“Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.” ― Seth Godin, Poke the Box
You know, sometimes words just fail me. But then someone else comes along and has the perfect ones.
Okay, let’s just get to the story. Right!
So, once upon a time, I used to sell lots of ebooks online, but then Amazon offered a bit of chump change an ethical bribe monetary incentives for indie authors to become wholly dependent on exclusive to Amazon. Only three months at a time. Which, frankly, doesn’t amount to much.
Hi everyone. Well, I, this weekend I just had to kind of shut myself down a little bit. I mean, I actually went online both Saturday and Sunday. Sunday, it’s like, I started to think, what am I doing? What am I doing to myself? I’m going online every single day doing stuff. And I, I don’t think it’s good for me to do that. So I am seriously, seriously thinking of taking a break either on weekends or just one day of the weekend from all online activity. Seriously. I’m, I’m just really starting to think about that. Except maybe Duolingo. <Laugh> I like keeping up my, I know it’s an algorithm, but you know, I can’t help myself. Yeah. I’m addicted. That’s what happens. You become addicted to this stuff and it’s like, you have to do it or you feel like, oh, you know, I haven’t done something that I should. No, you don’t have to.
In retrospect, I should have done more of an introduction, explaining that this is a topic that should be discussed. It should be made, as they say, “part of the narrative.” 🙂
Hi, everyone. I’m gonna talk about something a little bit different today. I don’t know if you remember the hearings before the congressional subcommittee investigating competition and digital markets. They took testimony from the four companies there, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and somebody else. I don’t remember. Was it …Facebook! Facebook, of course. Facebook. So yeah, I always wondered what happened after that. This happened after that, this.
In 2011, I blogged repeatedly about my concerns about Amazon. I made an analogy that people quite likely thought was ridiculous was insane was inappropriate/offensive never gave any credence to, assuming they gave a damn what I had to say.
But some authors flocked to the Internet giant. And others stayed staunchly indie, even though we would not get whatever bribe special treatment incentive we might get by being Amazon-exclusive.