With the whole ecosystem stacked against new and indie authors, and AI getting so good I can see why some people could easily fall for this. I made the tough decision at the start of my Sci-Fi novel writing career to work 100% on the book and 0% on the marketing. It meant I got zero traction and attention in the market (except by word of mouth), and I had to keep my day job, but totally took away all the stress and anxiety.
When I retired last year I took the next logical step and now I give my eBooks away for free, being content with the fact I've achieved something good and I'm giving back to the community.
Even before retiring I have been more or less giving things away for free or at a loss even (especially when you consider my time). Software, hardware…
Another commenter calls it altruism, I just call it my hobby. (No one expects to get their material bike investment back when they take up mountain biking, right?)
So perhaps 800 hours or so to write a game which nets me about $500 on Steam. You can do the math to figure out my wages on that one—but I was able at least to justify picking up a Steam Deck from the proceeds (which I likely would not have done out of pocket).
More recently: perhaps about $4K and another 800 to 1000 hours invested in an analog computer kit and I'll be lucky to ask for $20 profit and will be surprised if I sell 25 of them.
It's okay though. I know already going into it that 1) it is niche and 2) that, as I said, it's a hobby.
(And when I use AI or clipart for the artwork in the project it's because I'm not likely to find an artist willing to partner with me and lose money on the whole venture, ha ha.)
Oh, excellent! I thought I was the only author (idiotic enough) to give away my books for free. I choose to call it altruism, but the truth is that I got sick of the whole marketing-and-promotion meat grinder a long while back and decided I wanted to write books I wanted to read, rather than writing what someone else thought they could sell. I am now proud to call myself a Hobbyist Indie Author. Perhaps we could start an insurgency together?
The need to defend against scams and abuse is a cost distributed across all of society - it’d be amazing if there were a way for all to share the costs without creating a giant firewall to wall off the bad countries.
How does one take the good and reject the bad? Even our immune systems still get beaten by cancers.
That's life I'm afraid - no system that rewards participation can be entirely free of people taking advantage of it somehow. It's an unavoidable cost that we pay to get the benefits. The best we can usually do is to incentivize good behaviour sufficiently that the percentage of bad actors is very low, using rewards and/or punishments as appropriate.
Let's start with actually punishing a scammer, ANY SCAMMER with the same gusto as the jackboot of copyright enforcement hits anyone in the world for daring to look an MCU movie the wrong way.
Late-stage capitalism wants sleazy intermediation and get-rich-quick scams. Talk about "honest hard work" is just a tool, for keeping the serfs where they belong.
> The catch, as you’ll doubtless have guessed, is that the author has to pay a fee for their appearance, variously described as a “spot fee” or a “spotlight fee” or a “spot-securing fee” or a “participation fee”.
Am I being too naive to assume that legitimate book clubs shouldn't be doing this anyway - or is all online activity just a way of generating income now?
Thanks for sharing this. New authors have enough challenges without getting scammed. I've written a (free) guide for the writing process here: https://frequal.com/forwriters/
The writing is just the first step, however. Promotion is a whole another set of hurdles. I can easilybsee an eager or despondent author falling victim to a promotion scam.
When I retired last year I took the next logical step and now I give my eBooks away for free, being content with the fact I've achieved something good and I'm giving back to the community.
Even before retiring I have been more or less giving things away for free or at a loss even (especially when you consider my time). Software, hardware…
Another commenter calls it altruism, I just call it my hobby. (No one expects to get their material bike investment back when they take up mountain biking, right?)
So perhaps 800 hours or so to write a game which nets me about $500 on Steam. You can do the math to figure out my wages on that one—but I was able at least to justify picking up a Steam Deck from the proceeds (which I likely would not have done out of pocket).
More recently: perhaps about $4K and another 800 to 1000 hours invested in an analog computer kit and I'll be lucky to ask for $20 profit and will be surprised if I sell 25 of them.
It's okay though. I know already going into it that 1) it is niche and 2) that, as I said, it's a hobby.
(And when I use AI or clipart for the artwork in the project it's because I'm not likely to find an artist willing to partner with me and lose money on the whole venture, ha ha.)
How does one take the good and reject the bad? Even our immune systems still get beaten by cancers.
Don't hold your breath.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Macdonald
Am I being too naive to assume that legitimate book clubs shouldn't be doing this anyway - or is all online activity just a way of generating income now?
The writing is just the first step, however. Promotion is a whole another set of hurdles. I can easilybsee an eager or despondent author falling victim to a promotion scam.
The grammatical usage and structures are a huge tell. Perfect and soulless.
It's something telling about the internet when spam transitioned from Viagra to cloud computing 8-/