New woes caused by Amazon…
The evil Bezos’s bots have struck again! Because my older books are “evergreen,” meaning that they’re as current, relevant, and hopefully entertaining as the day I wrote them, I decided recently to check to see if there were any new reviews written by recent readers. (I now only read and use reviews to extract material for marketing purposes, but readers should keep writing them to help other readers.) Not only were there no new reviews, but the bots had removed the old ones!
If you peruse the reviews on my “Books & Short Stories” web page or in the “My Reviews” archive of this blog, almost of those have been removed on Amazon…and for no reason! Or maybe the evil Bezos and his minions, those evil bots, think I’ve died? Or did these satanic creatures decide that any review written before some date should be discarded (reviews can and should be evergreen too!)? I should check that latter theory—I wouldn’t put it past Amazon—but I won’t waste anymore of my time worrying about that sham of an online bookstore. I’ll just up my boycott of them. And please help me with that. B&N is a far better online bookstore for all my books, and you can find all my novels there!
Some Prime readers can read books for free or “borrow” them to see if they want to read them (I guess the “peek inside,” which is enough for me, isn’t enough for them). That’s another way Amazon shafts authors. Sure, authors get 70% royalties for ebooks priced above $2.99, but most small presses provide a lot more TLC for the 15% they take than Amazon has ever done for that 30%, which is zilch!
I’ll also boycott any marketing person who dares to tell me Amazon offers the best way to become a successful, bestselling author. (That includes Penny Sansevieri and her AME minions, Laurence O’Bryan and BooksGoSocial, and many others.) That’s a load of BS! Amazon does nothing for writers except scam them! They can’t even display books properly, so they fail at something that any local bookstore can do much better with their eyes closed! (See that same web page for an explanation of what they egregiously did to me with “The Last Humans” series—it’s all in red type! I checked that too. No change!)
And an author has no recourse. You can never talk to a real person at Amazon. Customer service is also handled by bots and doesn’t even begin to deserve that name.
If I ever publish more fiction (I’ve been giving it away recently), you can be sure it won’t appear on Amazon! (#4 and #5 of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series began that boycott after the fiasco with “The Last Humans” series.) I’ve wasted too much of my writing life attempting to work with Amazon!
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Rogue Planet. On a faraway planet, a kingdom is overthrown and a young prince fights back against the usurpers who establish an evil theocracy. Although this gives this novel a Star Wars or Game of Thrones flavor, it’s not fantasy—it’s hard sci-fi. Set in the same sci-fi universe as the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” the action and suspense goes far beyond any space opera. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold, and it has a print version as well—ask for it at your local bookstore or order it from B&N.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
