Tag: Amazon

Why I won’t be watching Amazon’s Rings of Power

Believe it or not, I actually did not have an opinion on Amazon’s latest boondoggle, the Lord of the Rings TV series called “Rings of Power,” until about three days ago. I expected it to be a disappointment, partially because I expected it to be woke, but mostly because all the major TV series seem to suck these days and I didn’t have any reason to believe that this one would be an exception. Amazon doesn’t strike me as being as insufferably woke as Disney or Netflix, though I did hear a lot of things about their Wheel of Time series (didn’t watch it, just because I haven’t read the books yet and plan to read them soon), but when people started complaining about the wokeness in Rings of Power, it didn’t surprise me either.

With that said, it seems that most people aren’t complaining that the series is overly woke, but that it’s just badly written. Kind of like how the thing that made Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi was so terrible just because the storytelling was so bad. A lot of people also hated it for being woke, but I’ve also heard it argued that the movie wasn’t woke at all, and if you really dig into the underlying message you’ll find that it actually repudiates many key woke tenets. But whether or not that’s true, it was just an objectively terrible movie, with plot holes large enough to drive a Death Star through and protagonists so unlikeable they make Jabba the Hutt look like a sympathetic figure. But I digress.

So anyways, I didn’t really have an opinion about Amazon’s Rings of Power yet, and was actually planning to watch the first two episodes… until I read the show’s official response to all the negative reviews it’s been getting.

Just for fun, let’s fisk it together:

We, the cast of Rings of Power, stand together in absolute solidarity

“Solidarity” is a lefty word. The left tends to favor certain words more than others (for example, they could have used “support” here instead). Also, they’re constantly trying to twist words in order to give them some advantage, however slight it might be. So right away, this word choice was a yellow flag for me.

and against the relentless racism,

Yeah, but is it really “racism” though?

threats, harassment, and abuse

Again, I can’t take these accusations at face value because most of the time, “harassment” is just lefty-speak for “someone who disagrees with me.” These people claim that speech is violence, and then turn around and use violence to try to silence—or worse, compell—the speech of everyone else.

Also, what about the fans who came to this show in good faith and were genuinely disappointed? Every book, movie, game, or TV show gets at least a few one-star reviews. Even the best ones do. Some people just have different tastes. Are you seriously lumping all of those fans into the same box with the trolls and the racists?

some of our castmates of color

Every time I read “X of color” now, I inwardly hear “colored X.” The two phrases mean the exact same thing, but one of them signals woke virtue, while the other will get you banned from the Nebulas hours after they name you a Grand Master (and against the express objections of the supposed victim, no less).

But honestly, “people of color” is just the lefty way of saying “people who aren’t white.” Which is often just another way to be racist against white people.

are being subjected to on a daily basis. We refuse to ignore it or tolerate it.

Do you remember when “tolerance” was supposed to be a virtue, and anyone who was “intolerant,” for any reason whatsoever, was considered a terrible person? But one of the key tenets of wokeism is that rules that apply to non-woke people don’t apply to you.

Also, whatever happened to being “diverse”? Because if diversity is truly the goal, then there are going to be people who genuinely hate your show—and that’s okay. It doesn’t make them racist. It just means that they have a diversity of tastes.

So once again, why are you calling everyone who hates the show a racist, abusive harasser?

JRR Tolkien created a world which, by definition, is multi-cultural.

He created a fantasy world with a lot of different cultures. That’s completely different from being multi-cultural, or promoting the ideology of multi-culturalism.

I’ve only read Lord of the Rings twice, but I don’t remember it being political or ideological. Why are you trying to make it out to fit your own political views? Have you read the books at all?

A world in which free peoples from different races and cultures join together, in fellowship, to defeat the forces of evil.

Yeah, but that’s not multi-culturalism. When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, we made a coalition with many different “free peoples from different races and cultures,” but that wasn’t multi-cultural because 1) we organized the coalition outside of, and actually in contravention of, the UN Security Council, and 2) the multi-culturalists condemned the invasion at the time, and still condemn it to this day.

It sounds to me like these people are twisting the word “multi-cultural” into pretzels to suit their own rhetorical ends. Which is typical of how leftists twist language.

Rings of Power reflects that. Our world has never been all white, fantasy has never been all white, Middle-earth is not all white.

Actually, Tolkien’s explicit goal with creating Middle Earth was to provide England with a founding mythology that was free of all Norman French influence. So that’s debatable.

But more importantly, who ever said that the goal is to make Middle-Earth, or the fantasy genre as a whole, “all white”? Are you seriously implying that everyone who hates Rings of Power is somehow a white supremacist?

BIPOC belong in Middle-earth and they are here to stay.

Yep, that’s exactly what you’re saying. Everyone who hates Rings of Power, for whatever reason, is actually just a white supremacist. Way to piss all over the Tolkien fans who just don’t like your show.

Finally, all our love and fellowship go out to the fans supporting us,

…but not to the Tolkien fans who don’t like the show. They can fuck right off.

especially fans of colour

…because if you don’t like our show, you obviously aren’t black.

who are themselves being attacked simply for existing in this fandom.

As you have just demonstrated by literally accusing all of the disappointed Tolkien fans—including the black fans—of being white supremacists. How dare those people exist!

Accusation = projection = confession with these people. In every case. No exception.

We see you,

No, you don’t.

your bravery,

No, you really don’t.

