds because sending them an email to let them know that both books are mine doesn't fix the issue. They wanted a letter from my agent or publisher stating that I allowed myself to use my own material in my next book.
It took me a while to figure out that they were talking about copyright infringement. For the longest time I couldn't figure out what the issue was since I received a generic email stating I needed permission from the author...and gosh darn it!...that made no sense to me. But it finally dawned on me that I needed to delete the Knucklebone excerpt from the Seven Little Secrets book. This rectified the issue and now both ebooks are available for sale.
I learned two lessons from this. One - don't use excerpts from any novels, not even my own and Two - Amazon does a terrific job preventing plagiarism from occurring. No complaints there. Just a lot of frustration as I tried to figure out why I needed permission from myself to #publish my own book.