Angela,

I take old fashioned books and re-write them in modern English. I start out with a Public Domain book that is usually not available anywhere except in a poorly done PDF image version. I do a TON of editing to make them easy and fun to read, changing out archaic words and phrases. I also usually add images. Up until now, I have told Amazon they are NOT public domain because of all of my edits, but recently they blocked one, calling it Public Domain. I tried to change the setting as they wanted but I am now permanently blocked from using Amazon KDP. 

Will you publish a book like this? It is basically a “translation” but since it’s from old English to newer English, they don’t consider it that.

I have been doing this since 2012 and have sold 100’s of books a year. It’s not a lot, but some people do like these books and keep coming back to buy others. I’m most concerned with getting good books out there from certain authors that I like. I do all editing and covers myself. I only need them printed.

Thanks for your time.

-R.

Unfortunately, public domain books have become the pariahs in the industry. They are easy to copy and put up for sale, which leads to multiple versions of the same book on the market.

Even if you rewrite them in modern English (that was a great idea, by the way), Amazon’s systems will recognize the similarities, and ban those books.

If you go through another service like ours, Amazon will likely ban those as well. And, with multi thousands of BookLocker authors, we can’t risk our account being terminated because of a few public domain books, even if they are rewritten.

In the future, if you have original books you’d like to publish with us, I’d love to take a look at the manuscripts. 🙂

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