It’s much braver to speak up and be honest about what you think about shows like this, especially when all of the Big Tech and social media sites censor you and falsely accuse you of being a white supremacist for your opinions.

and endless creativity. Your cosplays, fancams, fan art, and

In all fairness to the publicity folks who wrote this, they did use the Oxford comma properly. So kudos for that.

insights make this community a richer place and remind us of our purpose.

The inverse of this is that when you call everyone who disagrees with you a white supremacist, your community becomes a poorer place, your creativity dies, and you ultimately forget your purpose. Which is exactly what is happening right now with every corner of the arts that has gone woke.

You are valid,

Once again, the left seems to favor this word. Not sure why.

you are loved,

Sorry, but I don’t turn to corporations or TV shows for love and affection. When I do need love and affection, I turn to the actual people in my life, thank you very much.

and you belong.

Unless you disagree with us, of course.

You are an integral part of the LOTR family—

Fandom is many things, but it is not and should not be a substitution for family. And frankly, given how toxic most fandoms have become, if I needed to find a new family, why would I choose such a dysfunctional one?

thanks for having our backs.

And thanks for stabbing us in our backs, you woke corporate shills.

So yeah, I won’t be watching Rings of Power at all now. Any show that turns on their fans and calls them all racists and white supremacists for not liking the show is totally undeserving of my time, attention, or respect.

But it wasn’t a total loss. We did get this from it:

White Science Fiction and Fantasy Doesn’t Matter

If you are white, and you write science fiction or fantasy, it is only a matter of time before you are cancelled.

This is the logical end of intersectional identity politics, which is really just the resurrected, zombified corpse of Marxism. White people are the oppressors. People of color are the oppressed. All white people are racist, and the only way to fight racism is with more racism. Black lives matter. White lives don’t.

The United States of America is currently engaged in a violent struggle that will determine whether this hyper-racist intersectional ideology will defeat the populist uprising that has its champion in Trump, or whether the country will reject this new form of Marxism and come back from the brink of insanity. But in science fiction and fantasy, the war is already over, and the intersectionalists have won. It is now only a matter of time before they purge the field of everything—and everyone—that is white.

The last chance for the SF&F community to come back from the brink was probably in 2015. The intersectionalists were ascendant, but they hadn’t yet taken over the field. (That happened in 2016, when N.K. Jemisin, an avowed social justice warrior and outspoken champion for anti-white identity politics, won the Hugo Award for best new novel for the next three consecutive years.) A populist uprising within fandom known as the Puppies attempted to push back, and were smeared as racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes, and Nazis. Whatever your opinion of the Puppies (and there were some bad eggs among them, to be sure), they did not deserve to be silenced, ridiculed, shouted down, and threatened with all manner of violence and death threats for their grievances. After the Puppies were purged, the intersectionalists took over and began to reshape the field in their image.

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer wasn’t renamed the Astounding Award because Campbell was a racist (even though he was). His name was stripped from the award because the people who renamed it are racists—not in the bullshit way the intersectionalists have redefined it, but in the true sense of the word: discrimination based based on race.

Before I get smeared as a white supremacist for writing this post, I want to make it absolutely clear that I welcome racial diversity in science fiction and fantasy. I’ve been very pleased to read some excellent stories from people of color in Lightspeed Magazine recently, including “Miss Beulah’s Braiding and Life Change Salon,” and there have been several excellent stories from Chinese authors in Clarkesworld recently as well. I just don’t think it’s necessary to tear down white authors in order to make space for non-white ones. That’s the racism of intersectionality, and I reject it.

It is much easier for these intersectional racists to cancel you after you’re dead, but they’ll come after you while you’re still alive if they can. That’s what’s happening to George R.R. Martin right now. Frankly, I would have a lot more sympathy for him if he hadn’t made his bed with these people back during the Puppygate debacle. Behold your “true fans,” Mr. Martin. The fact that you’re the biggest name in epic fantasy right now isn’t going to save you.

But if the intersectionalists are all anti-white racists, why are so many of them white? Because for decades, crunchy liberal white folks have been taught that everything bad in the world is their fault, and the world would be better off without them. Climate change. Racism. Colonialism. It’s the white man’s burden 2.0. I know, because I was raised in this milieu. I was forced to read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States in high school, and I know just how false and dangerous it really is. Besides, the revolution always eats its own. If you think you’re going to get a pass because you’ve read How to Be an Anti-Racist, you’ve posted a black square to your social media, and you’ve donated money to any of these social justice causes, you’re deluding yourself.

If you’re white, they’re coming for you. It’s not just your “whiteness” that they want to purge—that’s just a motte-and-bailey tactic to make their racism less overt and more palatable. The only thing they need to know about you is the color of your skin. If they know that, they think they know everything else about you, because they are the true racists—and in the world they’re trying to create, everything white must be purged.

The good news is that the cultural tides are turning, and the racist ideology that drives these folks is at or near its zenith. Marxism always fails, and cancel culture cancels itself in the end. If you play your cards right, getting cancelled can actually boost your career, rather than destroy it.

But the next ten years are going to be very tricky to navigate. Even if the intersectionalists lose on the national level, as I hope and pray that they do, they have already taken over the SF&F field so thoroughly and completely that the only way forward is to abandon all the old institutions and rebuild them from scratch. The indie publishing revolution has made this much more possible, but Amazon still dominates the indie publishing world, and they’ve already donated tens of millions of dollars to these Marxist causes. How much longer do we have before the intersectional ideologues within Amazon rewrite the algorithms according to their ideology? It’s only a matter of time.

Fortunately, if you are resilient enough, time is on your side.

