Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2022-04-02 07:30 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2022-04-02 07:30 pm
Entry tags:
Concept: The Free Amazon Book Club
Not quite apropos of https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/post/five-swift-answers-to-the-problem-of-baby-eating-authors , but not not related either, just that I'd brought up the topic with norabombay before actually reading that post.
At some point in the Semi-Near Corporate Deathfuture, a group forms. Buy Nothing, but for ebook discussions. Their fodder: the free books one can find on Amazon.
At this point in time also, publishers have started trading their back catalogs a little more aggressively. There's a market in some of the long tail! Ebook conversion has become easier! But with the growing awareness of some of the offensive personal habits of certain authors and plots that would make the Pope faint, some of the backstock has become a liability. So you might as well bundle it up and sell it, cheap, to whichever publisher wants to distribute it.
Burn Books, in addition to their well-known raze-and-torch mil-SF, has been picking up some of the books that no-one else is willing to touch, for fins on the hunny. Canceled books are consistent with their brand, and variously popular with their internet-notorious commentariat. And it turns out that the long-tail sales off a few volumes of Slave Bear of Counter-Earth will pay for a respectable amount of lawyer time.
Of course, that leaves a lot of the other books in the pack as basically freebies. To drum up sales, some of the starting-point books in a series are listed for free.
Which is where the Free Amazon Book Club comes in.
And what book club is going to resist a book with their name literally on it?
Shenanigans, and possibly a fight with some Terrible People on the Internet, follow.
norabombay before actually reading that post. At some point in the Semi-Near Corporate Deathfuture, a group forms. Buy Nothing, but for ebook discussions. Their fodder: the free books one can find on Amazon.
At this point in time also, publishers have started trading their back catalogs a little more aggressively. There's a market in some of the long tail! Ebook conversion has become easier! But with the growing awareness of some of the offensive personal habits of certain authors and plots that would make the Pope faint, some of the backstock has become a liability. So you might as well bundle it up and sell it, cheap, to whichever publisher wants to distribute it.
Burn Books, in addition to their well-known raze-and-torch mil-SF, has been picking up some of the books that no-one else is willing to touch, for fins on the hunny. Canceled books are consistent with their brand, and variously popular with their internet-notorious commentariat. And it turns out that the long-tail sales off a few volumes of Slave Bear of Counter-Earth will pay for a respectable amount of lawyer time.
Of course, that leaves a lot of the other books in the pack as basically freebies. To drum up sales, some of the starting-point books in a series are listed for free.
Which is where the Free Amazon Book Club comes in.
And what book club is going to resist a book with their name literally on it?
Shenanigans, and possibly a fight with some Terrible People on the Internet, follow.
So many fights on so many internets
Weird things that are not quite weird enough to be true fetishes for enough people.
A surprising number of works in conversation with Richard Nixon and Watergate, where they stop the battle, and like discuss campaign finance reform
Re: So many fights on so many internets
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Characters you can play (an incomplete list):
- a marginalised self-pubber in the process of being cancelled due to political infighting, trying to explain to their less terminally online book-loving friends that this does NOT put them in the same category as Those People, and no, they can NOT just go move their stuff there instead
- an author who was trad published in the 80s by some publishing house that hung onto their rights way past when it should have been legally allowable, and the author didn't have the knowledge, funds, representation, or spoons to challenge them, and their book (and subsequent books, if any) didn't sell well enough for any other publisher to go to bat for them, and that same publisher, who before winding up published some very Problematic books indeed, sold their catalogue to Burn Books, and now this author's book is in print again... but like this.
- an internet citizen and blogger raised by 1970s-80s feminist SFF lesbians, trying to document the current and historical situation without anyone (family or fandom) making the connection between them and their mothers Karen n'ha Sandra and Sharon n'ha Susan (oath-mothers: MZB and Lisa Waters respectively.)
- a retired sex worker who did a lot of porn back in the day, trying to sue Burn Books' cover artist for unauthorised use of her likeness
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