Eight episodes and done.

Which, by the way, is a great way to do a TV show. The story was told. The story is finished.

We are getting a True Detective, Season 2, though one supposes it’ll be more like American Horror Story — different cast, different narrative, maybe some shared territory. Or, given the events in season one, maybe we’ll see some aspects of the case continue somewhere else?

Anyway. Gonna talk a bit about the show here. And the finale.

Which means: spoilers are incoming.

I’m gonna put some spoiler space here

SPOILERTOWN, POPULATION YOU

SPOILERS LA LA LA

YOU ABOUT TO BE SPOILED

TURN AWAY

BRIDGE OUT

SPOILERS AHEAD

AWOOGA AWOOGA

AAAAAAAAH SPOILERS

CAUTION CUIDADO VERBOTEN

SUH POY LURS

Ahem.

I think that’s good enough.

All along, folks were looking, I think, for a twist — a whodunit-style pivot where we find out Marty is the King in Yellow or Carcosa is really a strip club in Des Moines or all of this has been inside Rustin Cohle’s nihilistic little snowglobe all along. And we did indeed get a twist — but I suspect it wasn’t the twist folks were imagining.

We got a happy ending.

All signs pointed to a Se7en-style conclusion: men driven mad by their exposure to the horror of the world, a Lovecraftian sanity-loss as they pick apart the rotten layers of mankind’s ugly soul until they stare into the unblinking void-eye at the center. And certainly it looked like it was moving that way. Wandering the labyrinth. Into the pit. To the throne of the Yellow King. Through a world far more Texas Chainsaw Massacre than we perhaps figured on. And then both men locked in battle with a monster, attacked and victorious but seemingly left to die in a charnel house pit. Grim, grisly stuff. And we were all but assured one of those men was dead, if not both.

And yet —

We got a happy ending.

We got a happy ending.

Not like — ha ha, shiny happy, ponies raining from the sky, but both men passed through that unblinking void-eye and emerged with souls somehow not rent to ribbons. In fact, these two patchwork men — in what is the most cantankerous, nihilistic bromance perhaps ever conceived, a friendship truly earned — have come out possessing something resembling enlightenment.

(I won’t spoil the end conversation between these two men, but even if you never watch the show, it’s probably worth digging that up and watching it. Writing and acting in a one-two-punch.)

I think what’s most fascinating to me about the whole show — aside from it being an intense character study more than it is a detective story — is how the story-world is supernatural-adjacent. By which I mean, the supernatural would not seem to exist (we have no direct evidence), but it has left its mark just the same. This is a world where metaphysics matter, where the cuckoopants geometry of the cosmos has injured men’s souls. We are given no evidence that the bird’s nests and antler skulls and ritual markings have any physical effect on the world around these characters, but the point, perhaps, is that they don’t need to. These rituals have spiritual implications. They have power over these people emotionally, intellectually. The supernatural here is natural. Unreal. Impossible and unseen, yet evident just the same. The killer is like a minotaur at the center of a maze — human, but monstrous. Cohle is truly affected by realms beyond, even though we can’t see them or touch them. The Bayou is still married to old magic, and though the magic doesn’t seem to work in the classic sense, it still twists the family trees.

And of course, the conspiracy of the Carcosa cult is still out there. We know they found their killer, but we also know that he’s just one notable branch of this rotten tree. (Again, I wonder if a follow-up season will continue to pursue this storyline, just with new characters and a new timeline.)

Fascinating stuff that culminated in a potent, if too easy, finale. (I say too easy because some of the logical leaps are a bit strained. The “green ears” — which could’ve and should’ve perhaps been a reference to the ear-muffs worn by a dude mowing the lawn — felt like a hasty conclusion that frankly didn’t rely on much of anything from the rest of the investigation. It seemed random and convenient and for me is perhaps one of the only real mis-steps the series has taken. A mis-step that is pretty forgivable given the strength of the writing and the acting.)

Great show.

Looking forward to season two, whatever it may be.

Author Jamie Wyman — @BeeGirlBlue on the Twitters — wanted to talk a little bit about her first year in as a professional author, and I thought that’d make for an interesting post. But I also add some of my thoughts throughout, if you care to hear ’em. Here’s Jamie!

