Bad Business

tyunglebower ♦ April 19, 2020 ♦ 1 Comment

I have major changes to announce pertaining to the business side of my author life.

Until further notice, all of my books, current, and any I will publish in the foreseeable future, will be free in e-book form, outside of Amazon. As my blog has often mentioned, Amazon will not allow an author to give away his own books on Kindle, as often as not. So if you want to download any of my books, I advise you to take a non-Kindle approach for the time being. If you want to contribute the 99 cents, however, (how they will all by force be priced on Amazon), go for it. Thanks.

I will continue to charge for paperback versions of the book, though as previously, the price will be modest, considering that as of yet, I cannot transfer the true covers to a paper template.

As my sales numbers over the years have shown me, I am, despite my best efforts, poor at marketing and at business in general. (At least with my current resources.) Yet despite my obvious shortcomings in the business side of indie-publishing, even I know going into the aforementioned change that it is very much against common business sense.

Yet the creative, actual writing side of being an indie-author has begun to suffer over the last year or so in ways I am still coming to terms with. Therefore, a degree of symbolic triage is in order. If I am to be an author, I must tend to the persistent, significant creative difficulties I have been experiencing. The results of that tending are as yet uncertain, but there is one aspect of all of it that is certain; I cannot attempt to fix that while also worrying about making some semblance of business success. So I will, in essence, no longer utilize the all important business-man alter ego that is so crucial to conventional indie-pub success.

I have little to lose if the business side of my author career continues to be what it is; quasi-anemic. But I have quite a bit to lose if I can no longer rely on my craft and power of writing and storytelling. The choice, in the end, is an obvious one to me.

Books, novels, short stories all may, in fact probably will emerge from this time of examination and experimentation. When and if they do, they will be made available to you, as I said, for free download. But my normal publishing schedule of roughly one novel every summer is for the time being suspended. It will now occur when it occurs, and I will talk it up when the time comes.

I intend to continue writing here on the website, as what i think is useful of thought provoking material presents itself.