Denial and moral cowardice

I got into an interesting argument on a message board forum for writers in the last couple of days. We were discussing whether or not it’s a good idea to give Amazon exclusivity in order to sign onto Kindle Unlimited, and I pointed out that Amazon has donated tens of millions of dollars to the groups and organizations that are promoting the violent riots currently sweeping the country. My point was that it’s important to take Amazon’s corporate values into account before giving them exclusive control over your ability to have a career.

Immediately, a bunch of left-leaning forum members jumped on me for having the audacity to attack Amazon for their support of social justice. No surprises there. But the next thing really surprised me. A member of the forum who claims to live in Portland said:

Joe I have yet to see any riots. If you mean demonstrations, those are the right of any American citizen.

When pressed about that, she responded:

Many people have drank the right-wing Kool-Aid, including Joe.

How bad do I think it is in Portland? Well I happen to live here and the violence and incitment to violence comes from the Fed troops, not from anyone donated to by Amazon. No demonstrator has ever kidnapped someone in an unmarked van off the street or gassed someone. Stop listening to the lies put out by propagandists like Andy Ngo and Tim Pool because I know exactly how false their gaslighting is.

In fact, the demonstrations (there have been NO ‘riots’ here) in Portland would have long stopped if his adored Donald Trump hadn’t decided to send in Federal agents from the Homeland Security Agency (actually the Homeland Oppression Agency) to kidnap and rought people up.

The forum moderator had previously asked us not to get into politics, and in a previous post, I had stated that this isn’t a question of politics, but of violence, corporate values, and narrative control. In fact, no one had even mentioned Trump until this particular post.

Needless to say, the thread was soon locked.

But one thing still bugged me: the fact that this person could so emphatically claim that there are no riots sweeping this country. Does she not have two eyes and a brain? I know that the left-wing echo chambers run deep, but to say that there are no riots is like staring at the sun at noon-day and claiming that it’s midnight. Hell—there was a riot not ten miles from where I live here in Utah, where a person was shot by a member of Antifa. In Utah. UTAH.

So I sent her a private message with pictures of Kenosha Wisconsin (this was more than 48 hours after the shooting of Jacob Blake, by the way), and that video of the guy driving down 5th Avenue in New York City days after the George Floyd protests (aka the 1619 riots). Here was her response:

A man was also murdered by the police in Kenosha, WI within the last 48 hours. So that demonstrations there may have turned into riots is no surprise. Now take your right-wing extremism elsewhere.

Oh really? The fact that there are riots in Wisconsin isn’t a surprise? I thought you said that there are no riots, only demonstrations?

Here was my response:

Jacob Blake was not “murdered by the police,” because he is still alive. But thank you for admitting (1) that riots are happening in this country, and (2) that fact is not surprising to you.

And hers:

You’re right. It was only attempted murder. When people are oppressed they have been known to riot. A pity that you support the oppressors. Now go away before I block your messages.

At this point, I probably should have just stopped engaging. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have sent the private message in the first place. After all, it’s not like anything I could say would change this person’s mind that Trump is the embodiment of all evil in this country, and that everyone who opposes him is either a martyr or a saint.

But the mental gymnastics I’d just seen this person jump through really fascinated me. In the space of less than a dozen posts, she’d gone from (1) emphatically denying that riots of any kind are happening in this country, to (2) admitting that riots may be happening, to (3) implying that the riots (which are indeed happening) are justified, because the rioters are oppressed.

Here’s the problem with all of that: if you believe that the riots are justified and you’re willing to admit in private that they are actually happening, why would you publicly deny them? Either you lack the strength of your own convictions to stand up and defend them, or you don’t want to examine your own belief system too closely for fear that it will fall apart.

Either way, that makes you a moral coward.

I would have had a lot more respect for this person if she’d just come out and say “yes, some of these demonstrations are violent, but it’s right and just because racisexislamohomofacisgenderonazi” or some other such garbage. At least then she would be sticking by what she truly believes. Instead, her moral cowardice DEMANDS that she do everything she can to deny reality, even when it is staring her in the face.

I think that’s where we are in this country. There are only two sides: those who are willing to acknowledge the reality of what is happening right now, and those who are still determined to deny reality. There may be some people in the first side who do not vote for Trump in November. But of the people who vote for Trump, I don’t think there will be any moral cowards.

2020-02-15 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the February 15th edition of my newsletter. To sign up for my author newsletter, click here.

I’m writing this author’s note on Friday evening, after a long and wonderful day at Life, the Universe, and Everything (LTUE). Of all the science fiction conventions that I attend, I think LTUE is my favorite. It’s local to Utah Valley, so a lot of the regulars have become longtime friends of both mine and Mrs. Vasicek’s.

But the biggest reason I love LTUE is because it has such a strong writing track. Where FanX Salt Lake (the big local media con) is all about fandom and geek culture, LTUE is all about helping creatives to develop their craft, learn the business, and connect with the people who love the things that they create. It started as an academic symposium for aspiring science fiction writers, but in recent years it has branched out to other creative fields like art, film, gaming, etc, all with an emphasis on science fiction and fantasy.

There have been a lot of really great panels in the last couple of days. One of my favorites was on the future of Fantasy, where Peter Orullian, James A. Owen, Rafael Hohmann, and Charlie Pulsipher (who does a fantastic Velociraptor impression) discussed the rise and fall of Grimdark, the dawning of Noblebright, the push from the industry for the #ownvoices movement, and the indie explosion of LitRPG. Lots of really fascinating trends to keep an eye on!

