#Pirates, #Google #Chrome, #Amazon's Pit of Doom aka "the Erotic Zone" and other nightmares of fully employed authors

It's the ants who kill you, so they say, never the elephants.
But the elephants who are EATING ME ALIVE are all those nasty buggers I cannot control. (What else is new? Life is survival of the tiny bits that bite, right?)

Let's talk about pirates!  They multiply worse than rabbits. They are criminals. Thieves.
Furthermore, they are very stupid.
Oh, you TORRENTS and "enterprising" copiers of an author's HOURS of work, where is your logic?
Why do you want to put us authors out of business? You rob each of us, you dastardly thieves, of hundreds of thousands of $$$$. At last survey that was approximately $4 billion per year...and that survey was 4 years ago! Do you not realize, you idiots of the internet highway, that you are decreasing the amount of money in circulation? That you are ROBBING authors of their hard-earned pay? That you are catering to a segment of the population who wants something for nothing? That they are as unscrupulous and conniving as you?

An example will help you imagine my outrage? Sure. Right now, out in circulation, on one book of my 47 titles, 241 places list the book. If only 1 person downloads 1 copy of that book from one of the 241, and whose royalty per sale should be roughly $2.00, I have lost $ 482.00. $482.00 that is rightfully mine, not a gift to anyone! Then imagine what that amount becomes if 10 downloads occur off each listing. 100? A fortune lost.

And you barmy pirates, do you not see that if you rob enough of us often enough, we will have to stop writing? That we will have no income and have to go to work at the local Walmart? That there will be nothing to pirate? Nothing to read?

Now comes along GOOGLE CHROME, another chip off the old block, ready to allow their cruisers to pirate our works instead of buy them. Oh, Google, what idiots you mortals be! If you allow this, why not give away cars and homes and toaster ovens, hmmm? Because you, Google, have to attract more people to your engine AND make money does not mean that the rest of us shouldn't.

Finally, we move to AMAZON, that savior of many an author in years past who now has a new idea. Did it come from the Koch brothers? FoxNews? Evangelical groups who wish to establish the purity of American "values"? No matter its origin, the practice is a killer. This new idea is to "hide" books ZON deems unfit for their morally proper servers. They have removed from customer sight and their SEARCH ENGINES books who by THE COVER ALONE would seemingly offend the eyes of the beholder.

Their new unwritten code judges a book by its cover. Maybe its title. But heaven forbid, ZON do a scan of the text to see if it REALLY does have offensive material in it. Garrrr. Because after all, if the cover offends the delicate Amazon folks, then it must offend readers, right?

So ZON hides the book, even DENIES it exists if you type in the title and search for it. So we have here a God-killa of a machine that now assumes the dictatorial right to hide books from buyers not based on a scan of the text for those pesky 4-letter words, but based on one Amazonian employee's assessment of "too-much-skin."

And BTW, the action by Amazon which prompts my vitriol, is that it took BURNING FOR NERO (see it to your right here) and put it in their Erotica Dead Zone. Not a rope or a safe word in sight! One 5-letter word.

So what is the cure?

Answer: Take 2 aspirin and go away.

Really. We authors are politely told by program professionals and publishers that:

• Pirates are forever. We can't crack the code to prohibit them from copying your works. Sorry. Just write a new take-down notice and send it off...so that tomorrow the pirates can mount your work again and you send the take-down…again. Rinse. Repeat.
• Google Chrome can now get in the act, too! Rinse. Repeat.
• And yeah, BTW, Amazon—who once lured authors with their technology and attracted readers with their scope and pricing—now becomes our new moral litmus tester. Thanks, ZON. I needed that.
• So now we hard-working authors must not only tolerate the thieves who break into our livelihoods, but we must also tolerate that new behemoth Amazon who makes moral choices for us all.

Where might the authors' rights be in any of this?

The giants of commerce have the power. We who sit and labor must sit in the corner and be quiet...and while you're at it, write another story, will you please?