Here’s a guest post by Ben LeRoy, who I offered the chance to correct some language that goes around in the often very silly self-pub versus trad-pub slap-fight (I say silly because, wait, why aren’t we all high-fiving each other again for being bad-ass authors with stories to tell?). Ben is the publisher behind Tyrus Books, and blogs about publishing and his many other adventures (I think last week he was in Alaska living inside the chest of a mother grizzly bear as she tended to her cubs). He, with others, blogs at: “Hey, There’s A Dead Guy In The Living Room.”

Can we at least get some things straight if we’re going to have a talk?

There seems to be a misunderstanding floating around (if Chuck’s Facebook wall is any indication). Let’s rap a little about this and see if we can’t establish some facts, clarity, and common language in an effort to kill misinformation and speculation. All of the shouting and flailing about in the public square is, to be frank, a waste of time, and does nothing more than pour gasoline on what would have been an otherwise fine bowl of Cap’n Crunch.

Some folks are jazzed about Amazon’s KDP Select. Awesome. I’m sure there are plenty of advantages you might find there — increased royalty rate, the ability to make your own cover, the freedom to leave your words the way you want them, etc. etc. etc. You’ve all heard the commercial, you’ve all got your stance. I am not here to dissuade you, even in the slightest from your inclinations. Why not? Because (1) that’s your business and you have to do what works best for you, and (2) I’ve got a whole lot of other shit I’m thinking about in my life and this issue isn’t really registering on my radar machine.

That said, there seems to be some confusion and misinformation regarding an issue that isn’t really a matter of opinion as much as it is fact, and I think it behooves us all to have a clear understanding.

One of the advantages somebody threw out for KDP Select as opposed to a Historically Entrenched Publishing Company (if people are going to start making up names for things, I want in on the action, so welcome to HEP C, motherfuckers) is that with KDP Select, the author had much more flexibility with his/her rights. Example in paraphrase.

KDP Select Fan: “If after three months I don’t want to be going steady with this gal, I can take my promise ring and go elsewhere,  but trad (oh, I loathe that shorthand) publishing owns my literary allures for my whole life + 70 years.”

When I see a phrase like, “life + 70 years” in the context of a publishing discussion, I assume were talking about copyright. Publishers (except in cases of work for hire and/or unscrupulous scam artists) don’t own copyright. That’s an honor and legal responsibility given to the creator of a work. Once that paperwork has been put into the filing cabinet at the Copyright Office, the author has copyright protection in his/her work for the rest of his/her days and then, even in the ghostly domain, his/her heirs retain that promise ring on this Earthly coil for another 70 years.

So what does that mean exactly? This business of owning the copyright? Does somebody participating in KDP Select have copyright? What about his HEP C neighbor? Does he too have copyright protection?

Having a work copyrighted in your name means that you, as the ring holder, have the legal standing to license and sell the rights to the work (be it print, film, music, key chains and frisbees, etc.) to people who are in a position to exploit those rights—publishers, movie studios, etc.. Most typically, rights are licensed for a contractually established amount of time in exchange for a contractually established amount of money and with some attention paid to what conditions would result in reversion of rights back to the copyright holder. These are deals that an author is willingly and legally entering into with the exploiter, either directly or with somebody acting as his/her legal representative (lawyer, agent, etc.). You shouldn’t be getting hoodwinked at this point. A contract is spelled out, questions can and should be asked.

Historically, those contracts might have given a set time period. Something like, “Five years from the time Harley Killemall Meets the Mafia hits the shelf, the rights revert back to the author.” Then the time got a little more vague by saying things like, “Harley Killemall Meets the Mafia can be exploited by the publisher until the book is declared out of print.”

Out of was generally understood to mean the book was not available to ship from the publisher to retailers. But then short run printing became a thing and ebooks became a thing and what “out of print” meant became a little murkier. Thankfully, there are now provisions like, “If the publisher doesn’t pay the author $XXX.XX amount of royalties in a six month period, a minimum sales threshold hasn’t been met, and the rights revert to the author.”