*she breaks through your door with an ax* 

* * *

So, as of 30 January, 2014, I have been a professional author for one year. That is the day I signed my first contract of sale to Entangled Publishing for my debut novel WILD CARD (nee “Technical Difficulties.”) At the time, I knew this wasn’t some golden ticket leading me into a chocolate factory of dreams. I didn’t expect editorial oompa-loompas to whisk me off for pedicures and bon bons or anything. However, with a year gone, I see that there were things I didn’t know about being a professional writer.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned that I wish someone had told me a year ago.

1. It doesn’t get better.

This can be taken two ways: It gets worse, or it stays the same. I’m going to err on the side of optimism here and say it stays the same. Basically, you’ve just arrived from the land of querying obscurity that comes with submission. You’ve been popping antacids and checking your email 30 times a day and your house reeks of unwashed clothes and peanut butter. Your hair…? Well, we won’t discuss that. Everything in your life has been on hold while you’re waiting to hear, waiting to know!

Now that you’re a published author, though, you’ve traded one set of anxieties for another. Now you have editorial deadlines and market expectations and publicity and readers and Goodreads and social media. You have reviews to say you’ll ignore but read anyway (at least at first). And you probably have some day-slave grind you use to farm cash and pay the bills. You might have kids, too. That’s an added bonus, right there. Point is this: all you wanted to do was write, right? You can’t do that. You’ve got this other stuff to add to your life. Writing, no matter how much you love it or treated it as a job before, has now become a profession and needs to be treated as such. There are a lot of little things that will try to mire down production. Keep your head down.

But not all the time…

Chuck’s Thoughts: “I’d say it falls under a third axis — ‘it gets different.’ I do still smell of peanut butter because that’s how I exfoliate, but I will say that becoming a professional author is a little like leveling up in a video game, or like watching your child grow up a bit. You master older, smaller challenges but and you think, ‘Oh ho ho, now I’ve got the Sword of Editorial Dominance, the Save Against Query spell, and armor made from all the rejections.’ But of course what you’re going to face are new challenges. New deals, new contracts, book marketing, fans who form cults around your work and kill in your name. THE USUAL.”

2. Have a hobby.

You need something that isn’t writing, or work, or family to refresh you. As much as you love your art, you need something else because there are days where writing will be work. It will be aggravating and you’ll be ready to throw your computer into the blazing heart of Mt. Doom. On those days you need something else. Something to calm the mind. Yoga, painting, meditation, cooking…these things work for some people. Me? I play with fire and other circus tricks. I also game with friends. Which leads me to the next one…

Chuck’s Thoughts: “For me, writing is always work. But not ‘work’ in the dirty four-letter-word way — ‘work’ doesn’t have to be a bad word. It can be clarifying. You can love what you do for work. I mean, writing as work? It’s a lot better than filling potholes or hiding bodies. Or filling potholes with bodies. Either way, she’s right that mitigating this has real value. Through hobbies and through #4, below.”

3.  Make friends in the business.

We talk all the time about how writing is lonely. Fuck that. Make friends. You need comrades, partners in crime. You need other published authors in your corner, people you can vent to who understand. People off of whom you can bounce ideas or concerns. People you can drink with at conventions. Don’t try to be some crazy hermit…it doesn’t build character or make you enigmatic. It makes you lonely, insane and unprepared. A lot of stuff is going to happen–mostly little things, really, but some big things–that you just can’t talk about publicly. When I’ve tried talking to friends who have no clue about publishing, they stare at me like I’m a hagfish with rubber ballgags for eyes. Or, if you’re venting steam, you get the, “why are you complaining? this is what you wanted.” You can try vaguebooking, but it only scratches the itch to rant so much. Enter your writer friends. Peers. A friends list: build one.

Chuck’s Thoughts: “Yep. We like to think that we can go all Ronin-Writer-Without-Clan, but that’s tough. You write your book in relative isolation but then that book goes out into the world. And you go with it. And it needs friends and cohorts the whole way. Further, it’s nice to have folks in the business off whom you can bounce questions and concerns.”

