As for Closed Circle: We’re trying.

In response to a couple of the comments:

You’re correct. We have the limited time download for (a) security reasons and (b) limited options of our digital download software. However, we do have a record of all sales and should something go wrong, we’ll work with you. We’re just encouraging people to get those backups made because every time we have to deal with a problem, that’s time away from writing.

We’re doing DRM free so you can copy as needed and manipulate the files to your needs. Not all our formats are perfect, but we’re working on making them so. We take pride not only in our writing, but in how it is presented. None of us own dedicated readers, so we depend on feedback from those who are buying to know how to better the product.

Again, we’re learning as we go along.

As for the site….Ummm….er…there’s access to the store from every page. Obviously, that’s not, er, obvious. I’ll see about an additional STORE link. Thanks for the heads-up.

Beyond that, the CC website will undergo reconstruction as time passes. I put it together in just a couple of weeks this last November and it’s just the initial framework. We’re going to get individual pages up for each book, etc, but we’re having to figure out how to do it as we go along. It’s one reason we haven’t advertised, because it’s not really how we want it yet.

Obviously, the word is getting out, so we’d better start on those individual pages, yes? Meantime, each series has its own little page under the author’s tab.

Please bear with us. We welcome constructive criticism on the site and our products. Our emails are available on the site. Just remember, we’re writers, first, and pretty battered ones at that. New York has not been kind to any of her midlist authors for the last twenty years. E-books are at once a last ditch effort and a hope for the future for a lot of us.

Thanks to folks like you, that future looks brighter every day.

A brief correction, though — our links may expire after 24 hours, but our service will never expire…well, not until we do.

If you have problems downloading a Closed Circle book, email us at authors@closed-circle.net and we’ll get you a functioning file. And if, in the future, the “whizbang format (.wzb) shoulders all other formats out of the way, we’ll add .wzb to our format menu and make .wzb formatted files available as free upgrades available to previous purchasers. (What you really have to record is the email address you used when you purchased.)

As for our site…well, we’re writers, not web-designers. When faced with the choice between prepping prose for sale and working on site mechanics/appearance, prose wins. (Such are the true joys of self-publishing…)

Thanks again for the kind words…and please check back every so often to see what we’ve added to the virtual shelves

Of note:
Barbara Hambly is running similar effort as an experiment.
http://www.barbarahambly.com/?page_id=78
And, if there ever was an author with cause to self-publish it would be her as she has been singularly ill-served by the traditional system.

But I have saved the link! I like the idea to buy directly from the author and even get a DRM free book, with which I don’t need to worry in case I change my reader device.

As the “grassroots market” grows, it generates more opportunities for all of us.

Given they are selling DRM-free, I have no problem with not being able to re-download later. (It would be lagniappe, but they’re obviously a small operation and I don’t expect them to have to worry about that).