How long does that take? I can’t say for sure (nobody can), but I can pretty much promise you it will be considerably less than your life + 70 years. What can you do when your rights revert? License them again. New publisher. Or self-publish. Or sit on them and refuse the world your genius. Like I said before, not my gig, not all that worried about it, I’ve got a plane to catch to Points Elsewhere.

Before I go, are we clear on this one thing? Do we understand why one of the differences between an author opting to do the KDP Select thing is not that he/she can get his/her rights back (not even really the same thing as a traditionally licensing deal) after 90 days while a HEP C published author has to wait until he/she is Ghost Drinking with Hemingway and Shakespeare?

Information and facts are your friends, no matter how spirited your opinion gets.

And as always—write on.

You have one more week to pre-order Blightborn because, Lord and Lady, it’s out in a week.

Which means you have one more week to:

a) get my short story, “The Wind Has Teeth Tonight,” for free with your pre-order

and

b) maybe win a Kindle Paperwhite or some free books.

Details on the pre-order contest here.

You can pre-order right here.

(It’ll be out in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover from the first day of release.)

You might be saying, “Hey, but I haven’t read Under the Empyrean Sky yet.”

To which I say –> HEY LOOK HERE IT IS.

I will also note that you have a way to read it for free in digital, were you so inclined — Kindle Unlimited has its free trial going, and Under the Empyrean Sky (along with Kick-Ass Writer, incidentally) are part of that deal. So, you could totally just read the first book for free. Like a savvy book-shark. I don’t know what that means, “book-shark,” but frankly, I like it.

*chomp*

First drafts suck.

Does that sound too fierce for you? Too general?

Let me try again: my first drafts suck. And in all probability so do yours.

That piece where as you wrote “The End” you heard angels sing to you from on high, and saw Gabriel hisowndamnself descend from shining clouds to thank you for your contribution to world literature? Odds are it sucks. Trust me. I’ve been there.

I don’t mean that there’s nothing in what you’ve written that works. I don’t even mean that the piece you finished and feel great about doesn’t hum with inimitable bassy deliciousness or read like a chocolate milkshake drinks. I just mean that if you’re anything like me, the piece, as a whole, is probably busted.

Maybe your characters cough too much. That’s happened to me—ruined the effect of a perfectly good final chapter. Maybe you use the word “fire” forty times in one six-page segment. Done that, too. Maybe your central character’s a total cypher, and her big turn doesn’t make any sense even though it sang in your head. That’s, like, every other draft of everything I’ve ever done.

You may be sensing a pattern here: this is written as much for my benefit as for yours. But current run rate indicates I am not alone.

First drafts are, well, first. Even when you’re proud of them, they’re not done yet. And this is good.

This is good, because first drafts can be made better.

You can spot word overuse. A shower-revelation will fix your story structure. A sudden lightning bolt will inform you there’s a missing scene between your tenth and eleventh chapters, or that the eleventh chapter should be the sixth (it’s happened.). The fourth read through the story you’ll realize there are too many scenes where characters contemplate the stars—or that you’re using cigarettes or coffee cups like commas, that your rhetoric’s gone stale or your sentences are all the same length. On your eighth read you’ll spot the glaring hole at the center of your plot.

And you’ll fix it. Each and every time.

Some days you’ll despair, because dammit, how can I be doing all this work to produce a first draft that will require the prose equivalent of full facial reconstruction and a heart transplant before it’s worth reading? You’ll come back to old manuscripts from which you thought wafted sweet ambrosial perfumes, only to catch a whiff of something else entirely.

But it’s better than the alternative.

Because for every draft you think is great when you put it to bed that first time, you’ll write one that just doesn’t work. Where you know, when the last line comes, that you’ve committed a crime against God and literature and the only thing for it is slink into a tiny shadowy cubby hole to stew in your own sweat and hope nobody notices.