I forget which panel it was on, but M. Todd Gallowglass gave some really prescient advice for aspiring writers: “You don’t make a writing career by being read; you make a career by being reread.” He was also on a great panel about whether or not it’s worth it to pursue a master’s degree, and he shared some very interesting points that run counter to what I’ve heard from everybody else: namely, that for a career writer it generally isn’t worth it. M. Todd Gallowglass is one of my newest favorite people at LTUE, and he’s always a blast to talk and hang out with.

The good folks from World Fantasy Convention are here at LTUE as well, and they gave a panel talking about all the wonderful things we can expect from attending World Fantasy 2020 in Salt Lake this year. It’s so close by, why wouldn’t we want to attend? I’m really torn on this: it’s a convention that caters more to the traditional side of the business, which isn’t the path that I’m pursuing, but I attended World Fantasy in 2009 and 2010, and it is a really great convention… also, it’s so close this year, practically in our own backyard… I don’t know. But even if I decide not to go, I will almost certainly attend the barcon.

The LTUE benefit anthology launch party was also a lot of fun! Lots of great stories from old-timers and regulars. I look forward to reading it! I also look forward to collecting as many signatures from everyone as I can. For last year’s anthology, Trace the Stars, I’ve gotten all but four of the author signatures. Also, I’m happy to report that next year’s LTUE benefit anthology will include a story of my own!

Brandon Sanderson wasn’t here on Thursday or Friday, but I expect we’ll be seeing him tomorrow. Kevin J. Anderson is here, as well as David Farland, Eric James Stone, and Tony Daniels, senior editor at Baen. Tony Daniels was also on a panel today with Mrs. Vasicek, where they discussed near future SF. Lots of fascinating things to think about, both from a technological angle and a social angle. I really liked Mrs. Vasicek’s “left field” near-future prediction: that AIs will eventually replace professors and every college student will have a personally tailored AI!

Speaking of Mrs. Vasicek, she gave a really fantastic presentation today called “Rage Against the Algorithm,” where she offered some insight into the Amazon hive mind, gleaned from their recent research papers. It appears that book covers are about to matter a whole lot more in the Amazon algorithm, and that they are putting a lot more emphasis on search and on the review system (which they are working to fix). Also, book categorization may start to become dependent at least partially on reviews. If you’re one of my author-fans and all of this sounds intriguing, let me know and I’ll email you a copy of her powerpoint.

On Friday morning, I moderated a panel on unconventional outlining techniques with Mackenzie Kincaid, Michael F. Haspil, and Els Curtis. That was a lot of fun. Mackenzie had some really great advice for productivity apps and hacking your own personal habits, and Michael and Els had lots of great insight into their own personal outling methods as well. Some really great questions from the audience really got the panel rolling, and I think it turned out quite well.

Friday night was the big mass booksigning, and it was a lot of fun! Definitely my most successful signing even so far. Caught up with a bunch of my old fans, and met a lot of new people as well, several of whom went on to buy a book or two. Also got into some really great conversations with other fellow creatives, including Emily Martha Sorenson, whom Mrs. Vasicek and I chatted with until almost everyone else was gone. It was really fantastic to talk with so many great people who share the same passion for geek culture and speculative fiction! Mrs. Vasicek and I both had a blast.

By the time this newsletter reaches your inbox, we will probably be on our way to the last day of LTUE. Mrs. Vasicek has a panel on computer hacking that looks really interesting, and I’m on a writing/publishing panel about how to avoid rookie mistakes—basically, how to learn from all of the many, many mistakes I’ve made over the years! Should be a lot of fun. If you’re there, be sure to come up and say hi! If not, maybe next year.

That’s my LTUE report for this year. It’s definitely shaping up to be one of the more memorable ones. Each year, it seems to get even better—may that continue for many more years to come!

2019-08-15 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the August 15th edition of my author newsletter. To sign up for my newsletter, click here.

It was not an easy decision to enroll all of my Star Wanderers books into Kindle Unlimited. For years, this was my flagship series, not only on Amazon but on all platforms. Enrolling it in KU means that the ebooks are only available on Amazon now, and the first book is no longer free to non-KU subscribers.

In the indie author community, KU has always been a controversial program. It all boils down to one word: exclusivity. In order to enroll your books in KU, you cannot publish them anywhere else but Amazon. The upshot is that Amazon’s algorithms give your books a huge signal boost—about 2.5x, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations. Getting writers to do anything is a bit like herding cats, but with the right incentive structure you can do it. Amazon wants to be the dominant retailer for ebooks, and KU is their tool for doing it.

I don’t blame readers for subscribing to KU. It seems like a great program: $9.99 per month gives you an awesome selection of books to choose from. And certainly, Amazon can do what it wants on its own platform. If that means reducing the visiblity of books that aren’t exclusive to your platform, so be it. But as a matter of principle, I believe that exclusivity is bad for readers and writers, which is why I’ve stayed out of the program.

Until now. What changed? A few things. Earlier this year, I finally wrote out a complete business plan that describes everything I do (72 pages, 22.2k words). That made me rethink a lot of things, especially my marketing strategy. If Amazon gives books in KU such a huge signal boost, could I use that to bring more readers to my books that aren’t in KU? If none of my books are enrolled in KU, isn’t that just another way of making my books exclusive?

When Kindle Unlimited launched in 2014, I had finally reached a point where I could live off of my book royalties. A lot of that was because of Star Wanderers: with a permafree first-in-series, it got a lot of visiblity. But then, the Amazon algorithms changed to favor KU over permafree. I chose to stay out of KU, and lost more than 60% of my writing income over the next 18 months as a result.