4. Don’t forget to have fun.

At some point you will find yourself finished with edits and wondering what to write next. For the past weeks you’ve been immersing yourself in making something fit to sell. Take time to say fuck that shit and write what gets you off. Don’t write for a market or worry about if/where it will sell. Just write the story for the hell out of it. It’s like swimming in a pool of Jelll-O for your muse. You don’t do it for any reason other than to do it and have fun.

Chuck’s Thoughts: “I’ve long said that the important territory for a writer is the intellectual space in the Venn Diagram of WHAT I WANT TO WRITE and WHAT READERS WANT TO READ. The better you thread this needle, the happier you’ll be, and the better your book may do. Or so I suspect. Oh, and I don’t do anything for my Muse. That jerk works for me.”

5. Shit happens.

At some point someone will rain on your parade. Sales will be lower than you want, you’ll get a shit review, you’ll get a rejection…something will happen that will take you right back to those horrible insecurities you experienced when agonizing over querying agents. It will happen. When it does…don’t stop. Don’t give up. Write more. As Chuck would say, “Art harder, motherfucker.” You don’t just get back on the horse, you brand that bitch with your mark and ride it over a tank full of ravenous great whites.

And when the inevitable shit doth happen, there’s something else you need to do: remember. Remember that you worked your ass off to get here. You have created a world (or worlds!) inhabited by people who breathe and eat and weep and need. You’ve made strangers give a damn about fictional characters. YOU, my friend, have done the impossible and are made mighty thereby. Do not forget that when you are knocked down and start with all the author existential questions. Shut up. You do belong here. No one is going to take away your Author Card and kick you out of the clubhouse. (Well, unless you’re a douche.  Don’t be that guy, k?)

So do what you do.  Take a day to drive fast with the top down or hail to the beauty of the lotus or spew flames out of your face. Whatever rocks your boat. Then pucker up, buttercup, and kiss the words. You’re a professional now.

Chuck’s Thoughts: “They kicked me out of the clubhouse because someone, I won’t name who, but someone who looks like me, ate all the food and drank all the liquor and threw up in the fishtank. But that’s neither here nor there. Point is, Jamie’s only in the first year, here — I’ve been at it a bit longer than that, and I’ll confirm already that This Thing We Do has peaks and valleys and you gotta enjoy the heights but always find a way to climb out of low places or you’ll never make it. My best advice to writers is to cultivate calluses. Keep your expectations in check. Have a thick skin — don’t just be a raw nerve squirming out there, or every hit is going to feel like the apocalypse. Thanks, Jamie, for coming by.”

Last week’s challenge: Describing one thing ten ways.

This week’s pretty straight forward.

I’ve got two lists at the bottom. Pick (or randomly choose with dice or a random number generator) one from each list, then make sure your flash fiction contains each of those things.

That’s it. Easy-peasy, Ramona-and-Beezy.

You’ve got an upgraded 1500 words. Due in one week (March 14th). Post it at your online space of choice. Drop a link to your completed story in the comments below. Any genre.

Now, the lists…

Must Contain #1

1. A lover’s betrayal.
2. A dead body without a face.
3. A mysterious — perhaps even magical — photograph.
4. An antique gun.
5. A terminal illness.
6. An ancient tree.
7. A time machine.
8. A monster.
9. A faithful hound.
10. A talking cat.

Must Contain #2

1. A distant outpost.
2. An infernal bargain.
3. A pair of detectives.
4. A stolen treasure.
5. A forgotten manuscript.
6. An escaped prisoner.
7. A hard drive filled with secrets.
8. A plane or train ride.
9. A piece of lost technology.
10. A comatose patient.

The Internet can sometimes be a kooky place.

Let’s go over a few ground rules on how best to address one another. These are things I know I most certainly need to work on. And I know these are themselves complicated ideas that may not always seem to agree with one another. This list is neither absolute nor exhaustive. It is meant to be a thinking point. A starting place for renewed conversation.

Here goes.