The funny thing about those drafts is, I mean, yes, sometimes they need more work than the ones that flow like honey. Sometimes. But they both need work, and when you start off thinking, no matter what this is, no matter how I feel about it now, I’ll need to work to make it better? Then the despair isn’t nearly so sharp. If the book is broken, and you know it, that’s just one more reason to throw yourself at edits. In a way it even helps. Because you have less attachment to the first draft, you pay more attention to structure, timing, language—to the architecture of acts and the necessities of character and plot. You tweak everything you can in a bad draft, because the book needs all the help you can give it. You’re Rocky up against Apollo Creed on pub date (or submission date, or “date you ask your crit group to read your MS,” or whatever). Training isn’t just a chore; you need it to survive. There’s potential in the story, somewhere, or you wouldn’t have pushed through to take it this far. You just need to bring it out.

I went through this whole rodeo with my most recent novel, Full Fathom Five. On writing “The End” after the first draft, I almost wept. The book was too long by half. The ending landed funny. The first act’s pacing was, charitably, off. There was a whole middle section that went nowhere. The theme was muddy.

But I could rebuild it. Make it better. Faster. Stronger. I’d seen how much I could improve first drafts I thought were, if not perfect, at least in the neighborhood; now I turned my hands to flaws I knew were there, and others friends and first readers and editors illuminated.

The work was hard. I wrote 20,000 new words, then deleted 80,000. Prose tightened. Images sharpened. Characters found their light and voice. The plot slipped into the right key, and the tempo tripped into time. And one day, reading the book through again, I felt it hook me. And when a book you’ve read twenty, thirty times does that, you know you’ve found something special.

I’m as proud of this book as I am of anything I’ve ever done. It’s golden. It’s right. And as for that first draft…

I’m glad I knew it sucked.

* * *

Max Gladstone has sung in Carnegie Hall, been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and nominated for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award. Tor Books published the first two books in the Craft sequence are THREE PARTS DEAD and TWO SERPENTS RISE.

And now, just released, is the third in the series, FULL FATHOM FIVE:

On the island of Kavekana, Kai builds gods to order, then hands them to others to maintain. Her creations aren’t conscious and lack their own wills and voices, but they accept sacrifices, and protect their worshippers from other gods—perfect vehicles for Craftsmen and Craftswomen operating in the divinely controlled Old World.

When Kai sees one of her creations dying and tries to save her, she’s grievously injured—then sidelined from the business entirely, her near-suicidal rescue attempt offered up as proof of her instability. But when Kai gets tired of hearing her boss, her coworkers, and her ex-boyfriend call her crazy, and starts digging into the reasons her creations die, she uncovers a conspiracy of silence and fear—which will crush her, if Kai can’t stop it first.

[editorial note from cw: the first book is amazing — when I once again grab hold of that mythical beast known as ‘free time’ I will ride it straight into the rest of the series]

Max Gladstone: Website | Twitter

Full Fathom Five: Amazon / Powell’s / B&N / Signed Preorders | First 5 Chapters

Having talked a little about Kindle Unlimited the other day, I thought it was worth calling attention to this article by noted hybrid author, Michael J. Sullivan, over at Digital Book World. Relevant passage (though you should read the whole darn thing):

Historically, Amazon has been good about treating self-published authors and traditionally published authors equally. There are some exceptions (for instance traditionally published titles can be pre-ordered, and most self-published authors cannot get this feature. Again there have been exceptions made for best-selling self-published authors), but for the most part both self- and traditionally published authors have enjoyed equal treatment. They share similar exposure on best-seller lists and top-rated lists, and Amazon’s “cut” from sales have been the same for both groups (30% under the agency model). In fact, when the agency model went into affect, Amazon raised self-publisher’s royalty from 35% to 70% to match what traditional publishers were getting. But now with the roll-out of Kindle Unlimited, we see two very different treatments:

Self-published authors MUST be exclusive to Amazon (except for a handful of best-selling authors) and can’t sell their books on other sites. Traditionally published books have no such exclusivity requirement and can be sold wherever the publisher wishes.

