Slept on some info

I only just found out about Smashword's merger with D2D publishing and I don't even know what will happen now. All I did was find out they don't supply stats for daily views of a book, I went to find out why, I found that info instead. It means I might have a different channel for print books, but I'm making nothing from Amazon so why would I bother. Unless it's completely streamlined and I don't have to redo any of my shit (doubtful) I'm probably not going to use it. This happened back in March, too. I wasn't in any position to process this had I known but I also don't remember getting a single email about this. I'm not going to bitch about that since I don't even care, I think I looked at D2D ages ago and just went, meh. I'll see what happens but I have a book with another distributor nobody bought. I have Amazon books barely anyone bought despite showing interest. Maybe if D2D is cheaper (again, doubtful and it's also in beta for POD) I'll see what happens. They distribute to Amazon, I opt out on Smashwords anyway. They can do POD provided you didn't do a preformated epub, I usually upload word docs. I just don't see it being a viable alternative.

AI has arrived. Let's Posse.

I was waiting for this and it's happened: an author has allegedly been given a contract that includes an AI clause that the publisher can take their work, feed it to the algorithm and do the work themselves without ever paying them again. That doesn't shock me. But the person who put the call out also said "We gotta stick together, guys! We gotta talk to each other and let people know!"

My pathological demand avoidance is prodigious whenever I'm asked to help where nobody helped me. Like every other time I've needed help, I haven't gotten much. I did the right thing and promoted people and placated them when I thought shit wasn't that bad. I got asked to help other kids in school, even when I wasn't that good. It's always about what they wanted and now I'm like, no. I'm helping by not producing anything. People slept on the shovel books on Audible. People slept on vanity publishing and fan fiction and fake contests and agents and reviewers charging for services they shouldn't. People were happy to go along with shit I was against. But AI's now the bridge too far and I'm like, fuck it. I'm serious. I'm sick of this entire industry treating us all like shit and giving Instagram and YouTubers contracts before even bothering with people who actually wanted to be published. The money train keeps going no matter what you do. I don't think this is going to eventuate, and maybe it should. But if we give the inch, they take the mile and we all lose. 

I just want the industry to do it for six months. Go ahead and see how many books and movies you can produce that people genuinely want to read and watch before you realise, the consumers don't want this. They should vote with their wallets but you can't make people. A content creator was worried about making content because she wanted a SAG membership, do I legitimately have to worry about creating my work whereby I might be excluded later for crossing that picket line? I am on SAG and WGA's side, it's the residuals people don't understand, not what they have now or what people think they get. They don't. It's shed some light on how being an actor or screenwriter isn't lucrative and how they're exploited by an industry that says, "But you'll do anything for your dreams, right? Anything..." *cue Poor Unfortunate Souls*. I kept telling people this and they said I was being negative and I'm fucking sick of playing Cassandra to a deaf audience. Let me sit in my fucking box and do my stupid thing that isn't making me money and leave me alone. I'm sick of this community ignoring me until it needs solidarity. I know it's selfish, I know it's mean. I know it might affect me one day (it fucking won't, let's be serious, whether I chase a contract or by some miracle someone offers me one, it's not fucking going to happen). But I refuse. If it's really coming down to everyone's at risk of having their shit stolen, then I'll pull it all down. My ebooks were free, they were uploaded to other sites and I didn't care that much. But why do you want my shit if it's not making money now? I didn't do this for a living for a reason. This compounds on that reason.

I'm not down with this call to arms. I'm sorry. I'm tired. I paid attention when everyone else didn't care and this is where we are. This is what publishing fan fic and plagiarism and vanity publishing gets you. You created an environment where exploitation was far too easy to pull off due to ignorance, now you've let them get away with it they're pushing the envelope even further. Maybe we should've stopped those fuckers making works off Catcher in the Rye. Maybe we shouldn't have made movies out of One Direction fan fiction. Maybe we should've stopped Amazon from making it too easy to self-publish. This is what you get for naivety and acceptance of bullshit. 

Writers have been bitching about being underappreciated for fucking decades and it's gone ignored. I keep telling people I knew as a kid not to expect to make any kind of living, which is why I'm so fundamentally sick of people outside this space assuming it's something I can profit from sufficiently. Not everyone can live their dreams and even those who technically are will do it at the cost of financial security. I don't have enough energy right now to write myself out of any kind of financial hardship, the work is a one way ticket into that. Nobody wants my ideas, nobody wants my IP, nobody is going to pay me a salary to do this. I don't want to edit for struggling authors. I don't want to proofread for them either. I don't want to use my talent for money. Fuck right off. I fucking regret ever telling anyone I can write since everyone just sees the one person who got filthy rich and assume this is a rule and not an exception. Stop it. Please.

I won't make this its own post but there's a book floating around supposedly written by Drake and a collaborator, but all I could find were fake versions of it on Amazon and then the real thing is on a website I've never heard of and it's not even available, so whoever wanted it fell for fakes on Amazon and that's not cool, but the whole thing looks like a joke. I thought the fakes were real and he'd just thrown it up himself, now I think it was just a limited edition print run. Whatever bro. Whatever. I'm so done. I'm laughing at this and I needed a giggle.

Please don't ask me why I don't write for a living.

The sparkle in the eyes I got from the NDIS person signing me up (which seemed to involve going over the same shit in my application) when I said I wrote was so annoying in retrospect. She asked if I was willing to do anything freelanced based, including proofreading, I said I wasn't qualified and I can't build a client base that quickly. I need a wage. Even if they were willing to put me through a business course, it won't necessarily translate to me running a real business.

