Frequently Asked Questions

At this time we only publish books from our listed authors. If that changes we will let everyone know.

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 is now an IT project manager.

Tasha now writes and runs Wittegen full time and Sophie writes and runs Wittegen part time while working for a further education establishment for the rest of the week.

We love to chat to our readers and make new friends so please see our author pages for all our social networking information: Tasha | Sophie

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.

Wittegen Eros is an imprint of Wittegen Press for exclusively adult titles – so those with sexy content. Other than that we are the same team with the same goals – give our readers the best.

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.

The blog is also where we will host our competitions from now on.

No, never. Any details collected during subscription to the newsletter or the blog or any other way on this site will be used only for the stated purpose at time of subscription. We very much respect your privacy.

If you are having any problems with viewing the site which persist for more than a day and are not rectified by deleting your browser cache, please use our contact form and let us know. We will do our utmost to resolve any issues as fast as possible.

All you have to do to see our Newsletter Exclusive posts is join our newsletter. The only thing you need is a valid email address and its free and we promise not to spam you. Click this link to see the newsletter subscribe form.

The first Friday of every month we publish a short story exclusive to all the subscribers of our newsletter, hence “Free Fiction Friday”.  See the Free Fiction Friday page for details.

This means the title 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 given period.

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).
• Oyster
• Flipart

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

• Library Direct
• Baker and Taylor’s Axis360
• Overdrive
• Smashwords Library Direct

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.

If you would like to help a book to be free on Amazon then please follow this set of instructions:

1. Go to the iTunes or Barnes and Nobel page for the book and copy the URL (you can find all book links on the page for the book on this site).
2. Go to the book page on you local Amazon site (also found on the book page on this site).
3. Scroll down to the “Product details” section.
4. Click the link in this section which says “tell us about a lower price”.
5. Choose “Website” from the options.
6. In the URL section paste the URL you copied from iTunes or Barnes and Nobel.
7. Enter 0 in the Price and Shipping Cost fields.
8. Make sure “Date of price” is the current date.
9. Hit submit.

Thank you if you take the time to do this.

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
• Smashwords

All the other platforms are provided to us by Smashwords, 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.

Last year (2013) Kobo UK removed all self-published books from their site because of issues with unlabelled adult books. They said they would put back any books which did not break their terms of service. We do not believe any of our books break their terms of service, because all adult content was labelled, however, only a handful of the titles were returned with no explanation as to why other titles, which included young adult books with no sexual content whatsoever, were not re-listed.

Some of our books are available on Kobo US and not UK, others are completely gone. We are still working to return our books to the Kobo service. Your patience is appreciated.