It wasn’t my intent to be some kind of strike buster, wielding my novel like a bat against folks who are rightfully trying to effect change at Amazon. That would have required forethought on my part whereas the main thought in my head was, “I’m done, it’s actually done.” A few clicks later (and about 231 cover upload revisions) and there’s a book on a website with your name on it. Pretty surreal.
Of course, any writer will tell you that if a book does feel done, then that may be a dangerous warning sign. But at some point you’ve revised the prose so much that you probably reverted back to whatever you had initially and, for better or worse, the work is what it is, and the best thing you can do is set it free to be ravaged by the slings and arrows of anonymous Internet reviewers with names like “BooKiller823”, who has never met something he couldn’t give a two-star review to. You breathe, you let it happen, and you move on.
Now the boycott of Amazon is a very good thing in general, even if it’s inconvenient for indie writers and small businesses and anyone else who’s donned their peasant clothes to work Amazon’s fields in order to modestly enrich themselves and greatly enrich Amazon’s shareholders. Someone might make the argument that, “You know, maybe it was a bad idea to allow one company to become a single marketplace for every product in the world,” but those people are always unceremoniously shouted down, thrown off of tall castle towers and/or pantsed.
But this is the reality we live in, at least until someone invents a trans-dimensional gate, in which case I think we’d all move to the reality where trans fats are beneficial to our health and nobody ever heard of reality television. We’re stuck in a place with delicious terrible fats and a lot of shows with people who, apart from extreme plastic surgery or a modicum of fame thirty years ago, are fairly unremarkable.
I’ve lost the point, which is that lots of folks have been using the Greater Evil for a while for publishing and have the wherewithal to be able to move to different platforms as public opinion has turned against Amazon. And that’s okay. And I hope it’s okay that I also used them. In my haste to let people read the book I erred in figuring out where to distribute it, but that can be corrected. And after the boycott is over hopefully there will be a turn towards the light from the company or renewed interest in keeping monopolies from existing, but I am skeptical of it happening. So we depend on the assumptions of good intent from our peers, and help to make sure that we’re pulling each other along to the best possible choices that we can make.
In the meantime, I’ll be known as the dumbass who published a book during a boycott.