I learned several things from that experience. First, I learned that I couldn’t rely on Amazon to do my marketing for me. I had to come up with a plan. Second, I learned that it was a bad idea to be dependent on just one platform. It was time to diversify.

Paradoxically, this meant doubling down on my decision to keep my books out of KU. But it paid off. In 2014, more than 90% of my writing income came from Amazon. Now, it’s more like 40%-60%, depending on the month. If I had panicked and put all my books in KU, I wouldn’t have those other income streams right now, and many of those readers never would have found me.

Over the years, I also became less dependent on Star Wanderers as well. I began to move toward writing trilogies of longer books instead of longer series of shorter books. And as I wrote and published more books, interest in my Star Wanderers books seemed to wane.

So now I’m in a place where enrolling Star Wanderers into KU actually makes sense. I have a plan and a marketing strategy, I’m not dependent on Amazon anymore, and the books themselves seem well-suited to the experiment. We’ll see how it turns out.

If you’re not an Amazon customer, don’t worry: I’m not going to enroll all of my books in KU, and still plan to release all of my new books wide. For now, it’s just Star Wanderers. And if you are a KU subscriber, I hope you enjoy! These books have a very special place in my heart, and I’m happy to share them with you.

Thoughts on #AmazonClosed and disappearing KU reads

There are a lot of scandals happening in the indie publishing world right now. The latest one has to do with Amazon deleting KU reads from March: some authors have seen their page reads retroactively revised down as much as ninety percent.

The speculation is that this is connected with Amazon deactivating several customer accounts, allegedly on the basis of those customers accepting free or gifted items in exchange for reviews. It’s also supposedly connected with Amazon’s recent legal arbitration against book stuffing in KU, which scammers use to inflate their page reads. Until now, Amazon has done precious little to push back against endemic scamming in KU.

The best potential explanation for this that I’ve read comes from TexasGirl and PhoenixS over on KBoards. TexasGirl writes:

I think it goes like this:

— An author hires a bot reader to inflate their page reads.
— The bot account opens the book and page reads through it.
— The bot then spiders the sales page for other books like it, to strengthen the association with other books Amazon has placed either as 1: normal also-bots 2: sponsored products
— The bot opens the also bot or sponsored books and reads them too.

This creates synergy between the paid bot book and collaterally botted book. This means the other bot accounts will do the pathway as well, creating more page reads via bots by the bad accounts. It ALSO muddies the waters as to which books hired the bots and which were just secondary opens.

PhoenixS adds:

A good portion of those “bots” may well be incentivized readers. Once a real reader account has been identified as a recipient of incentives either for leaving reviews or for borrowing or for reading — or skimming through — a book, then all their reviews and borrows/reads become suspect. So anything they might borrow, even for their own, real personal pleasure (often within the same subgenre they’re getting incentivized for) would be dinged.

In other words, KU authors who use AMS ads are inadvertently shooting themselves in the foot, as the bots and click-farms use the sponsored links to find legitimate books to borrow (in order to mask their illicit activity). Also, when Amazon deactivated a bunch of customer accounts, they also removed a bunch of legitimate page reads, putting the screws on some of their KU authors.

I have many thoughts on this subject. Personally, I haven’t been affected at all, as none of my books are in Kindle Unlimited. I do feel for the authors who have been hit, though. It takes about two months for book royalties to show up in your bank account, so when you think you have $$$ coming only to have it arbitrarily disappear, it can create some heartburn-inducing cashflow problems. No one likes to be jerked around like that.

In my view, though, this is all just one car of a much larger train wreck.

The big tech companies that comprise the FAANGs all seem to suffer from the same hubris: that the fundamental laws of nature, economics, and human behavior can all be overcome by a sufficiently advanced algorithm. Combined with this is the equally arrogant hubris that they, by virtue of their power and success, have a responsibility to reshape the world in a progressive way, even if that’s not what their users want.

We can see the second part of this hubris in Zuckerberg’s recent testimony to congress. His admission that Facebook bears responsibility for the content on its platform has got to be giving his lawyers multiple aneurysms right now.

The first part is evident in the way Amazon structured Kindle Unlimited. The whole program is rife with perverse incentives, from the zero-sum payment structure of the KDP global fund to KENPC and the All-Star bonuses. Book stuffing, click-farming, and other KU scams are both predictable and forseeable. Instead of restructuring the program, though, or hiring a team to clean it up, Amazon has either denied that any problem exists, or created algorithms to play whack-a-mole with the scammers, often striking legitimate authors in the process.

The dirty little secret is that KU wasn’t created to benefit authors or readers, however, but to benefit Amazon by preventing a rival ebook subscription service from eating into their market share. Hence the exclusivity requirement for KU authors. By tying up the majority of the indie publishing community with exclusivity, Amazon denies the competition the content it needs to get off the ground. Never mind that KU isn’t that great for readers and is downright horrible for authors.

But why all the drama right now? Because this train wreck is headed for a massive cliff: an antitrust suit against Amazon. Between President Trump’s tweets about Jeff Bezos and the “Amazon Washington Post,” and the mainstream media’s neverending crusade against the president, the political winds are shifting in ways that must appear very foreboding in Seattle.

Amazon is cleaning house, and a lot of dolphins are getting netted as a result. One bad apple spoils the whole barrel, and the scammers have been squatting in Amazon’s house for years. But the real train wreck is just getting started, and when it goes over the cliff with the rest of this mixed metaphor, that’s when the fireworks will begin.

