And of course, the day the book goes up is also prime day at amazon, on which many of Amazon’s employees have gone on strike, as well they should. Even starting to try and sell books through that company feels extremely icky, and I’m not sure what to do about it. It’s the catch 22 of a) they’ve more-or-less cornered the market on ebook sales and b) they’re literally evil.
I think the resolution I’ve come to (literally right now) is to have my books available there for those who either don’t know or don’t care, but actively market them at Smashwords. I say Smashwords specifically because apple, kobo, and the rest may not be the monopoly, but they wish they were, particularly in their tomfuckery around blackboxing user libraries and not letting you actually own the files of the books you you’ve fucking paid for.
In general, and after having put some effort into making this neocities page look how I want it to, I’m starting to realise how super not into the whole “professional website” thing I am. To me it seems totally disingenuous to have a clean, corporate looking page when 1) I write stories about how oppressive and horrible that whole system is, and 2) I hate interacting with those sites and their clean, generic perfection.
And, honestly, I’m too fucking old and tired to be fucking around with trying to fit myself into a conventional mode of doing anything. It gives me internet hives and it just makes me feel shitty.
It’s odd how revelations work, namely that you can realise something you’ve realised before without realising that you’ve already realised it. And then suddenly, oh, right, yeah, that’s the same idea I’ve had five times and forgotten five times. And everyone around is like yeah, obviously, I thought of that years ago.
What’s new this time, I guess, is the feeling that I can actually do the thing, or that there is a workable way of playing the game while telling the referees to go fuck themselves. Or to put it in a less aggro way, I can decided not to focus on Amazon, while retaining it as a conduit for exposure and legitimacy and reviews and all that guff.
As always, it’s an ego-strength thing, feeling like I can decide to do something and actually “get away with it,” as if doing something that literally (literally) millions of people are already doing. It’s not about what you’re doing, but about the fact that the doing itself feels dangerous. And the only thing that can convince you that doing it isn’t dangerous is to do it…