Welcome back to this sporadic swarm of bees, everyone! I wanted to share a few quick updates, including some more information about leaving KU (I know!) like I mentioned on social media, and start to tease some future plans now that some more solid pieces are coming together.

Publishing news

I’ve had three shorts published so far in 2025 (including one reprint), so I thought I would put those front and centre:

• “Home is Where the Butterflies Roam” is a disability-centric cozy fantasy short, about a girl named Bug and her accessibility aid butterfly. This is very different from pretty anything else I’ve written, as it’s quite soft, but it was important to me to write something that approached the themes it did. You can read it for free on Disabled Tales.

• Next, I republished my short story “What the Sea Provides”, which was originally published in The Cozy Cosmic in 2023. This is a cosmic horror found family tale that I’m quite fond of. You can find it on my itch.io and across major retailers.

• And lastly (so far!), I had a dark sci-fi drabbled called “Which Will Break?” published in the anthology Chronos 2. It’s so short (100 words!) that I can’t really say anything about it without spoiling it.

I have at least three more shorts coming out this year that I can tease here:

The first is for Smitten Land issue 2, as announced on Instagram last month. This story was a bit outside my comfort zone in that it was a bit different from a lot of things I’ve written in the past, but I had a ton of fun with it and got some excellent feedback from peers. One of my goals for 2025 was to push my own limits and experiment more, so very exciting to have had an opportunity to do so so early in the year!

I can’t speak to the other two planned shorts right now, but one is a hard-hitting one I’m quite proud of and happy to have found a home for, and the other is a cool project I’m excited to see coming together, and I’m excited to try something different formatting-wise.

I’ll republish some more shorts this year, as well, though I don’t have a set schedule for this yet.

On leaving KU

I talked about this on social media, but I’ve made the (admittedly not easy) decision to pull my writing from KU, at least for the time being. Today is the last day for “And The Mountains Melt Like Wax”, and March 28 will be the last full day for Pray For Him. Anyone who grabs the books before they leave should still have access in their KU library until they return them, and the Amazon ebook of Pray For Him will be on sale for ~$1 for 72 hours from March 13th to 15th (the latest allowable by KU rules, one of their many ways of encouraging exclusivity).

This was, as mentioned, a hard decision.

Like I mentioned on the post, I was reluctant to join KU in the first place because my books being widely available is in line with my values as an author. Being wide allows easier access to readers not based in the US, who use different devices, or through libraries or at a lower price point. But I was a new author with a hefty debut, and KU was a way to have a low risk way to test the book out for readers who weren’t familiar with me. Being in KU also allowed me to run promotions more easily that helped get a lot of copies in a lot of people’s hands. And Pray For Him did well in KU. On a good month, it’s over a quarter of my earnings. Last month was my second best month for reads since release. It’s going strong. I have no illusion I’ll take a financial hit by leaving KU.

But between increasingly poor policies on Amazon’s part (such as disabling downloading of your purchased content), a big push in my own country (hi, I’m Canadian) to use other devices and apps, and an increasing concern around access and ownership, this was the right call for me. At the same time, many authors can’t reasonably make this decision, as it’s not financially viable to remove that income source—but for me, it is possible to manage that loss, and so this is my choice.

The choice feels right. It might also hurt, but it’s right for me. Later this month, both the story and the book will start to become available on Kobo, Apple Books, Hoopla, itchio and more. My website will be updated with links to as many purchase locations as possible (like books2read like I’ve done with some of my other shorts). My existing link for Pray For Him will be updated with commercial retailers, and the itchio link will be added to my site and my carrd.

At least for the time being, my books will remain available on Amazon but will no longer be exclusive to it.

With that serious message out of the way, let’s close off with some teasing of future plans!

What comes next?

A few more solid pieces are coming together for publishing plans beyond the short fiction updates above.

I have a chapbook planned at some point, which will be a collaborative project. The text is mostly written, and the artist is on board, but no solid dates for this yet.

I’m still planning to continue to republish short stories with the aim of eventually putting together a collection. The collection will feature previously published short stories, but also new content as well. I have a cover picked out for this one already, but no set date. A few shorts are still in exclusivity periods, so likely a collection won’t come out until late 2025 or early 2026.

Lastly, a few longer WIPs are coming along! It’s probably too soon to say which will be the next book, though my attention has largely been focused on one I posted a teaser for in the form of a placeholder title: Necromantics. I’ve been very excited about this one, but I’ve also been hopping around WIPs a lot (thus the joke in the video). I’m hoping to have a finished first draft of this one, or another longer WIP, by mid-year, but progress has been a little slower than I’d like, so I won’t commit to any dates right now.

In the meantime, I’m trying to defeat my reading slump so I can spend more time soaking up inspiration and I’ve started some new books on writing craft to build my skills as I work on this next draft.

I’ll still periodically update this newsletter with WIP updates, publishing plans, and behind the scenes thoughts and processes, so be sure to subscribe to avoid missing any updates!

Tyler Battaglia (he/iel/any) is a disabled and queer author of horror and dark fantasy. His debut horror romance novel, Pray For Him, is out now.