1) Honesty and empathy go well together. You can be honest and forthright as long as you attempt to try to understand the point-of-view of other people.

2) Anger and outrage are not without value, but understand that anger comported without focus and with only rage is not as useful as you’d think. Anger and outrage are good when they’re trying to accomplish a goal, but not so good when it’s just anger for the sake of anger. Piss and vinegar splashed in someone’s eyes won’t get much done. Cold and calculated response is far better than a lava gusher of grr-arrgh-gnashy-teethy. Snark and insult only reduce the effectiveness.

3) When you are met with anger and outrage, do not meet it with anger and outrage in return. Assume that the angry person is angry for a reason. Try to understand it. Approach it with, again, honesty and empathy. Someone saying to you: I’M ANGRY is not going to get less angry when you say GO FUCK YOURSELF. Either attempt to understand their concerns, or just cut bait and run. Do not pour whisk(e)y on the campfire in part because you’re wasting precious whisk(e)y.

4) Think before you tweet. Or post to Facebook. Or post a blog. Ask yourself: “Is this demonstrating the best version of myself? Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

5) Consider sitting on your anger for an hour. Or, as Teresa Frohock suggests, 24 hours.

6) Do not silence, diminish, or dismiss another person.

7) Don’t shut down the conversation. Have the conversation.

8) Have a discussion, not an argument. If you must argue, don’t let it become a fight.

9) Insults and accusations are ugly business. Accusations in particular carry scary weight. Far better to attack ideas than to turn around and attack the people you think represent those ideas.

10) People are shitty on the Internet, sometimes. Do not engage. Or, if you must: kill them with kindness. I like to tune out poisonous voices. I will use the ‘block’ button when necessary.

11) Online lynch mobs are a real thing. But be careful not to assume that “lynch mob” is synonymous with “people who disagree with me.” It is also not synonymous with “people airing concerns.” There’s no metric for when something is a real lynch mob and when it isn’t, but understand that labeling it as such has the potential to diminish and dismiss people’s concerns. (One supposes that a good way to identify a lynch mob is when it’s full of actual vitriol and insult rather than full of people being honest about their anger and their worry.)

12) Just because you don’t agree with someone’s concerns doesn’t invalidate them.

13) Nobody likes being told, “you’re wrong.” Even if you think they are.

14) You can always walk away from a conversation. Politely disengage.

15) Respect people’s right to disengage.

16) Understand that things you say may be taken out of context or read differently than you intended. This may be the fault of the reader. This may be your fault. This may be due to some cultural divide of which you are unaware. Research. Investigate.

17) Having big, large, complicated discussions on social media is not impossible, but it’s hard (particularly on Twitter, where the 140-character limit is excellent for brevity but less awesome in terms of conveying tone, nuance, complication).

18) Try to spend time sharing happy things. Pictures of very small ponies, for instance. Or dogs driving cars. Or babies dressed up like superheroes. Spend some time engaging positively. Be a fountain, not a drain.

19) People are allowed to like things you don’t. And people are allowed to dislike things you love. Respect the subjectivity of preference and opinion. The other day I was drinking beer and B-Dub, the Toddler Inquisitor of the house, asked what I was drinking and I told him. He said, “Yuck,” because he thinks beer is gross. (Er, not that we let him drink beer — but I do let him smell it and he found it ugh-worthy.) His response, and this is a response nearly all of the Internet should learn, was: “I don’t like yuck. But you like yuck, Daddy — that’s okay!”

20) Sometimes, interacting on the Internet can cause a kind of “Social PTSD.” Things feel faster, and negative stuff hits quicker and in greater number. This can be an anxious place. the Internet can be a watercooler for fun chatter, but it can also be a watercooler filled with urine surrounded by bitey goblins. Understand this both in terms of how it might affect you and how it might already be affecting other people. “Outrage fatigue” is also a real thing, which can mean being tired of all the outrage going on, or mean being tired of feeling angry all the time. Again: respect someone’s right not to join in your outrage even if you think they are or should be an ally. Sometimes we just have to tweet animated GIFs at each other to feel normal for a while.

