I Just Can't Walk Away

Dear teeth,
Stop being jerks. Thank you.


Remember the great Saga of my Sweet Valley books? And how it was previously resolved?

I never actually got any email with any updated links or anything, so I thought maybe they just fixed it so the previous downloads wouldn't expire. (Stranger things have happened, k? Also, about that time I keeled over and had serious Sinus Health Issues.) Yeah, this morning they all started to expire.

So I went back through my emails very carefully to make sure I hadn't missed something. Nada. Off went another email to the lovely ladies at Chick Lit Isn't Dead and now I feel like a huge friggin' stalker even though none of this is my fault or theirs. Fuck you, St. Martin's Press. Your handling of this whole thing has been so incredibly bad that if I were watching this instead of being involved in it, I'd suffer so much secondhand embarrassment for you that I'd have to look away and just never come back.

Which is probably not how you want potential customers to react, right? You don't want them thinking you're money grubbing assholes, or too incompetent to figure out how to run a simple little giveaway, do you?

Apparently you do. GEEZ.

  You might recall that a month ago I was all atwitter over winning the SVH ebook series from Chick Lit Is Not Dead. I waited patiently and when we'd hit a month out and no word, I sent a little note to the site (as they'd requested) and let them know no pretty shinies for me. Someone else had already posted on the site about their lack of shinies, so I figured it was just lost in the holiday shuffle.

I checked my email when I woke up this morning and it appears I was correct, someone didn't hit send when they should have (essentially) and so the five of us who won were waiting on something that wasn't going to come. :P

Fair enough, especially when I checked the email account I'd given them when they asked which eReader I wanted my books to appear on. (I chose the ONE that doesn't bork my phone) Waiting for me were a slew of links for my books!

I clicked the first one and my glee turned to "...wait, wtf?" for a variety of reasons.

1) This invitation to download a book expires in 30 days. Once you download the book, you will have 60 days to read it. Perhaps someone more well versed in the ways of things will point out that this just means "crack open the damn thing before 60 days are through and hey, yay!" but I'm taking it as "you have 60 days after DLing it to read it and then POOF. It's gone!"
   Which is a dick move. I waited a month for these, and no where in the fine print prior to this did it say "you win them for two months and then we repo them." Is this a standard thing? Because if so, I'd like to opt out of this reality. I prefer it when you win something and it's yours. Like that shitty copy of Letters to Kurt that I cannot give away. That sucker is MINE, whether I want it or not. But these? These that I want, poof? How fair is that?

2) Naturally these are incompatible with the only reader my phone has not rejected.
  Why, oh why, did you bother to ask which one I would prefer to use then? Seriously?

I am bitterly disappointed. Emphasis on the bitterly. Funny, MacMillan. Oh so funny.

I'll admit, my first thought beyond a stream of obscenities, was "dammit, now I have to buy them" but then the genius part of my brain said to hell with that. I won these stupid things and if they think I'm going to fork over an additional $35.88 in two months, they can kiss my ass.

You can publish shitty "10 years later!" updates and I'll accept it because the author/creator is obviously insane. You can then follow that up with the creator being blissfully unaware of how anything, anywhere, is ever done with the possible exception of France (I dunno but you can't go three seconds in an interview with FP without France being mentioned) and I'll still fork over my money because I am a fan. But this?

This is where I draw my line.

Which sucks for you, because I can't think of too many other people who love SV the way I do.