Self-published authors are paid from a pool set by Amazon each month. They have no idea how much they will be paid per book. Traditionally published books get paid exactly as they would if a sale were made. They know exactly what the unit price will be for each book and are not relying on the Amazon’s whim as far as what their unit price will be.

Now, a few comments.

Some of my books are there, not through KDP Select, but through Amazon Publishing (Skyscape, in particular). The books seem to be doing well — noticed a jump in my ranking (which is a number may or may not be attached to anything, like a child’s steering wheel toy).

But this isn’t that. This post is more relevant to author-publishers.

As noted, if you want into Kindle Unlimited, you have to be exclusive through KDP Select.

Which means — well, it means tough tee-tas, is what it means. It means if you’re willing to shut the door on other sales avenues, Amazon will reward you by… giving you a different, in some ways lesser, deal than if you entered KU with a publisher.

Someone will correctly point out that the average $2/month payout is potentially better, though, then what a published author will get. That’s likely true (though not guaranteed) — but it doesn’t change the fact that the price of your self-published book becomes irrelevant. Control over price is a meaningful aspect of acting as your own author-publisher, and this takes that away from you. Sure, it’s nice if you wrote a 5,000 word story at $0.99, but a 100,000-word fantasy for $5.99 –? Hey, two bucks either way. And nobody knows how the pool is calculated or if it’ll go up, down, or sideways. To reuse a phrase — it doesn’t seem to be attached to anything.

So: if you’re an author-publisher, maybe be a little wary of Kindle Unlimited. I don’t know that it’s worth an, ahem, big petition or anything, but it may be worth sending Amazon a polite note to suggest that they tie the compensation to the price of the book and, further, eradicate any exclusivity demands. Because, again, diversification will help make a writer — exclusivity can help break one. Particularly one just starting out.

Thor’s a lady. Captain America is a black dude. Ms. Marvel is Muslim. Spider-Man is a Hispanic kid. Groot is a tree. Adam Christopher and I, along with artist Wilfredo Torres, have reimagined the original patriotic superhero — The Shield, once of Red Circle comics, now of the Dark Circle reboot — not as Joe Higgins, but, rather, as a full-figured ass-kicking woman.

It’s exciting stuff. I’m like, It’s not enough! It’s addictive. Let’s see Idris Elba as James Bond. Or Emily Blunt as Jane Bond. Hey, Japanese Batman. Or flip the Luke and Leia roles in Star Wars.  Transgendered Pakistani Doctor Who! More, more, more!

*flips the table*

*then gender-flips the table*

*now the table is a chair and also a Chinese lesbian*

Actually, a while back I suggested flipping the gender of the Doctor, and dang, you’d think I was dropping a hot deuce on a Gutenberg Bible. Some people get mad when you say stuff like that. Like, religious war mad. Like, you just insulted my mother mad.

And I’m seeing that again. Not about our variant of The Shield — but about beloved characters like Thor. Like, ahhh what the fuck if Thor is a woman then anything can happen what if my Mom becomes my Dad and my dog becomes a plant and then I fuck the plant and then we have dog-plant babies holy snack-nuts this is worse than global warming.

People rail against this. They find excuses why it shouldn’t happen — “But Thor is mythology,” they say, as if mythology is history and as if comic book fiction is meant to be an accurate, factual depiction of historimythic events. (Sidenote: I now quite like the word “historimythic.”)

Thing is, I kinda get it.