As an indie author, now is a good time to be as flexible as possible.

Why Kindle Unlimited is a broken system

kuI recently became embroiled in an unexpectedly hostile discussion on Mad Genius Club over the brokenness of Kindle Unlimited. In retrospect, though, there was nothing surprising about it.

The OP had asserted that Amazon is “still the only real game in town,” which I attempted to refute. It ended with the fine folks at Mad Genius Club putting words in my mouth, threatening to ban me for my “tone,” and calling me a “pompous blowhard” and a “prancing, self-aggrandizing, self-congratulating spunkmuffin.” Which would have been amusing except that… okay, it was pretty amusing. But it was also a bit infuriating to watch so many people deliberately take offense simply because I disagreed with them.

(The irony was especially thick as they viciously attacked me, then turned around and emphatically denied that KU pits authors against authors, all while demanding me to prove to them that it does—often in the same breath.

And for the record, I do not think that there’s anything “dickish” about asking the other side to back up their argument with sources. This is especially true for things that “everybody just knows,” and doubly so when forming a negative argument, such as “no one bothers with outside Amazon.”)

In all fairness, however, there were a few arguments I made that I could have done a better job supporting. And since this is my blog, where no one holds the ban-hammer but me, it seems appropriate to make them here.

First, though, I want to make it clear to any KU readers that I’m not trying make you feel guilty for subscribing to KU. If you are a KU subscriber and you enjoy the program, great! I have nothing at all against that. Whether or not the system is broken, we’ll still find ways to get paid. Have fun, and as always, thanks for reading.

Also, I want to point out that even though I believe KU is broken, I would still love to enroll my books. The problem, as I’ve pointed out before, is that Amazon demands exclusivity for the privilege. Not only am I wary of putting all of my eggs in a basket (especially a broken one), I also think that that’s a bad deal for my readers on iBooks, Kobo, Nook, etc, or who live outside of the territories where Amazon operates. Their numbers are not insignificant.

So why is Kindle Unlimited a broken system? In a word, incentives.

In a healthy system, writers write the books that readers want to read, readers support the writers by voting with their dollar, and the middlemen (publishers, distributors, booksellers, etc) provide value to both readers and writers commensurate with the cut that they take.

A healthy system is not closed. If readers collectively decide to read twice as many books, writers collectively earn twice as much. If another writer’s books do twice as well, it does not take away from the money I earn from my books.

Contrast that with the closed system that is KDP Select. We have only a ballpark estimate for the size of the KU subscriber base. Amazon keeps that (and most other KU-related data) close to the chest. We have no idea if the pay is commensurate with the subscriber base.

Instead, writers are paid out of a fixed pot, the KDP Select Global Fund. If readers collectively read twice as many KU books, it doesn’t increase the size of the pot. The pot only increases if Amazon decides to increase it, which again may or may not be commensurate with the increase in books read, or subscribers enrolled. We have no way of knowing.

Worse, because pay is based on a share of the pot, if someone else’s books receive twice as many borrows, everyone else’s earnings go down—even if their readership remains unchanged.

This is why so many writers are up in arms about the latest KU scandal, covered in depth by Phoenix Sullivan and Ann Christy. To summarize, the current iteration of Kindle Unlimited (KU 2.0) pays authors based on number of pages read, and scammers are gaming the system with text synthesizers and click farms. It’s not impossible to make $500,000 a month with this scam, all of which is taken out of the share of legitimate writers.

Is Amazon working to fix the problem? Until last week, it wasn’t clear that they were—and it’s still an open question if they can. It’s a perpetual game of whack-a-mole where the moles keep getting smarter, increasing the odds that legitimate writers will get whacked.

When you look at the way the incentives are structured, however, there’s nothing surprising about this unmitigated mess. Amazon has divorced the readers from the writers in such a way that pricing signals no longer work. Worse, the fixed pot pits authors against authors in a zero-sum race to the bottom. You do not earn more by simply getting more readers—you earn it by getting more reads than other authors. In the meantime, Amazon keeps lowering the KENPC payment rate, and authors keep bending over.

Is there still value in an ebook subscription service? Readers certainly seem to think so. If there’s value for readers, it shouldn’t be too difficult to also find value for writers.

But when you look back on the history of KU, you realize that it’s not really about providing value for readers or writers, but undercutting Amazon’s competition. KU launched right around the same time as two other subscription ebook services: Oyster and Scribd. These subscription services did provide value to writers, as they paid full price for every completed read.

Amazon responded by launching KU 1.0, which paid writers significantly less. However, since Amazon had most of the ebook market share (at least in the US), and since non-KU books receive much less visibility on the Kindle Store than KU-enrolled books, authors were aggressively pressured to sign up. Amazon’s exclusivity requirements kept its competitors from receiving content, and as a result, they have since either folded (Oyster) or failed to gain much traction (Scribd).

It ultimately comes down to the contrast between makers and takers. KDP Select is a closed system, where the size of the pie is fixed and the best you can expect is to get a larger slice than the person next to you. This turns everyone into a taker: someone who feels threatened by other people’s success and jealously guards their own.

Is it any wonder then that KU authors, when presented with someone critical of the KDP Select program, resort to rhetorical tactics like gaslighting, lampost-moving, name-calling, and conflating disagreement for personal attacks? Sadly, no. These are all classic hallmarks of a taker, which the system has forced them to become. In this way, Kinde Unlimited pits authors against authors.

