I wouldn’t normally write today but by the time I get to it on Friday the website will be gone and if you have books there/are an author there/are a publisher there and you haven’t heard then you’ll be very annoyed. Actually, you’ll be annoyed anyway but I’m putting this here anyway.

All Romance eBooks are going out of business due to overwhelming debts, they expect to be posting a loss and can’t see a viable future for 2017. They have a notice on the All Romance eBooks website and on their OmniLit website but not on their roofbody website of AReBooks where they’re still advertising their Publishing in Partnership programme. As of a few days ago they were still soliciting ads and taking up to $US1,000 from people. Two days ago the emails started going out to publishers, authors and readers telling them what going to happen. The publishers were told they could take their books down, the readers were told to download their books and the authors were told they would not receive the last quarter’s money, instead they’d only receive 10c in the dollar as opposed to the 60% they’d normally receive.

Those in the romance industry have hit the proverbial roof. Blogcritics is where I first read about it and one of the commenters is looking for feedback. If you’re an author then I suggest you fill out this form quickly. There’s also a closed Facebook group where people are discussing potential legal action.

If you’re a reader and you’ve left all your books up there then I suggest you’ve lost a lot of them. With many publishers removing their books there’s a lot of empty shelves. One commenter on one of the articles I’ve read said she had bought 2,200 books but was only able to download 220 as all the rest had already disappeared.

Some smaller publishers and authors are offering to send out books to those who bought books on pre-orders. If you’ve done that then just send them a receipt of the order and see what happens, the worst they can say is ‘no’. Some publishers are taking it on the chin and insisting their authors will still be paid even though it’ll put them out of pocket.

For some authors this is their livelihood, the only thing keeping food on the table, for others it’s just a top up. True, I’m not interested in romance books but I know many other people are for them this is a travesty, a real problem and for that I support them.