I'm Removing All My Published Books From Amazon

Scrapping 4 years of work

Every book that I’ve ever self published, I am taking down from the internet and removing from my life. This is what I announced to myself some weeks ago and actually acted on. If you had asked me why, I would’ve told you it was because I wanted to keep 100% of my rights and profits from each book sale. Then my reasoning changed and I want to share why and also why I decided to put them all back up.

Last year I completed Write For Life followed by The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. In each of those books, Julia speaks a lot about how one should do their morning pages each day.

For those who don’t know, morning pages are essentially 3 long hand written pages of stream of consciousness, with the main goal of clearing all the junk from your head and making space for the good ideas to flow. My reasoning behind doing it daily was because I tend to overthink a lot and writing all my thoughts down really helped me organise my brain.

Now I’ll be honest, when I first read her books, I was very unsure of what the spiritual repercussions would be because the entire thing was so spiritual and I had no idea in what or who she put her faith. There is a lot of truth in her writing as God is the Creator of the universe. Even though she mentioned this, something just didn't feel completely right. I ended up talking myself out of those feelings with the excuse that Julia is just using certain words and phrases to be appealing for all different types of readers, so I let it all go.

Over time I’ve filled nearly 2 years worth of morning pages (as I had originally attempted The Artist’s Way in 2024) and out of them came 6 books I published on Amazon.

A month or so ago I decided that I wanted to sell my books on my own website (which I still haven’t built yet) as PDF/EPUB downloads and put on pause the book I was editing. Then a certain documentary trailer by the ministry, Little Light Studios was released about a particular book called Jesus Calling (which I’m glad to say I’d never heard of before). This documentary came out not long after and as I watched it, I found the entire thing so eye opening that it made those feelings I had all those months ago resurface. I knew that I wouldn't be able to go forward unless I did my research and found out what was really bothering me about The Artist’s Way and I very quickly found the answers I was seeking.

I could ask myself “Why is it that I’ve only just seen all this now?” as the article I found came out around the same time I was reading the book, but I’m not sure I would’ve been ready to receive the answers so I’m grateful now that I’m aware, especially as I’m making decisions of what things to keep in my life and what things to get rid of.

I could say that ironically I had been thinking to myself, “What if you wrote so many things that you later realised wasn’t entirely accurate. How would you go about writing a new book correcting those things?”

Well, from what I’ve been learning over the weeks, I’ve started to be able to see more things that I once never noticed and it’s all thanks to God.

I will share what I learned in a dedicated article, but the decisions I had made after were to get rid of my personal copies of all the books I’d written, including all the drafts and to rewrite the first book I ever published which I had planned to sell exclusively on my website when I eventually launched it. The funny thing is I had planned on sharing a video I had filmed of me announcing my new book and where it’s being sold, but I kept pushing it back each week from releasing. Now I know why.

I still have a lot of thoughts and learning that I need to do as quite a few things in my daily routine now need to be replaced, and much prayer needs to be had to see if I should rewrite the novel I have been working on for a few years or scrap it altogether.

I have decided after a few weeks that I will republish all the books I still had access to (which I have already done) because they are a part of my journey. Everything I do now though moving forward will be different. I mean, I halted the publishing of my third poetry book and have plans to rewrite the entire thing because it doesn’t fit in with the direction I’m now walking in. The previous books aren’t bad per se, but I think they could have been way better developed. But can’t everyone say that about their past? As long as we’re always learning and improving, that’s what counts right?

✨ Nadine