I'm officially pissed off at the internet. If self-publishing ebooks was a person, I would punch them in the nose until it broke. You may be wondering, what brought on this outburst of violence? My answer: sitting on my ass for a month and a half while my ebook is a total failure. I hate people. I hate Amazon. I hate everything right now.
I present for you a paradox of stupidity and ridiculosity. A soul-shaking forehead-slapping kick in the cosmic testicles. How does ebook publishing work? You stick a book online and people pay you for it, then they read it and have a good time while you count you're net profit of thirty-five cents. Unfortunately, there is a key piece missing in this model. A little something that I learned today is called Social Proof. It's a concept from psychology, look it up on Wikipedia if you care. To summarize it, no one does anything unless they think other people are doing it. You may have noticed the conundrum. If this is an inflexible rule, how does anything get done in the first place?
What this means for book publishing is this, no one will look at your book if it doesn't have enough reviews. You can't even give it away without reviews. The reason why is that there is no Social Proof. None of the monkeys have seen their fellows eat the red berries, so they won't do it. It's ninety-nine fucking cents to check out a short novella that takes two to three hours to read. Then you turn around and tell the other monkeys about it. "Hey, look at me. I'm so cool, I just read this book and you should too. Is it good? That doesn't matter. What matters is that I'm doing it and you should too."
As a side note, my cd drive in my computer is acting up. Opening and closing on its own. Even though I could be writing today, I'm going to deal with this instead.
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