It’s a broken system, but of course, different people experience the brokenness in different ways. When I was living in Georgia, I met several older people who believed that things were better under Communism. Without a doubt, the Soviet system was broken, but these people did better under it than they did after it fell. In the same way, there are a lot of authors doing very well under KU 2.0 who would love to keep things exactly the way it is.

Several of them employ text synthesizers and click-farms.

And when KU 3.0 comes out, as it inevitably will, it will sort out a new batch of winners and losers just like KU 2.0 did before. Because of Amazon’s exclusivity requirements, many writers will lose just about everything, having developed no other income streams.

But not the scammers. They’ll just find a new way to game the system, based on the way KU 3.0 misplaces the incentives. Amazon will continue to aggressively insert itself between readers and writers, breaking the incentives structure in new and interesting ways.

And the cycle will begin again.

Why my books are not in Kindle Unlimited

Last year, Amazon came out with a book subscription service called Kindle Unlimited. As a reader and an Amazon customer, I’ve noticed that they’ve been pushing this service quite aggressively. As a writer, I’ve been following it quite closely, especially with some recent changes with how they compensate their authors.

However, if you check my Amazon catalog, you will find that none of my books are available on Kindle Unlimited. And if I had to tell you why, I could sum it up in just one word:

Exclusivity.

In order to enroll your books in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon demands that the content of your book cannot be available anywhere else. Not on competing retailers. Not on your website. Not on a site like Wattpad or posted on social media. It’s KU and KU only, take it or leave it. And you can’t get around that by doing separate editions, since it’s the content that must be exlusive, not the book.

Recently, Hugh Howey argued that KU’s exclusivity doesn’t really hurt writers or readers, because all of Amazon’s competitors in the ebook market suck so hard that it’s no big loss to lose them anyways. I disagree, though. Different readers have different needs, and as great as Amazon is, it isn’t the best choice for everyone.

I believe that readers should be empowered to make their own choices, not only in what they read, but in how they read it. Some readers would rather sideload their ebooks, and don’t want to deal with Amazon’s proprietary .mobi format. Others would rather keep their books native to their device and not deal with Amazon’s apps. Others live in parts of the world where Amazon tacks on an arbitrary $2 USD surcharge to every kindle store purchase, and that obviously doesn’t work for them.

Put simply, I believe that exclusivity is a bad deal for readers—and that because of that, it’s also a bad deal for writers. The less control that readers have over what they read, the less they are going to read. The more control that middlemen have over the market (and for all the wonderful things that it does, Amazon is still a middleman between readers and writers), the less pressure there is for them to innovate and improve.

On many of the indie writers forums and communities that I frequent, it appears that other writers are more interested in short-term monetary gains than in doing what best serves their readers. And that’s unfortunate, because Kindle Unlimited is structured in such a way that it pits writers against each other in a zero-sub game. Instead of paying a fixed rate for each page (or KENPC) read, Amazon sets a “pot” and pays each author a share of it, in proportion to how many borrows/pages they got. Thus, if one author gets more reads than another (or games the system to make Amazon’s algorithms think that he had more reads), that means less money for the other author.

A lot of writers argue that it’s not really a zero-sub game because Amazon usually adds to the pot after the month is over, thus manipulating the borrow rate to hit some undisclosed target. Even if that’s true, though, it makes things even worse. If Amazon has a target borrow rate in mind, why not tell authors up front? It basically amounts to not telling authors how much they’re going to be paid until after their books have been sold. In any other supplier relationship, this blatant lack of transparency would be insane.

From what I can see, it’s all about control. Exclusivity gives them a great deal of control, not only over the marketplace but over authors as well. The lack of transparency and ever-changing borrow rates make it difficult for authors to gather the data they need to decide whether to stay in KU or to publish their books widely. And authors who decide not to opt into KU are punished by having their books rank lower, thus achieving less visibility in the Amazon ecosystem. In the year since KU came out, my Amazon income has fallen by at least 60%.

Even with all of that, though, I would be happy to enroll all of my books in Kindle Unlimited if Amazon dropped the exclusivity requirement. There are a lot of readers who prefer Amazon’s KU subscription service, and I would love to make my books available for them.

But exclusivity is a bad deal.

Things I want to learn in 2015

I was going to follow up my retrospective 2014 post with another one, but instead I want to look ahead at the things I hope to learn in 2015. Of course, I’m sure that many of the things I’ll learn are things that I couldn’t have foreseen, but it helps to have some direction to start out with. Here goes!

How to consistently sell books outside of Amazon

If I learn nothing else this year, I want it to be this. In 2014, about 90% of my sales were through Amazon, and when they came out with their Kindle Unlimited subscription service, my income took a big hit (Amazon requires all books in KU to be exclusive, so none of my books qualified). If I can grow my non-Amazon sources of income to more than 50% of my total revenue, that would be fantastic.

So far this year, I’m off to a good start. I have a book featured in Apple’s ongoing First in a Series Free promotion, and that’s given my books on iBooks a huge boost. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if I sell more books on iBooks this month than I will on Amazon. But the key here is to sell consistently on the other platforms. Right now, I have no idea how to do that—but I definitely want to learn!

How to turn readers into lifelong fans

I’ve been publishing for the last four years now, and I’ve picked up a few fans along the way, but I get the sense that most of the people who read my books are just casual readers who find my books interesting but tend to move on after they’ve read them. Perhaps this is normal, but I would like to take things a step further and build a strong fanbase around my books.