Fifteen years ago (cough cough, maybe even ten), I probably would’ve been in the same camp. In my 20s, geek shit was more important to me. You bind yourself up with these things — Star Wars isn’t just a movie you like, it’s an emblem for things you believe, a sign of who you are, acting as both aegis and mantle. Someone fucking with that feels like someone fucking with your DNA. (Doubly ironic then when it’s troublemaker George Lucas mucking about with the work of legend George Lucas.) You say, “But I am That Thing, so if you change That Thing, then who the fuck am I?” Geeks don’t like change. That includes anybody who geeks out about anything. Washington Redskins? GASP HOW DARE YOU. Changing the name wouldn’t change the team. It would simply be a name that stops pissing in the eyes of Native Americans. But changing it is like saying, “If you change of the name of the team I love, what does that say about me?”

It says nothing about you, of course, but we’re weird creatures, we humans. Hard-wired, it seems, to associate with the things we love in a way that goes beyond mere appreciation. We aren’t distant. We mesh. We merge. We braid ourselves up with the things we adore.

And so, we rail against it.

Let’s hack away at some of the issues surrounding the gender-flip.

But This Thing I Love Is Different Now

It is. And I know that’s hard. I don’t say that glibly — I mean, yeah, no, I get it, change is hard. Even in something simple as the comic books we read. But, here’s a vital reminder:

The whole reason you have the affection you had is because the original version existed in the first place. Which means it still exists. Nobody is taking away your old Thor comics and drawing boobs and a vagina on him. You still have those things. The version you loved hasn’t gone away. Now it’s time, as all children must learn, to share. Let somebody else drive the Big Wheel around for a little while, okay? Someone who maybe doesn’t look like you or sound like you.

It Breaks The Rules Of The Story

Again, Thor can’t be a lady because Thor is a dude in the mythology. The Doctor can’t be a woman because [insert some cryptic rules-lawyering from some episode 20 years ago].

These are made-up stories, though.

This isn’t science we’re trying to defy. We’re not spitting in the Eyes of the Gods. I can literally, right now, go write a story where Harry Potter is a pansexual goat-being. It’d be absurd and I’m sure somewhere J.K. Rowling would quietly harrumph in her tea, but I’m just saying: this stuff ain’t gospel. Stories are meant to be flexible, malleable — even religion and mythology allows the teller to adjust the tale to the listener. That’s a feature, not a bug.

This Is Tokenism

You misunderstand tokenism. Tokenism is, and here I’ll quote The Internet:

the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce.

So, to be tokenistic, Marvel might say, “Thor isn’t going to be a woman, but look, there’s a woman in the next issue. She’s a toll booth attendant and she’s a Strong Female Character because dang, look at those biceps. She handles loose change like a champion. She’s her own boss. #feminism.” Instead of making Captain America black, they’d say, “We’re racially diverse because his dry cleaner is Asian, and his real estate agent is a homosexual African-American, and look! Page four! Someone with mocha-colored skin walking a dog.”

Tokenism is doing the bare minimum to look like you’re meeting the maximum.

It’s Just A Publicity Stunt

I do not know the heart of anybody who decides to invoke greater pop culture diversity, but what I do know is that media companies are pretty much always engaging in publicity stunts because that’s how they get attention. If something like this is at the heart of a publicity stunt — hey, whatever. You only do publicity stunts when you think they’ll work, and if they think engaging in greater diversity would net them valuable media attention, that’s suggestive of a better world than I think I lived in ten years ago. The publicity stunt used to be that HOLY CRAP THEY’RE KILLING SUPERMAN. Now it’s HOLY CRAP THEY’RE SPACKLING OUR COMIC BOOK PAGES WITH DIVERSITY IN AN EFFORT TO READ MORE READERS.

Perhaps I’m just not cynical enough, but recognizing that this kind of news will grab attention and hook new readers — readers representative of the diverse world in which we live — uhh, okay, yeah, sign me right the fuck up.

