It’s not like me to sit idly by and watch the world fall apart around me. When things like what’s been going on in the indie publishing world happen, I stand up and fight them because this is my world and the income I earn selling my stories puts food on my table, gas in my car and so much more. I may still work traditionally, but I don’t plan to forever because I enjoy the freedom that comes with writing and publishing. I enjoy telling naughty stories and hearing from my readers, but as so many of you already know, recent changes being imposed by bankers are making it harder to tell those stories.
When this whole thing first started, I heard a lot of people say things like, “Well, it’s the prerogative of the people running the game. If they don’t want to sell your eBooks on their virtual shelves, that’s their business.” And to a certain degree, of course those people are correct. Any one of those businesses can decide at any given moment that they don’t want to sell any indie books and close their doors in our faces, much like BookStrand decided to do nearly 2 weeks ago. That’s their prerogative, and as much as I don’t agree or like it, there’s really not much I can do about it. There was a great deal of evidence piling over the preceding months that suggested BookStrand was simply looking for a way to get rid of the indie publishers and authors that had infiltrated their eStore-front, taking attention away from Siren books with our flashy covers, bold titles and taboo plot lines. Despite the fact that a number of indie authors did their best to work hand in hand with BookStrand, in the end, BookStrand still made us out to be “The Big Bad” even though a number of their approved authors dance dangerously around issues they accused indies of advantageously exploiting.
And then there was the question: would All Romance eBooks also cave under the pressure, and close their doors to indie publishers and authors? There had been some indication over the months leading up to this whole ordeal, that ARe was receiving complaints from their base readership about the raunchy indie content taking over the site. The funny thing about that, was that our sales numbers didn’t seem to suggest that the majority took issue with what we were publishing. Kelly and I made a good deal of money on ARe the first few months we published over there, and a number of our books hovered in top category lists until ARe started acting on the alleged complaints they were getting from their core readership about the content. One issue they specifically seemed uncomfortable with was the “Daddy” story, featuring legal-age (18-19-20 year old) girls and their stepfathers. Eventually that stemmed beyond the Daddy story and reached into any and all stories containing an older man with a younger woman, even if that woman was of consenting age. Their original solution was to pick and choose which titles they would carry, and withhold certain types of titles from their front page when they were published. We weren’t happy with their decision, and over the months that followed we watched our income from that site start to dwindle. Once again, that was their prerogative, and when this whole new set of issues cropped up, a lot of people held their breath as they waited for ARe’s decision. So far, they’ve decided to continue working with indies, but under a whole new set of rules that fall in line with PayPal’s dictation of what is and is not appropriate. Are we happy about it? No… and yes. At least they are still willing to work with us, but no one wants to be censored.
So as these worlds were crumbling, people began to worry about Smashwords. For a lot of authors, Smashwords is their means of distribution to stores they can’t get into on their own because they live outside the United States, or those venues don’t yet have a means for direct upload in place yet. We’ve always said that Smashwords was an author’s site, geared more toward authors than readers, but we still make sales over there. Mark Coker and his team have always done their best to accommodate authors, no matter what material they wrote and published on the site, and though the occasional snag does pop up from time to time because nobody’s perfect, Smashwords continues to grow and change to better accommodate the people that use it. But what would happen to Smashwords, since they use PayPal to not only accept payments, but distribute payments to the authors who upload through the site?
It took a lot longer for Mark Coker and SW to respond to the issue, which to me proves something: Coker isn’t just going to lay down and die in the face of adversity. When he did finally respond, he kept his head as best he could, and while some folks aren’t happy with his decisions, let’s face facts: he’s a small business owner in the throes of a really controversial traffic jam. So he had to cave to the bigger enemy, for now, but according to recent communications with Coker, he is doing his best to try and take this fight to a bigger arena and he’s asking us to do the same.
We can rant and rail all we want about how Smashwords should find another payment service to work with, but the cold hard truth is that as naughty as PayPal has been over the years, this whole things goes beyond PayPal. It’s coming from credit card companies, and that’s not right either, especially considering the amount of creativity employed by a lot of people who struggled endlessly through the economical crisis in order to find ways to rebuild their income and get to a hopeful place again.
People are still out of work, still wallowing in the depths of poverty, trying to get by from day to day. Writing, whether it be erotica, romance, horror, mainstream… whatever, has become an alternative means of income for a lot of people: they supply the steadily growing demands from readers, and through those means earn a viable wage. We pump money back into the flailing economy. We get back on our feet and stand again, and maybe those big credit card companies and banks don’t want that. I’m starting to sound a bit like a conspiracy theorist, I guess, so it’s probably best if I stop there, but I would ask you to think about it. Think about how difficult it’s going to be for the folks affected by these absurd restrictions to rise above and move on to lead productive lives again, and ask yourself what we can do to stop it.
And maybe, just maybe, instead of aiming our outrage at Mark Coker, we can aim it at the people who really deserve it: PayPal, the credit card companies who are trying to dictate what their users can and cannot buy or sell. There are petitions out there working to battle this, and if we take time and action, maybe together we can nip this in the bud before it stretches beyond the erotica genre and starts cracking down on mainstream fiction for being too liberal, horror fiction for being too gory, science fiction for going places no man has gone before…
You get the picture.
In the future, there’s no cure for mortality. People still die every day. No one has found the fountain of youth, the key to immortality, but there is a solution to the grief that comes with the loss of a loved one. Cybernetic companions designed to look and act exactly like a deceased loved one are all the rage for the rich and powerful. Some employ these companions full-time, even if they haven’t lost someone they love, choosing the cold comfort of prefabricated love over the cruel possibility of rejection.
