Sandy Nathan's YOUR SHELF LIFE

Those of you who’ve following my Plucky Grandmother series, here and here, will know that I’ve scheduled promotional days where two of my KIndle eBooks will be offered free. The promotion is this weekend, October 12, 13, & 14th.

Except that my book, The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy, was/is listed on Apple’s iBookstore. I didn’t know it until Amazon told me about it. If you’re in Amazon’s KDP program, which allows you to give away your Kindle eBooks, you can’t distribute anywhere else.

After a series of supremely unhelpful emails between Amazon and me, I assumed I lost the argument. Then I received the following email from Amazon.
The letter congratulates me on getting my eBook into the KDP Select program. But it’s been in the program since May or something. It’s already had one KDP Free Promotion. Is this Amazon’s way of saying, “We hear you, Sandy, here’s a few more days to get The Angel exclusive to Amazon.”

The only way I’ll know is to wait and see if The Angel is free tomorrow. What surprises on the morn!

Are you relating to this, indie authors and publishers? The total opacity of the system and the impossibility of getting a real person to help you. The sense of being lost in a hostile, incomprehensible world. It’s all true. We deal with this all the time, on EVERY friggin’ thing about getting our books in print and posted somewhere where at least our MOTHERS can read them. It’s a nightmare. This is what happened next:

Today, we examine the structure of the publishing industry, trying to figure out why you may feel so lousy pursuing a literary career. (Unless you’re one of the anointed few making mega-bucks with your scribblings. I doubt that feels lousy.)

We’re going to take three different points of view, which add up to very similar conclusions. My fellow authors, Ruth Harris & Anne R. Allen, wrote a great blog article about Writers’ Masochism. That refers to writers taking personal garbage and ill-treatment that no one in any other industry would.

Except maybe law, our second point of view on this issue. Here’s a link an article by Will Meyerhoff, an attorney and psychotherapist. If you read Mr. Meyerhoff’s article, I think you’ll agree that the legal profession and publishing industry have much in common.
Professionally, I was an economist, negotiation coach, businesswoman, and horse rancher before entering the writing field. I have a couple of Master’s degrees, including one in counseling. I took my counseling degree in a program stressing family structure and systems––how the family’s unspoken rules work to keep some family members powerless and unhappy and allow others to be fat cats, throwing their weight around. This background served me well when I started writing seriously.

I entered the world of writing after an explosive personal experience back in 1995. I jumped into writing groups and editors and writing full time. Once I had written work and needed a publisher, I became acutely aware of of the structure of the literary/publication world. At the bottom of the triangle were hordes of wannabe authors––and they had to be published and traditionally, only. That’s all that mattered.