Small Experiments, Widening Up

It's been ninety days since I first put TheRealJoyG up on Amazon as an eBook, a return to self-publishing after more than a decade away. Reading books might be passé and AI might be making us dumber, but I'm choosing to ignore the gloom and keep publishing. So three months ago I clicked the buttons and turned it loose on the world as much as an act of defiance against tech-driven dumbing-down as my own social experiment. Is anyone actually reading?

For all of Amazon's might and muscle, the life of a creator still demands a huge amount of hustle. My experiment from last October was: given no real marketing at all, would I even be a blip? Well... yes and no. The yes half of the equation is, I've sold a couple copies, enough to warrant an actual payment back from Bezos & Co. in another ninety days. I'm officially calling myself "not non-selling" as a result. And historically, I did sell a handful of copies of my first experiment in a published novel, too. Two-time not a non-selling author!

The no half is a bit more brutal. In the decade since, "reporting and metrics" are very much the focus of the platforms. Amazon and others will tell you (for free) just exactly how many markets you're reaching, the per-nation breakdown of pages and royalties and other minutiae, adjusted in realtime to reflect exchange rates. No adjustment needed here: those are zeroes. In ninety days (according to the monolith) absolutely no pages have been turned Amazon's exclusive lending platform. Again, no marketing, no investment, no hustle on my part, so this result was no surprise.

Now the ninety days are up, and my initial experiment of making the title "Amazon exclusive" ends. I'm grateful for the sales as a perk, but I'm not relying on them at all. This is the era of external validation and I'm choosing to ignore that, too. Writing for writing's sake is still the goal, and breaking out of the walled garden is a good way to further that goal.

I'm not sad for the experiment, I'm not sad for signing up and learning how the act of distributing the written word has changed. I'm sad that our affair with words is on the ropes right now, and as a slinger of words, I don't feel the need to dabble any more with limits. "Going wide" is the phrase used within the self publishing community for targeting multiple distributors at once. I've learned a lot in thirteen years and ninety days. The experiments were a success. Now to get those words out while we still value them.

🧩🦏