21) Social media can sometimes feel like various wars going on across multiple fronts. Again: empathy is necessary to try to understand the other “side” — the truth (“truth?”) of things is usually somewhere in the middle, in a place of compromise where even if people don’t agree, they at least attempt to understand one another. This can make it feel less like a war and more like a meeting. And while I am not fond of meetings, it’s a whole lot better to have one of those then a shooting match from within our muddy trenches.

22) Realize that some people are used to being dismissed and diminished. This is, in part, that PTSD I’m talking about. Again, empathy has value in trying to understand the source. Is there a legitimate concern? What else is going on? Open the door instead of building a wall. Seek truth and wisdom and find compassion — compassion is perhaps most important when it is hardest to find.

23) Those who live in hair houses should not fling lit matches.

24) To quote Kameron Hurley:

KameronHurley Words matter. And it sucks to make words on the internet that can be misinterpreted, but we’re responsible for them, for better or worse. 3/5/14, 10:53 AM

25) In the gospel of Pope Wheaton,above all else cleave to the precept: “Don’t be a dick.” Or, if you’d prefer to sing from the hymnal of Hierophant Vonnegut: ”

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies: ‘Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.'”

Amen.

Oh. Oh thank god. He finally screwed up.

Right, sorry. You don’t know what’s going on. My name is Brian White. I’ve been locked in Chuck’s cellar for the past two years. Usually he only lets me use an old eMachines laptop, but he broke it over Stephen Blackmoore’s head in an author cage match last night. And now Chuck wants his collection of “artsy” nude selfies organized so he chained me up in front of his iMac and then went out to buy more coffee for me to grind.

(What? Did you think he actually spends all that time making coffee with his Chemex? No. That’s all me. The only thing Chuck pours is a torrent of abuse, kicks, and leftover hobo parts down the cellar stairs.)

But I don’t have time to waste on my litany of pain. Chuck didn’t log out of Terribleminds before he left. This is my only chance. I need your help.

Not escaping. I have given up hope of that. But my one bright spot, the thing that keeps me going when Chuck makes me dance for the amusement of the secret cabal of Amazon executives, is my magazine, Fireside.

We’ve been cranking Fireside out for two years now. We’re a fiction magazine, and we have two goals: publishing great storytelling regardless of genre, and fair pay for writers. We became a monthly subscription magazine in our second year, and now we are trying to get Year 3 of Fireside funded on Kickstarter.

Year 2 has been great. We’ve been running a serial that Chuck, uh … “suggested” I publish. We’ve had tons of wonderful flash fiction and short stories. And amazing art by Hugo-winner Galen Dara. And we want to keep it going.

If we fund Year 3, we’re going to try out making the website free. We’re going to do more short stories and flash fiction, and we’ll have a serial by Lilith Saintcrow. I’ve gotten my hands on a Miriam Black short story that Chuck left on his desktop that we’ll publish, along with stories by Blackmoore, Kima Jones, Daniel Jose Older, Andrea Phillips, and Sofia Samatar. And we’ll also be accepting submissions of both short stories and flash ficition, on a quarterly basis starting in June.

We’re making the website free, but as I said, we pay our writers fairly (12.5 cents a word), so we need your help. Please check out the Kickstarter. (Linky linky.) You’ll be making a lot of writers happy, and you’ll be helping me survive the next time Chuck gets out the wiffle ball bat.

Oh god. I have to go. B-dub’s toy cocktail shaker is glowing blue. Chuck is almost back.

Thank you.

EDIT:

Chuck here.

You can all relax — Brian’s in the cellar and I’ve turned off all Internet access for the time being. I’ve switched out his “in-bucket” and his “out-bucket” as punishment.

I’ve been keeping him in the cellar for the three years that Fireside has been running, actually. It’s not a sex thing, really — mostly he got accidentally locked down there when I asked him to head downstairs and get some beer from the cellar fridge, but then he tripped and knocked himself out and was threatening, “Oh, I’m going to sue you for leaving that dead hobo down here for me to trip over,” and I was like, “Oh, no you’re not,” and then I chained him to the water heater and made him listen to old Ace of Base albums — which is a very good album, I’ll have you know. But then it got kind of boring, so I was like, “Why don’t you start a magazine where you pay the authors well above the standard professional rate and also, why doesn’t each iteration of the magazine feature me in some very important way,” and then I hit him a bunch with the bat and then had him dust-wrestle the UPS guy I had down there at the time (don’t worry, that guy’s been in Bri-Bri’s food bucket for a good while now). Brian agreed to start Fireside.

