A Prime Example

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an Amazon slave. I've been a Prime Member for years, I have several Alexa smart speakers, I use Subscribe & Save, I use Kindle and Audible, and I even watch Prime Video (mostly for the Grand Tour or anything the old Top Gear crew is attached to). I know the company is evil, they treat their workers (especially their drivers) like garbage, their returns are a joke, and Jeff Bezos is dumping tons of methane into the atmosphere with his phallus rockets, to say nothing of that stupid yacht he tried to have a bridge disassembled over. 

Yet... I'm still paying. I can only offer so much in my defense. There's still plenty of small and local businesses I support, and there's certain items that I simply will not buy from Amazon if I can avoid it. If I can get it straight from the manufacturer, I'll go that route (especially if they let me check out with PayPal because that's just as convenient as Amazon). To me, Amazon offers a way to eliminate tedium. I don't have to haul bags of cat food, kitty litter, and sparkling water around in a cart, into my car, out of my car, and into my house. Now, all but that last step has been eliminated. It's one less thing I have to deal with. It's cruise control, not fully autonomous driving, if you follow. The point is if it all went away tomorrow, I'd be only a little bit bummed... for about five minutes, and then I'd move on to something else. 

Is it really an addiction if you're in control of it? 

Anyway, there's still the dilemma of supporting a terrible company, but the awful truth to that matter is that voting with your wallet is kind of a hollow promise. After all, there's no "vote against" just voting for something, and not voting at all. Moreover, if you know anything about how the company is structured, their main money maker is not their retail branch. It's all their web hosting. That's where this gets really scary. I heard once that all of Netflix's servers are owned by Amazon. That may seem like a massive conflict of interest, but it's actually good business. There's a similar sort of relationship between Apple and Samsung. Yes, they're rivals in the smartphone space, but if you were to open up your iPhone, you'd find Samsung's name on more than a few components. In fact, the iPhone camera is actually a Sony component. I find that funny because the camera on my old Xperia phone wasn't all that great, but the little iPhone 5c I got to replace it took damn fine pictures right out of the box. 

I decided to write this entry after receiving an email from Amazon that some of you may have read yourselves or at least heard about on social media. Ads are coming to Prime Video. Although they insist there will be overall fewer ads than television, it's more than a little disheartening that this is what they resorted to in terms of expanding their market share in the streaming space. 

Rather than create a new, lower-priced, ad-supported tier and bring in new customers, they'd rather punish loyal customers who have been paying for Prime for years (seriously, whatever happened to grandfathering?). Instead, they now offer an ad-free version of Prime for an additional fee. Obviously, this is about Amazon making more money. They chose this strategy because simply raising the rates would have deterred many from renewing, so they decide to raise the proverbial temperature of the pot of water instead of dunking us in straight away. As I said, I think they could have done more to draw in new customers than try to tiptoe around existing ones. 

As for what I'm going to do about it... very little. Ironically, most of what I've been watching on Prime Video of late has been through their subsidiary FreeVee, which is ad-supported anyway. There's also that practice of advertising their other shows before the ones I'm already watching. It's frustrating that this is happening, but I'm more mad at myself for not being more bothered. I feel like I should be cancelling my Prime membership as a statement, but I know it's not going to change anything and despite what I said about what I'd do if this all went away, I don't want to be the one to pull the plug. Given the scale, it would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. Then again, we're also living in a time when a comedy about Wile E. Coyote suing Acme was brought back from a fate worse than death for media. 

Maybe we're reaching a point where it's more than just the bottom line that a business can pay attention to. Yes, Coyote Vs. Acme got a big boost from a number of meetings being canceled, as well as the potential threat of Capitol Hill getting involved (one congressman compared the move to committing arson and insurance fraud), but it's still notable how much of a public outcry got heard. Hell, remember when the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie got delayed because of backlash against the early trailer? No calls for boycotts there, just plain, "Dear God, what is that thing!?" from a few thousand voices on Twitter. Yes, there was still a bottom line ultimately being threatened, but we didn't have to wait until opening weekend for the change to occur. 

SEX SELLS (but would anyone buy?)

Here's a little context to set the tone:

Making money off anything to do with the internet is a little like asking for change from the driver's seat of a Ferrari; no one thinks you deserve it, and resent you for asking, never mind that it's a small amount, you only ask once with no issue made of it, and you offer rides to anyone who contributes. It's mind-boggling how many people can be turned away from something if they suspect that it's making money for someone. A YouTuber I follow by the name of KipKay recently had a product placement in one of his videos, some weird energy drink/snack that he was sent as a gift (possibly paid for, I don't know). Despite only being a few seconds out of the total video length, the dis/like bar was almost totally red and a number of comments below cried things like "Sell out!" or "Shill!" or often far worse.
More recently, a businessman by the name of Greg Pabich started a Kickstarter fund to release a fixed version of a notoriously-buggy NES game called Cheetahmen II. The main point of criticism was that the project required upfront payments, citing similar services that produce NES cartridges on consignment (that is, no money upfront, with production being on-demand instead of using pre-orders). This would seem a fair point of discussion, except that the people who were bringing this up were calling Pabich's Kickstarter a scam because of it.
How is using a different business model than someone else a scam? Is Target scamming people because they use different distributors and marketing techniques than Wal-Mart? Obviously that's not to say there are no such things as scams or false advertisements, but merely profiting from something does not a scam-artist make.

I'm starting to feel like I may be preemptively biting the hand that may or may not feed me by defending a business model I haven't even fully-implemented yet. I've started writing an erotica story, one that's shaping up to be fairly lengthy, not quite novella territory, but sizable nonetheless. It's comprised of four chapters and a short introduction/disclaimer. The intro and first chapter are essentially finished, but I don't want to post it anywhere until I have the remainder completed. Part of this is because that's just how I've always written, somehow it just feels like bad luck or counting chickens before they hatch. I'd rather not start shooting a trailer before I have a script.
The main reason, though, is that I'm planning on selling the story, with the first chapter being available for free and the entire story for a price.
I'm either going to have it available on DeviantART using their "points for download" system, though I'm not entirely sure they'll allow the story to be posted there, given their upload guidelines, or through Google Play Books (Android and Chrome platforms). The price, whichever system I go with, will be about 1.00USD (though I'm looking at a few other services to see how their profit-sharing compares). It is turning out to be fairly lengthy, but it's hardly in novella territory yet, but it's shaping up to be at least as long as Ladyhorse which I wrote a few years ago. Following its release, I considered re-inserting a paragraph I'd deleted at the last minute and offering that version up for sale as a sort of "Premium Edition." Obviously, that's going a little overboard for just a paragraph, which is why I also considered commissioning some illustrations for it. In the end, I didn't bother with it. For this, I've considered making some myself, though I'll admit they won't be anything special (in fact, they'll probably be sketches of locations or items in the story, as I've kept character descriptions to a minimum). I don't know if that's worth a dollar, illustrated or not, but compared to some of what I've seen on Google Play for around that price, it's probably more robust. Plus, I'm still working under the notion I set forth in the comic that, in the way of 90% of erotic literature, I could do better. So, this is me putting my money where my mouth is, and possibly shooting myself in the foot for blabbing about this potentially earlier than I really should have.

Here goes nothing.

... better get back to it.