Hi. I hope I’m sitting up straight and looking at you as opposed to looking at me. Anyway, what I’m trying to do, what I’ve been trying to get it together to say is that I hope at some point to form a community, a community of writers and other creators who could work together to do various things like collaborate on projects.
How often have you wished that there was somebody else that you could put together a collection of short stories with? You can do that. It can be done, and people are doing it now, and you don’t have to go to a publisher to do it, you don’t have to beg for permission of somebody else. You can put together your own anthology. I put together my own anthology of short stories back in, what was it, 2009 or 2010? I don’t remember. Anyway, it might’ve been 2010.
In any event, if you self-publish, you can do things like that and you can get people together and collectively get royalties through a distribution service like Draft2Digital, which distributes to Amazon if you care to go with them, which you probably do. Yeah, most people do. Most rational people. I’m not always rational.
I am rational. Believe me when I tell you that it’s a bad thing to depend on Amazon. Bad. Very bad. Which is why I have to write my memoirs because this has to go on the record somehow. This has to be made part of history somehow, and because all of this has been very historic and very weird for me, so that’s all I’ll say.
I think, yeah, I hope to get this community thing going and I’m still trying to figure out how to do that and how to do it in a way that will be of, excuse me, will be of interest to writers and other creators and offer actual benefits in light of how shabbily we tend to treat ourselves and how we tend to get treated.
Yes, I said it. Writers are treated shabbily. They will do whatever they can to get their words out there, even for free. I mean, it’s a race to the bottom, as I think Seth Godin would call it. This whole Amazon thing is a big race to the bottom and look what Bezos did or not Bezos. Yes, Bezos! The Washington Post bending over backwards not to piss off Trump.
Yeah, he’s not a problem at all. No, Amazon’s no problem. The mere fact that they make all their money off of cloud computing and the spare change goes to whatever little businesses he’s got here and there. Oh, who cares? Hey, I care and this has been bothering me for a long time and it should be bothering others, so why are we not saying something, doing something to help ourselves.
We need to work together to help ourselves and each other. That’s it. That’s my message. Sorry if I rambled. This wasn’t exactly planned. None of this was planned—where I am, what I’m doing, none of this was planned. That’s a great title for my memoirs. None of this was planned. Be seeing you.