But I'm so sick of people thinking I can make a decent living off this talent. I'm telling you, I can't. I had to fight for something that would've still given me more money than I'd ever have earned as a professional writer, which is about 12 grand a year. And that's for established writers in my country. We don't make money from slaving away on a laptop.  It's all the other shit, I keep saying this, pay attention.

Please for the love of God also pay attention to the current writers strike in the US before badgering me over screen writing. It's become an exploitable talent. Nobody wants to pay you what you are genuinely worth never mind what you think you're worth. The studios don't even care anymore, they want to replace writers with AI, and actors too now. Anyone who wants to work in that sphere can be exploited because they know it's a "dream job" and certain people will accept less to do it. I could work in a salt mine set up churning out shit other people make more money off. It's not that easy to just do this. I do this as a hobby, soon as I have to profit from it, I fail. I would need so much support and an agent and an editor to do what I do well. I wasn't making passive income from my books you can't just release a KDP book and sit back and wait for the money to roll in. It's bullshit. I even said on my writer's Instagram feed I didn't quit my work-a-day to do this professionally. I'm not being defeatist about this, I'm being realistic and I am genuinely sick of people's starry eyed misconceptions that one successful author means anyone can break it that big. It's NOT FROM THEIR BOOKS. They sold the rights to it and it's residuals and even that is dependent on your IP being capable of some level of mass marketing. I would get shitty royalties on a traditional contract. Amazon may offer more but they can't get your book into stores. Stop pretending authors are living it large because one TERF has a boat now.

The orcas have their work cut out as it is, don't make me send them after you too.

In addition to this, I just heard a quote that turned on all my bells. Game developers tried to tell Amazon management stopping games being sold on Steam was like refusing to sell a book on Amazon. That was EXACTLY what my publisher refused to do, to the extent she sabotaged the applicable .mobi files by not bothering to format them well enough and then later, when she was being "forced" to use Amazon because of the CreateSpace take over, she refused to do this and desperately looked for a POD alternative. I think the one she did find was cumbersome and it put a long delay on us getting new editions published. She was even insulted and angry whenever we asked her to upload the Amazon version because people didn't want to buy from another site, they either wanted the paperback on their Amazon or they wanted it on their device directly. People aren't like me who now how to manually upload files to a device. The ease of purchase for Kindle was one of the reasons it's done so well. 

Meanwhile, ANYONE will ask you if you say you've written a book "Is it on Amazon?" (and to a lesser extent Audible) You HAVE to say yes. When I took back my material, I got weird congratulations from someone for them being released. She did release them since CreateSpace published there directly, but she didn't want to be locked into the contract. And when she released my second book, she botched the formatting and refused to pull it to fix it. I didn't care if it was unavailable for a couple of days, I knew she could fix it and I'd say it was more a case of laziness than worrying about profits. While I understood her not wanting to be locked to Amazon, she destroyed her own business and I had to cancel my contracts because she was failing to produce a product. Last I could tell, she either did it on behalf of people before closing the company, or gave them the files and told them to do it themselves. I also saw she was incorrectly claiming someone's book after they left. I still have to put up with my old Amazon listings existing online because Amazon don't remove print books from the website, they only make them unavailable, since third parties might still be selling that edition with the same ISBN etc.

Having said all this, the only reason I refused to publish my children's book to Amazon via Blurb was I didn't want them making claim to any material the illustrators made. Given they didn't seem entirely bothered, I could change this but nobody's shown interest in it anyway, so it never mattered. And given there's an existing scam now with AI picture being shoveled onto the site for passive revenue, it would make sense not to go there. I don't know. When it comes to paperback books, it really is limiting yourself refusing to bow to Zon.

Coupled with this, if someone was refusing to buy my book because there's no audiobook version, I don't care. I don't care enough at all to accommodate those people at my own time and expense. I don't even want to hear another person reading my books. If it was part of a contract, provided I didn't have to do it myself, I'd live with it. I was trying to avoid doing it for my publisher, again because she was insisting we do this in the most unprofessional and time consuming way. We could deliver it in chapters which I think she was planning to use some as samples. I refused. The best she got from me was a short audio about me that I did purely to shut her up. I wasn't prepared to buy a new microphone and sit in my room doing this. It would've stressed me out too much to even try. I hated making stupid videos for Facebook, I resented I had to set up my own book signing and stage pictures (I didn't but I was considering just setting up a table outside a book store for a fake shot, and nobody got back to me about my request, I'm sure it was due to how unprofessional my book looked on publication. It was abysmal and she was expecting me to be able to buy in bulk from her to sell or have brick and mortars order from her. The only person who managed to get a Barnes and Noble signing was someone who knew the owner). I just saw their Facebook page has finally been removed, the twitter still lives with dead links to the site. People tend to have Audible subscriptions now since audiobooks are so cost prohibitive for so many people, I don't know anyone who buys these and if they were only available from some flaky outlet or Soundcloud, nobody would buy them. I knew it would've been a huge waste of my time to do this for both books or even one. She was too unreliable to get our actual books reprinted. I wanted her to go away and fix all my issues before I gave her anything else. Her obsession with SEOs by way of flooding the web with blog posts, I've not seen a single other person doing this but I guess it was a free way of doing it. She was so stupidly fixated on this and not making a quality product, it drove me insane she couldn't even see that, she was definitely overselling her ability to get the right attention, she seemed to be using web 2.0 logic, the way people seem to think you can rely on ten year old tactics for current day internet problems. But having a substandard audiobook and probably charging more than it would've cost any individual to record anyway (we were recommended free software, as far as I knew, none of us had professional recording equipment), it had no more chance of working that her dumb as fuck podcast idea, which I'm still ranting about to this day.