Frequently Asked Questions

We are an Independent eBook publisher based near Canterbury in the UK. We publish our books all over the world using sites like Amazon and Smashwords. At the moment we are not open to unsolicited submissions.

We are Natasha Duncan-Drake (Tasha) and Sophie Duncan and we decided to set up Wittegen in 2010 and started publishing in 2011. We are twins and we have been writing since we were wee things, but neither of us pursued it professionally until we set up our own company. Both of us are originally techies by trade: Tasha used to be a database designer and systems consultant; Sophie used to be a software developer and an IT project manager.

When we first looked into self-publishing, one of the things we noticed was that branding is very important. We could have simply self published our books and then linked to them on our blogs, but we wanted a brand under which to group all of our books. We both write in multiple genres and for a wide age range, so we decided to set up our own company. We feel this provides a professional platform from which to market our books.

This means the titles contains explicit sexual material. Some of our title are erotic romance and not suitable for those under 18, hence we warn for it. We do not wish our readers to come across content they were not expecting.

Many of our free books are thank you’s to our readers. Some are slot-in short stories to go with some of our books’ series and some are simply stand alone offers of gratitude. Other free books are to entice readers in and hopefully, encourage them to purchase other books in the same series. This is usually the case when the free book is an actual part of a series. Some of our books are free when they first come out (e.g. those written for All Hallows Read for the past two years and the Giveaway Games stories), but then become paid for books after a period of time.

We use the lengths given by the Hugo Awards since it seemed like a valid ranking system:

• Novel is defined as >40K words
• Novella is defined as 17.5K – 40K words
• Novelette is defined as 7.5K – 17.5K
• Short Story is defined as <7.5K

Yes, our books are shipped via Smashwords to: Scribd (erotic content is not available in their subscription service, but erotic titles are available to purchase from their platform).

Yes, but of course it is up to the libraries themselves to choose what is listed. We ship to the following systems via Draft2Digital:

• Baker and Taylor’s
• Overdrive
• Odilo
• cloudLibrary
• Palace Marketplace

Amazon do not allow independent publishers to list their books for free on their site under normal circumstances. The minimum we are allowed to set is $0.99. The books that are free on Amazon have been price matched by Amazon themselves to equal the price found on other sites. We cannot control this, we can only ask Amazon to price match when appropriate and hope they will do so. Sometimes they remove price matching without warning and we have to request it again, which we aim to do as quickly as possible, but it is up to Amazon’s discretion, so we cannot guarantee the results.

Firstly, KDP Select only offers 5 days out of 90 free, so the book is not available free, permanently. Secondly, to enroll a book in KDP Select that book must only be available on Amazon. We feel this is anti-competitive and hence do not wish to use this service. We are very grateful to Amazon for providing such a huge publishing platform, but we do not agree with all of their techniques.

Unfortunately, Amazon does not allow some adult titles to appear in general searches. We are sorry, there is nothing we can do about this. If you find another book by the same author and then click the author link all books will then be listed.

We primarily upload our books to three services:

• Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing)
• Google Play
• Draft2Digital (was Smashwords)

All the other platforms are provided to us by Draft2Digital, who have an eBook distribution program as well as an eBook selling platform. This saves us a great deal of time and gives us what we believe is good coverage for our reader base.

The newsletter is a formal email which goes out only at intervals and will group together information in one place. It will talk about upcoming books, featured books, competitions and events. The blog is less formal and more immediate and each post is likely to deal with only one topic. Posts will be about publishing, our books, free fiction and other topics we think will interest our users. We may even add a review section, but that is under discussion. We may also take guest blog posts and blog tours from fellow authors/indie publishers.

Free Fiction Fridays are when we give away free fiction to all the subscribers of out newsletter. This used to be every month, which may return, but at the moment it is special occasions, like high days and holidays.