Not in that order.
General News Update
This one’ll be short and sweet. Due to a lot of reasons, mostly known as “Dove writes niche and ebook pricing has been stagnant for, uh, at least ten years while overall costs for everything else have not” collectively, I’ve updated the overall ebook prices. This also means that, where possible, I’ve provided fancy elements to the ebooks, taking full advantage of the existence of colour ereaders. I’m currently talking to Kobo to figure out why I can’t push through updates on my books, but they’re live on Itch and Payhip right now. Exciting stuff!
The ebooks have also returned to Amazon. However, due to Amazon being, well, Amazon, these now come with DRM. There’s two reasons for this. The first is that this will, I hope, encourage people to get the DRM-free versions available everywhere. Amazon also, at least for now, has the outdated versions, so if you want any of the shinies… Yeah, don’t go there. The second is that Amazon decided that DRM-free books, which have a reflowable (read: a fluid and dynamic layout that adapts to the ereader and its user’s preferred settings) layout should have the option to be downloaded into a PDF (read: a fixed layout that doesn’t adapt) and even if I trusted these conversions to look well–they should if you’ve got your ebook created properly and well–if I wanted my ebooks to be a fixed layout, I would have made them a fixed layout. That said, if people really want the PDFs, I can add the ones for the print editions that will actually look great because they are, I cannot stress this enough, designed to be a fixed layout. (Can you tell I’m not happy about this?)
I’ve also updated Payhip to look really nice and orderly with a getting started page and useful sorting categories. And, um, I think that’s it for the updates. Onto the really fun stuff! A book announcement! We are back with our demisexual shenanigans!
The Princess who Didn’t Eat Cake: 10th Anniversary Announcement
Hey all! It’s been… a ride. Who can believe that The Princess who Didn’t Eat Cake is turning 10 years old this year? I sure can’t!
But! To celebrate this (and because, sadly, the book is a lot more needed still than I anticipated), I’ve created a whole new anniversary edition! It comes with an entirely new 4000-word personal essay on the state of demisexual fiction, as I experienced it at least, between 2016 and 2026 as well as some glances at the wider states of asexual and aromantic representation.
All essays now also come with neatly formatted reference sections, so for those of you who were actually using the hyperlinks, sorry! To everyone else, I hope you’ll enjoy having all the practical reference information neatly in one place at the end of each essay as well as a list of titles mentioned throughout for ease.
I also prettified the layout somewhat with decorative headers (and alt text for them) and fancy scene breaks. If you’re on a colour ereader or a computer/tablet, there will even be colour. Yes, of course it’s the official purple HEX code for the demisexual flag.
Useful Info in a Nice FAQ Format
Q: When is it available?
A: Right now! Yes, technically this is a few months before August 31st, its official original release date but no time like the present!
Q: Do I have to pay for the anniversary edition?
A: Nope! I mean, you can. I won’t say ‘no’. That’s why I added a suggested price and the ability to give more if people want to. I’ll deeply appreciate anyone who does pay, however much that payment is, but The Princess who Didn’t Eat Cake is first and foremost intended to be freely available to anyone who needs it or thinks it could be useful.
Q: Will you be updating the recs list at the end?
A: Nope. This has been a standard feature of the original ebook, in hopes of introducing more people to a variety of then-recent and good (in my opinion) demisexual representation in multiple genres. I’ve removed one title due to the author developing bigotry I could not in good conscience support as well. But maintaining the list and keeping it up-to-date with recent titles is, admittedly, not a small undertaking. It means reading all the demisexual representation I can get my hands on and evaluating each and everyone for the list, then overhauling it when enough time has passed or enough titles were there to be replaced. That works for a while and for an ebook (which this is), but it’s far from ideal and tracking the various editions and which has what is… Let’s just say an attempt was made and it’s about the one time my bajillion copies of everything failed me.
It also means that if I did want to make a print edition, which I’m not ruling out, any updates I make would have to be made there as well and print is far less forgiving of the changing summary lengths.
Q: What formats is it available in?
A: Epub! (Epub3 for the curious.) I may release it in a print book as well if I can make it look all pretty and, crucially, with a page count that makes doing so sensible, and the print book would obviously have a set price for printing costs, but that’s still up in the air. This is only 12k, maybe inching to a short novella with the sample chapters in it all together. That’s not a good length for a print book.
I know some people do like offering PDFs, but honestly they’re only really legible on a computer screen and there are plenty of good fee and paid desktop ereading programs available that will read just as nicely if not more because they’ll have more control over the final presentation.
Q: Will there be a print edition?
A: I don’t know yet! I’ll need to decide on a good size, set it up with some basic formatting and see what the length is like. Depending on what the page count comes to, it’ll be yes or no. If yes, it’ll still depend on whatever time frame I can get proofs and corrections in. To the point where I might do a Backerkit campaign instead so I can also do some fancier elements like sprayed edges or foil text or something else suitably celebratory for an anniversary edition. We’ll see!
Q: What’s new?
A: As I said, I added a whole new personal essay, “Me And Demisexual Fiction: A Short Introspective Musing on over a Decade of Exploring Demisexual Fiction”. I’ve also updated the cover and all the formatting inside, adding little headers and scene breaks. I’ve also done one final update for the recommendations list at the end and I’ve converted the hyperlinks in the existing essays into reference lists at the end of each essay. On top of that I’ve also done some standard updates to the metadata such as adding a note on the lack of genAI, an updated copyright notice explicitly forbidding the use of this book in LLM training datasets, and, of course, an updated lists of books I’ve written so it correctly includes all of the ones to date.
I think that about covers it, so… Enjoy the anniversary edition of The Princess who Didn’t Eat Cake!
