Money is not an outcome I need from writing. Fame is good. Fame is good because it makes people read the stuff, and it impresses Susannah. But readers are the outcome, not fame per se. Fame is for the single man. Fame is to get invited places and get pussy.
So I could give the next book away for free. I’m afraid self publishing is dead. First- no publisher could sell my book. What I offered a publisher was my ability to sell books, which is gone. My Savage Spear of the Unicorn promotion for three dollars has sold one book. Wait no two. Back in the day a pinned tweet begging for RTs would sell a hundred books. Part of it is not having a new book for six years. Part of it is Savage Spear is the least marketable title. I should have just called it The Unicorn. But Twitter as a tool to sell anything but tweets themselves about tech and AI, real estate, business, entrepreneurship, whatever, is done. Twitter as a sales tool is done, and so to sell books, or promote writing in general, we will need to discover new tools. Which is scary. Or would be, if I needed money.
100K twitter followers could sell you a book. Now it can’t. The people bitching about Twitter are right. It was better when the trans terrorists could censor you and get you banned. Because as long as that didn’t happen, people could see your posts. There really is something with the algorithm.
Tech captured the content and the money coming from it, and then people who inherited Bay Area real estate captured the money from tech.
OK. All I wanted from this was to become able to write good stuff, and then to have some people read it. There’s nothing more to get.