It’s Just Politically-Correct Snarghlewarble

“Politically correct” is a phrase so often (mis)used, it’s entirely worthless. My opinion is that if you’re trying to score points with a political party or with folks to get votes, then that, my friends, is politically correct. If you’re trying to make an earnest change to whatever (media, policy, education, workforce) and that change happens to be about sexism or racism or some other perceived imbalance, that’s not political correctness. What you’re calling “politically correct” is really just someone trying to make the world a better place according to their ideals. “Don’t say that hurtful word” isn’t an expression of political correctness. It’s an effort to be Ask You To Be Less Shitty. “Let’s see more diversity on the pages of this comic book” isn’t somebody trying to score political points. It’s trying to address what the person or company sees as a problem.

Why Can’t They Make New Heroes Instead, Jeez

The logic here is, “Why do they have to make Captain America black? They should make new heroes, instead, that are black.” I get the point — and at the core, the creation of new and diverse characters has value. But you also have to realize that new characters regardless of gender / sexual preference / skin color / nationality / etc. have a hard time reaching new readers right out of the gate. They run the risk of being marginalized heroes. One of the great things about taking iconic pre-existing characters and flipping them around is that it says, hey, these top-shelf characters aren’t just restricted to one segment of the population (i.e. the Straight White Dude contingent).

Also, this excuse runs the risk of sounding like, “Yeah, sure, you can have your super-ladies and whatever, just keep them over there. Go play in your own sandbox. This one is ours.”

No, What We Really Need Are More Diverse Creators

Can’t fault that argument. Entirely true. Thumbs-up. High-five. Put it to a vote — you got mine.

That being said: as a fellow creator, I can only do so much here. I can support and signal boost.

Further, this isn’t a one-or-the-other dichotomy.

But yes, you’re entirely correct: more diverse writers, directors, artists, even executives.

But These Characters Don’t Look Like Me

Nope, they don’t. And they may have experiences not indicative of yours. So what? What do you think everyone who isn’t like you has been experiencing all this time? That same feeling. And yet they still read Batman or watch the same television shows.

Confession time: I’m a jerky white dude. I’m clumsy in my assumptions and preconceived notions and — hey, I acknowledge my privilege. The privilege of privilege is being blinded by it and blind to it. You can walk around all day, whistling like a happy asshole, completely unaware of all the toxic douchebaggery splashing all around. We step on flowers we don’t even notice.

Sometimes, though, you have your eyes opened to it, and it’s a real holy-shit-we’re-in-some-kind-of-sexist-racist-Matrix moment. Rape culture doesn’t seem like a thing until someone starts pointing it out and then it’s a really awful Magic Eye painting, except instead of seeing a dolphin you’re seeing how we ask rape victims what they did to deserve getting raped. Once someone tells you, “That Terrible Thing is really an actual thing,” it’s ants, it’s dust, it’s fingerprints-on-glass. Didn’t notice it before, but now you realize it’s freaking everywhere.

And one of those “it’s freaking everywhere” moments is when you realize, oh, yeah, okay, our pop culture has been speaking very directly to heteronormative middle-class white-guy culture for a long time. Comics, television, novels, whatever. It’s time to share the storytelling. Time to pass the Talking Stick. Besides, maybe if we saw more diversity on the page, we might be willing to acknowledge the diversity outside our doors. I often say that the most valuable multitasking we can teach our kids and express in ourselves is to dual-wield Empathy and Logic, and if this helps in that, so be it. If this makes people more open? More aware? How is that possibly a bad thing?

You want to talk about Kindle Unlimited.

I know you do because folks have tweeted me, asking me about it.

I even got a couple e-mails. A whole couple. Almost a few.

(People, when will you learn I’m no expert on anything?)

First up, if you want to talk about it, I will point you to Mike Underwood’s post here. Also, this GigaOm article is worth the direction of your uncertain, questioning gaze. (If you don’t know the core gist of the Kindle Unlimited service, it’s this: unmoored from the Prime Kindle lending library is another service which you can pay $9.99 a month for in order to read a whole host — around 600,000 e-books — on your Kindle device or app. It consists mostly of Amazon Publisher books and KDP Select author-publisher books. You can do a free month trial right now.)