And here we are, Year Three.

Each time it’s been successful on Kickstarter, but always at the last minute — and this year, I’d love to see it go a little further, a little faster. Just so we can give Brian something nice.

Anyway. Go. Check it out. I will be writing a new Miriam Black short story for it, so, there’s that. (And Fireside Year Two has me writing a serialized sci-fi story about a box that takes you ten minutes back in time — “The Forever Endeavor.” Get it? Get it, huh? No?)

So, check out the Kickstarter.

Unless you’d like to join Brian in the cellar?

I know, I said I wouldn’t talk publishing. BUT IT’S MY BLOG AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT HA HA HA HA *noisily eats a Hot Pocket, turns the TV on real loud, opens the chimpazee cage, hands the chimpanzee a beer and a power drill*

Ahem.

Let’s see, here.

Amazon has reduced the royalty rate on ACX audio for self-published authors.

So, let’s just clear this up:

Amazon is not your friend, author person.

Amazon is a giant corporation. It serves itself. You might think, It serves its customers, which is only true in that to serve itself it generally has to serve its customers. And this is entirely fine and normal. To reiterate: Amazon is not your friend. Its job is not to be your friend. Amazon is a great disruptor. Amazon is a powerful business. Amazon has done wonderful things for the World Of Books. Hell, I love Amazon Prime. I love that I can order chimpanzee chow, 9mm ammo, and drill bits at 3AM in the morning and have them in two days (though, hey, Amazon — your Prime shipping times are slipping, just between you and me). Amazon is also the publisher of some of my young adult books through its imprint, Skyscape. My experience there has been wonderful. Great editors, great attention, strong promotion, and they give me input and allow me to have control over the work and input over things like the cover. Amazon does a lot of cool things.

Amazon is still not my friend. Nor is it yours.

Amazon is actually a many-headed creature. Some of those heads do awesome things. Some of those heads might run Draconian warehouses that feel a little like working in the belly of some kind of giant-sized prison robot.

None of these Amazon heads are your friends.

The attachment the self-publishing community has long held to Amazon is understandable — Amazon somewhat single-handedly delivered value and opportunity to that community. That community bought all the way in, and one could argue that the robust creative and intellectual investment has created a kind of momentum that has led to more self-publishers finding that space and joining it (sometimes exclusively) and has led to more people buying Kindles.

But for a while now, some folks (including myself) have been saying all along, “Amazon might change your royalties” (which are of course not really royalties at all, but that’s a semantic issue). And those warnings were often thought of as doomsaying. When I caution, “don’t put your eggs in one basket,” you might reasonably respond with, “Hey, if Amazon starts acting up and casting shenanigans about like an alcoholic chimpanzee with power-tools, I can just go somewhere else.”

And that’s true. Totally true.

But here’s the problem. Amazon isn’t the chimpanzee. It’s the 8-million-pound gorilla. And it didn’t get that big on its own. It got that way by people investing so completely in that ecosystem.

That’s true for folks who do all their shopping there.

It’s true for folks who buy all their e-books there.

It’s true for folks who publish all their e-books there.

So. Let’s say Amazon decides to limit advantages to self-publishers.

Sure, you can jump to B&N or Kobo or iBooks.

But we all know that Nook is shitting the bed. For now, at least.

And getting on iBooks is a lot harder than getting on Amazon.

I have heard of late a lot of people finding success at Kobo, which is nice.

But anybody who has a Kindle cannot use those platforms. And a whole lotta people have Kindles.

And we helped make that happen.

It is often the mode to chastise what The Big Five Publishers do, and understandably — they are sometimes very good for authors and sometimes not so good for authors. And the reason they can be sometimes not so good for authors is because they do not have a great deal of competition.

