Two Days to Return a Phone Call
Or why I took my books out of Kindle Unlimited, and what’s finally coming out the other side
In the spring of 2012, I was anchored in my boat Talespinner off Green Turtle Cay in the Abacos when an email came in with the subject line:
Amazon Publishing LOVES Circle of Bones!
I read it about four times. The email was from a senior editor at Thomas & Mercer — Amazon had started several publishing imprints that worked on a more or less traditional model, and T&M was the mystery and thriller one. They were relatively new then, but I knew who they were. He said we should talk and gave me a phone number.
There was one problem. I was in the Bahamas. My cell phone didn’t work over there, and the Out Island Internet connection I had at anchor wasn’t going to carry a phone call. So, I wrote back and said: I’m at Green Turtle Cay, I’m setting sail for Florida today, and I’ll call you in a few days.
Then I pulled up the anchor and sailed home to return a phone call.
On that call, the editor told me they wanted to buy Circle of Bones — re-edit it, repackage it, publish it under their imprint. And then he asked the question every writer should be ready for: What else are you working on?
I had no idea. None. I had not thought one hour past that book. But I understood the opportunity sitting there on the line, so I opened my mouth and out came: “Well — I’ve been thinking about turning this into a trilogy.”
“Great,” he said. “We’ll offer you a three-book contract.”
And that’s how what became the Shipwreck Adventure trilogy was born.
Thomas & Mercer was really good to me. Over the next ten years I worked with great editors, they produced fabulous covers, and they sold more than 150,000 copies of those three books. I mean who sells books better than Amazon? There is no way I could have reached that number on my own, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But it came with one condition, and the condition never changed: the ebooks were exclusive to Amazon. Forever. Not “exclusive for a launch window” — exclusive, period. And eventually that came to mean being in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s subscription service.
At the time, I also had my Seychelle books that I was self-publishing, and if I was going to get read-through from all those T&M sales, it made sense to put those books in Kindle Unlimited, too — which meant they were exclusive to the Zon, too.
The paperbacks could technically be ordered by bookstores, but most independent bookstores would rather not stock a book from an Amazon-owned imprint, and I don’t blame them.
By the end of the decade, the books were doing what books do when nobody’s steering them. They were old. They were quiet. They were forgotten.
I’ve been thinking about it as a cruise ship. The cabin is comfortable, the food is good, somebody else stands the night watch, and you cover real distance. But you don’t plot the course. You get off wherever the ship stops. You don’t get the sense of accomplishment of having done something few people get to do.
The moment I changed my mind
It came when I finished Whiskey Creek — my first new novel in years — and sat down to decide what to do with it.
The obvious move was to submit it to an Amazon imprint. And as I thought it through, I realized the logic was a one-way door: if part of my catalog was locked into Kindle Unlimited, it made sense to put all of it there. You want readers who finish one book to find the next one waiting right there in the same place.
But there was someplace I didn’t want to be anymore.
Some of that is plain business sense. Having one retailer account for one hundred percent of your income is not a good position to be in. On our boats, we try to have back-ups for everything, right? I didn’t like the feeling of being so dependent on one company who could choose to randomly close my account on an algorithmic whim.
And some of it is that in this particular stretch of history, I don’t want everything I’ve built to depend on the goodwill of a single billionaire. I don’t want to get political, but it’s true, and it’s part of why I did this.
Mostly, though, it’s simpler than either of those things. Sailors tend to be rugged individualists almost to a fault. I wanted to see if I could do it myself.
So, I didn’t submit Whiskey Creek anywhere. I published it myself, wide — which means putting my books up for sale in every online bookstore I could reach. And then I asked Thomas & Mercer for my rights back to the trilogy.
I got them. The words only, though — that’s my IP, my intellectual property. Which means new covers, new interior formatting, new book descriptions, yada, yada, yada.
What nobody tells you about going wide
It is so much more work.
Every book has to be uploaded to every store — ebook files, print files, covers, metadata — and every store wants it slightly different. Each one has its own keyword system, its own categories, its own promotional programs with their own deadlines and their own rules, and you have to learn all of them and then keep track of when to apply.
And I can no longer advertise to one link. There’s no single button that says, “buy it.” I need a landing page that fans out to half a dozen stores, and every extra click between a reader and a book is a place where the reader can lose interest.
On Amazon, the store finds readers for you. Wide, there is no algorithm doing that work. You are the algorithm. I know. Call me crazy. The thing is, I like doing this stuff.
Yes, I’ve had doubts
Whiskey Creek went up for preorder and I got sixty folks to pay p front.
Sixty.
My Thomas & Mercer books had thousands of preorders. Thousands, without me doing anything at all, because the ship’s engines were running, and I was a passenger, kicking back with a cocktail in hand. I took a good look at that number and thought some fairly dark thoughts about my own business judgment.
But here’s the thing. I am lucky enough that I don’t have to live off my book income, which means I get to play a long game that I understand not every writer is willing or able to play. And every single sale I’ve made since going wide, I earned. I know where it came from. I know what I did to get it.
Miles gained on a cruise ship are not miles earned like they are when you’re sailing your own boat.
That’s not a business plan. I get that. But it’s the truth, and it’s why I’m still doing it.
Which brings me back to Circle of Bones
Circle of Bones was the book that started all of this. I self-published it in 2011, back when making an ebook free was a brand-new trick nobody had figured out yet. And that’s what put that email in my inbox at Green Turtle Cay.
For the fifteen years since, it has been available in exactly one store. If you read on a Kobo, or an Apple device, or a Nook — if you live somewhere that Amazon isn’t the center of the book world — you have never been able to buy this ebook.
That changes today.
Circle of Bones, Shipwreck Adventure Series Book 1, is now available for preorder at every major retailer for the first time. The official release date will be October 13, 2026. Here’s the new cover.
The story is a nautical thriller about a woman solo sailor named Riley, the wreck of the real WWII French submarine Surcouf, and it’s full of some wild on-the-water chase scenes.
You can preorder Circle of Bones at the store of your choice:
Amazon. Apple. Barnes and Noble. Kobo.
And here is a small illustration of the many frustrations I just told you about with going wide: as I write this the preorder is live at seven stores, including three in Europe, but Google Play still hasn’t gotten the memo.
I’m asking one final favor of you
If you’ve never heard of Bookbub, it is a newsletter that offers free and discounted ebooks according to your interests with links to the platform you read on. You can cancel the newsletter at any time.
See, when I left Amazon Publishing and Kindle Unlimited, aka the cruise ship, I gave up the ship’s PA system. There is no single algorithm that tells both a Kobo reader in Canada and a Google reader in the UK that I have a new book out. BookBub is the closest thing wide authors have to that — when I release a book or run a sale, BookBub will email the people who follow me and it costs me nothing. And if I can reach 1,000 followers, BookBub will also let me send alerts about preorders like this one. I’m not far off. Every little bit helps.
Follow me on BookBub by clicking here.
It takes a minute, it costs nothing, and it is genuinely the single most useful thing you can do for me short of buying the book on preorder. And you may find some really good deals on books you will enjoy. To those who do follow, I thank you in advance.
Fair winds,
Christine