My thoughts — unfocused and rambly, because it is Friday and at this point I’m not even sure I’m sitting here typing on a keyboard and not nude in the woods somewhere banging on a yellow-jacket hive, hallucinating from anaphylaxis — are as follows:

a) Amazon is interesting because it is a big company and yet it moves like a spry, tiny company. Which is awesome and scary because when big companies move quickly, it is often tectonic.

b) I don’t know yet if this is tectonic. It is interesting to me as a reader and a little scary to me as a writer because all new things are scary to me as a writer because writers are ultimately flinchy since being whacked in the nose so many times with bad deals. I think if this becomes a truly dominant model, then it will be tectonic, shaking How Books Are Consumed and How Authors Are Paid to the molten, trembling core.

c) I think it’s a good price point.

d) I think there’s an argument to be made where this devalues books.

e) I think there’s an argument to be made that high e-book prices hurt authors more than low e-book prices, so, blah blah blah book value exposure something snore.

f) I think Spotify was bad for bands but this isn’t Spotify.

g) Most of the time, your money triggers based on people reading to a certain point in the book — 10% or so. If this becomes a dominant model, maybe easy to game? It’s like, someone reads as far into your book as they would the available free sample, that triggers payment. Which is nice. But potentially subject to some kind of abuse.

h) Contrary to the narrative about Amazon, this could be interpreted as them hoping to keep actual e-book prices high. If you look at the language that’s being reported (this bit found at Publishers Lunch) —

Filling in one of the unanswered questions for authors, Amazon Publishing authors will be compensated in a manner similar to that to for authors of publishers that agreed to participate. As Amazon Publishing executive Jeff Belle wrote to agents in an email, “every time a customer reads more than 10% of your author’s book through Kindle Unlimited (about the size of the current free samples available for Kindle books), your author will earn their full ebook royalty rate based on the average sale price of their book for the given month.”

— that suggests an incentive for keeping your e-book prices higher, not lower, particularly if Kindle Unlimited becomes truly popular, or even as noted, dominant. (I bolded the relevant bit suggesting this.) The higher the e-book price, the better that average becomes. It ostensibly even discourages sale prices. Prices too low, too often, and authors will be paid less.

i) You will find some of my books there, including Under the Empyrean Sky, Blightborn, and the short fiction set in the Heartland world, The Wind Has Teeth Tonight. You’ll also find Kick-Ass Writer there. (Full list here.) None of my self-published work is there, as this appears to be only open to those in KDP Select. KDP Select is the “I’m with Amazon exclusively” program, which I don’t dig because I do well selling my author-published work elsewhere.

j) No, I didn’t know about Kindle Unlimited before a couple days ago. I was not given a chance to opt-in or opt-out. This isn’t exactly abnormal for publishers, mind you. I do not believe KDP Select people received any warning, either — so, if they’re in, they’re in for at least 90 days or so, I believe. They can, I expect, opt out thereafter. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

k) That said, worth realizing that Amazon not giving authors any overt choice or head’s up suggests they’re more like regular old publishers than you might believe. Which isn’t good or bad — it’s just worth noting.

l) Ten bucks a month isn’t as good as I’d like, but one assumes (hopes?) that the roster will grow, and not shrink. Then again: could this be tied in at all to current publisher discussions? Did publishers know much about this? Some did, presumably.

m) But but but, it contains audio, which is big.

Overall: it’s interesting.

I am cautiously optimistic.

I like being read and I like being paid. I hope this does both.

I am, as always, wary of Amazon corralling all of the book world under one tent — e-books! Kindle! Goodreads! Audio books! Publishing companies! Print-on-Demand! And now, subscription services! — because monoculture makes my butthole clench.

Still — I’m trying the free month because free month.

Still: stay tuned, surely more to come, with further clarity.

Feel free to comment: what do you think about Kindle Unlimited?

Play nice in the comments. (None of that “Amazon Is EEEEEEVIL” rhetoric, please.)