Up until now, I’ve mostly focused on writing books, not in connecting with the people who actually read them. But I want to do a lot more of that next year—not only in order to sell more books, but also to connect with the fan community in general and make a more lasting contribution to the genre.

How to write (harder) better faster (stronger)

If I could write 10,000 words a day—good words, publishable words—that would absolutely fantastic. So far, the most I’ve managed in a single day is about 5,000. Right now, I’m lucky if I hit 2,000. It’s aggravating, because I feel like I’m so ridiculously slow, and the stuff that I do write usually needs some cleaning up before it’s publishable … basically, I just want to be a robot unicorn who farts rainbows and writes a bestselling novel every 72 hours.

Barring that, I’d just like to learn how to overcome some of the things that get in the way of writing.

How to write memorable characters that readers fall in love with

Of all the areas of craft that I’d like to work on, this is the one that probably needs improvement the most. I’ve had lots of readers tell me that a particular story resonated with them, but I’ve never had a reader tell me that they were crazy about a particular character. I think I’m reasonably good at writing characters that are complex and three-dimensional, but that’s a separate thing from writing a character that readers fall in love with.

I think I’ll stop here for now. There are other things that I’m sure will be good to learn, but these are the ones I especially want to learn in 2015.

Things I learned in 2014 (Part 1)

Last week, Kris Rusch wrote an interesting blog post reflecting on 2014 and things she observed that indie writers learned, so I thought I’d do something similar and reflect on some of the things that I learned last year about the business and the craft. Here goes!

Readers of SF&F want longer books.

I did a lengthy blog post about this earlier, but the basic gist of it is that readers in my genre want longer, more immersive books. There’s a place for the short stuff, especially for high concept sci-fi, but most readers of speculative fiction want worlds they can get lost in with characters that become their best friends. It’s practically impossible to do that in a story that takes less than an hour to read, so to satisfy those readers, you’ve got to write long.

You can’t have a healthy career with only one income stream.

Between 80% to 90% of my income in 2014 came from Amazon. Times were good in the spring and summer, but then Amazon launched their ebook subscription service (Kindle Unlimited). None of my books were enrolled in KU, but because of the way that Amazon skews the rankings to favor KU books, my Amazon royalties took a huge hit.

I knew back in 2011 when I started that I needed to cultivate multiple income streams if I wanted to have a steady career, but I’d gotten complacent. Since my Amazon earnings were paying all the bills, I figured I was doing all right. But you can’t measure the healthiness of a career in just the revenue it’s bringing in right now; you’ve got to look at contingencies for the future, including the worst case scenario.When most of your revenue comes from a single client, that makes your career far too brittle.

So looking to the future, I can’t say that I have a healthy, steady career until I’m earning at least as much from all my other income streams as I am from Amazon.

I’ve been relying far too much on Amazon’s algorithms.

Related to the last point, I learned that I’ve been relying far too much on Amazon to sell my books. In fact, I can say that the Amazon algorithms were the linchpin of my marketing strategy (inasmuch as I actually had one, heh).

Amazon has the best book recommendation engine in the industry by far. It’s done a lot for my career, connecting my books with many readers who have gone on to become fans. But what the algos give, the algos can take away. To build a career with staying power, you have to constantly work to find new readers in a variety of different ways.

I’ve always believed that cream rises to the top. That said, if you’re starting at the bottom of the ocean, you’ve got a long, long way to rise. Up until now, I’ve been operating under the belief that readers will find me without me making much of an effort to find them. I learned this year that you’ve got to meet in the middle. You don’t have to hand sell every book (thank goodness!), but you do have to make an effort to make your books visible somehow.

A well-articulated negative review does more to sell books than a blasé positive one.

This one surprised me. When I published Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers: Book I), it garnered a fairly painful two-star review on Amazon about a week or two after launch. The review had some positive things in it, but it also had some negative things that were pretty spot on. Being the angsty writer that I am, I thought my chances had tanked. Instead, sales of the book immediately shot up, and stayed fairly high for about a month.

Readers aren’t stupid. They understand that not everyone has the same tastes in books, and parse their reviews accordingly. A negative review that is articulate and well-reasoned will lend a lot more credibility and cultivate a lot more interest than a string of positive reviews that lack any real substance. It sounds counterproductive, but it’s often the negative reviews that sell the book.

Sometimes you actually can get the best results by doing it yourself.

When I redid the covers for the first three Gaia Nova novels, I decided at first to hire a cover designer. For various reasons, though, that didn’t work out, so I decided to do them myself. I’d done the typography myself on the old ones, and let’s just say they left something to be desired.

The reason I wanted to hire the work out was because I didn’t think I’d get the best work if I did it myself. I figured that if I hired someone who was an expert in it, it would turn out so much better. Instead, when I did it myself, I discovered that my own skills had improved to the point where I could produce really good work myself.

It is possible, especially in self-publishing, to become so skilled at every aspect of the production process that you can do it all yourself and still produce a quality book. The learning curve is so sheer that it’s practically a cliff, but you can do it. And even if the work that you produced at the start of your career wasn’t all that good, you can improve to the point where your work is on par with that of professional designers.

The trouble is, it takes so much time and effort to get to that point that you may be better off hiring the work out. It takes a certain type of personality to DIY everything and produce a quality product without feeling overstretched. I’m pretty sure that’s my personality type, though of course I still have a lot to learn. But just because it’s DIY doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be of an inferior quality.

There are other things I learned in 2014 about the craft and business of writing, but this post is starting to get long so I think I’ll table it for the next post. Take care!