I’d been declaring, with all the confidence in the world, that my books were destined to be comics. And they still are — just not exclusively, and not yet. Before the visual work takes centre stage, a wave of prose ebooks has quietly surfaced on ottawavalleycreations.ca. If you’re wondering why the catalogue suddenly looks more text-forward than comic-forward, here’s the short version of the long story.
These titles didn’t appear out of nowhere. They were originally published under a pen name — a brief detour into romance novellas released on KDP as Evangeline Storm. I experimented with a pen name to test the platform and to sandbox the publishing pipeline. That experiment ended the moment Amazon stopped reporting KENP reads, which also meant they stopped paying for the reads they were still profiting from. By the time I wrestled my way out of a Select contract they’d effectively voided themselves, the whole catalogue needed a new home and a new plan.
Draft2Digital became that new home. The migration coincided with a discovery that matters a great deal for Canadian authors: ISBNs are free through Library and Archives Canada once your publisher account is approved. The approval process, however, is slow. Supposedly twenty days. In my case, well over a month of silence. Long enough to wonder whether the account would ever materialize, and long enough to consider publishing ebooks with simple SKUs instead. (They wouldn’t have solved anything. ISBNs are the key to global cataloguing — the infrastructure that lets a book exist beyond the whims of a single storefront or social feed.)
While all of this was unfolding, the “everything becomes a comic” plan took shape out of sheer frustration. Every snag with the pen name’s books underscored that I needed a stable foundation for anything published under my own name — ideally through my own imprint — and that wasn’t possible while I was still stuck in distribution limbo. The comics became a future-facing solution: a reset, a way to rebuild cleanly once the groundwork finally settled, born of the simple fact that an image is infinitely easier to share on the internet.
Eventually, the LAC account did come through. The titles were released from KDP after a month of nearly escalating into a legal fight. Once free, they moved to Draft2Digital and out into the wider ecosystem of storefronts and libraries. And somewhere in the middle of that shift, it became obvious that fragmenting my work across multiple identities and platforms was part of what kept creating the problems. Consolidating everything under Ottawa Valley Creations — creative work, technical services, operations, publishing — kept solving them.
So yes: these ebooks are not comics. They were never supposed to vanish just because the long-term catalogue is moving toward visual formats. They’re the foundation the comics will stand on. Now that the imprint questions are settled and the distribution chaos has calmed, the comics can unfold alongside the novels and novellas instead of being held hostage by uncertainty.
New visual work is still coming. For now, this is the groundwork — and the signal for those without Ko-Fi that things here are, in fact, very much alive.