That should sound familiar.

Because that’s Amazon.

Amazon has very little competition in the e-reader space.

And what competition it has is dwindling.

We’ve said: “Big publishers are bad because they do not care about their authors but Amazon is good because it does. And so here, Amazon will surely handle all our eggs much better than those naughty publishers — with great love and care. So we should give all of our eggs to them.” And then we gave our eggs to them and watched as other egg-carriers started to wander around, confused, starving where they were standing (because remember, they have no eggs) and then now Amazon’s starting to teeter and totter and drop some of our goddamn eggs. And we’re like, “Yo, that’s not cool,” and Amazon’s like, shrug, “Whatevs, take your eggs elsewhere, it’s no skin of my GNASHING ROBOT GORILLA TEETH,” and then you realize — uh-oh. Nobody else is really around to carry those eggs anymore. Our eggs don’t go anywhere else.

See, when you concentrate a great deal of power in the hands of a single company, that company will maximize its profits and start taking more of its share.

It does this because, say it with me:

Amazon is not your friend.

Think about how you seduce readers with a lower price point.

Then, when they’re invested: you increase the price on that book or its sequels.

Smart business. The “drug dealer” trick — first taste is cheap or free.

And that’s what Amazon is doing here.

A good deal now. You get invested. Then a not-as-good deal later.

Maybe not a terrible deal. Maybe still better than what you’d get elsewhere.

But maybe not.

You don’t know because:

*screams it from the rooftops*

Amazon is not your friend.

The things you think Big Publishing does to hurt authors? Amazon will do it, too, soon as it can.

Because that tends to be how big businesses work.

Small businesses? Not so much. Because it’s harder to be a dick when you’re four guys in a room. It’s a lot easier when you’re a faceless Borg Cube with thousands of employees.

The bigger you are, the less human you become.

The takeaway?

Amazon has not yet decreased your take from self-published works.

They have done some things that suggest they might, however. Decreasing ACX payments, for one. Increasing Prime, for two (and increasing the threshhold for free shipping). Talking very publicly about increasing their profit margins, for three. (It’s important to note here that Amazon, despite being big as it is, has not been making much actual profit over the years, which is a trend that ostensibly will need to change.) Given that there may be a backlash against the Prime increase, Amazon may look to find other ways to secure greater profits. I assure you, they’d be more comfortable dinging self-publishers than the entirety of the Prime subscription base.

Further, indicators exist outside the purely economic. We can all pretend that Amazon isn’t a gatekeeper, but like I said before, Amazon doesn’t want to be eBay. They want to be Netflix, not YouTube. It lets most folks through the gate, but when it feels the need, it’ll remove Monster Erotica or Baboon Fart Story from its ranks without the courtesy of a complimentary reach-around. That fist may tighten. Either in terms of restricting content or gouging author-publishers (through royalty reduction, most likely, though possibly also through increased fees).

They’ll do this because:

Amazon no es tu amigo.

So. What do you do?

You diversify.

Spread those eggs around, man. Give some to B&N. To Kobo. To iBooks. Sell your works directly! (If you’re so keen to remove all barriers between you and a reader, there’s your way forward, by the way.) But it’s also worth considering publishing your work with a publisher, too — big, small, medium-sized, short story, novella, whatever. Point being, to protect your career, cleave toward a diversification of efforts. You have many eggs — so find for them many baskets. That way, to play out this metaphor to its ludicrous (and not to mention obvious) conclusion: if one basket falls on the sidewalk and breaks, you still have other, unbroken eggs.

Amazon isn’t your friend. It also isn’t your enemy. Big publishers aren’t, either. I love Amazon for what it’s done for books. I love big publishers for what they’ve done, too. But remember: these are companies. Corporations. Business entities. They’re like bacteria, or rabbits, or grass — they’ll grow wherever they can and if they suffer no competition they’ll invade and take over an area. And then it gets a lot, lot, lot harder to dig out an entrenched species. If you’re really an independent author — then be truly independent. Don’t be dependent on a single company for your livelihood. Just as an ecosystem thrives on diversity, so should you, as an author and a publisher.