Summary: If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here Thought I could get away from this for awhile while I move to Rainmaker, but moving makes dust - and dust makes you sneeze. Here's some sneezes I've been supressing: Why digital sharecropping is dying and will take you with it. Got a comment on one of my other blogs about how he was going along publishing public domain books on Google Play and suddenly got kicked off. So that income line is permanently down for him, from what I gather. I imagine that his problem is in not having already built his audience. You build your audience, find out what they are interested in and then produce the books in the format they want. Along the way, you also publish the distributors like Google Play, Amason, iTunes, etc. This is a lesson I'm only just learning - probably just in time. An old (March 18, 2013) podcast from Entreproducer with Eric Reis pointed out that many times, when you are trying to fit into Amazon's mold, you're actually throwing away income. Think about it - where does Amazon want you to price your book? $2.99 to $9.99. That gets you into their Kindle program, which is a walled garden. Reis sold his as a PDF with lifetime updates, for around $20 - and is still making income off it (at the time of this recording.) He didn't like Amazon because they were forcing him to put his book up against similar titles priced at $4.99. In short, Amazon is trying to make a commodity out of your books. The original ones. (Amazon's weird policies on public domain books is odd, in that they are already commodities and given away for free on the Internet elsewhere. You'd think they'd want to encourage people to add value and submit truly higher-quality versions and then let the market decide. Control freaks? Possibly.) The bottom line is that like most of the "free" blogging sites, they are just using you as a sharecropper while they own the field you farm. At any time, they can capriciously kick you off and quit paying you anything. (And they remind you of this every single time you submit a public domain book - one of the reasons I haven't published to them since.) For those of you who have never farmed: Sharecropping is doing the work and getting a small split of the profit. The land owner pays for the seed and fertilizer. If you also live on the property, that rental is usually taken out of your profit. In the post-Civil-War South, this was a solution that turned out to be just above slavery, since it still kept you on the plantation and too broke to save up and own your own place. It was security, and a living - after a fashion... Wordpress, Tumblr, Weebly - all these tend to be tenant farmers for sharecroppers, as they need your content, but they don't need you. (In fact, several of my Wordpress blogs became orphans because they suspended my account, but not the blog - hint: set up several accounts under different emails and cross-connect the authors to the blogs.) What they constantly push at you is to pay them monthly for the privilege of publishing there - and over-charge you for getting that domain you want (which they own, not you). Once a tenant, always a tenant. Wordpress has been particularly bad about shutting you down when you put affiliate links into your content. But they run their own ads on the site. Blogger is at the other end of the scale, since you have to enable Adsense ads to run and Blogger doesn't care what you link to. And they encourage you to get your own domain name while they host your blog for you. That's why I've been using them, until just recently... You want to have someone else host your blog and take care of the backend, while you then build your audience. Blogger does this pretty well, but it's quite limited to what it can do. If you integrate Gumroad, you can get membership options and email capture while you sell your own digital products that they deliver for you. And if you're just starting out, that's probably the best
