• Houghton-Mifflin, purveyors of the textbook of said statistics. Who decided that even though I spent nearly $150 purchasing their textbook, I could only download it once, and then only to one computer, and only then using Adobe Digital Editions. Who the hell uses Adobe Digital Editions? And seriously, I get the new Coldplay, I rip it to my computer, I can listen on any device I want, but I spend nearly ten times as much and you lock me in? It’s a statistics textbook for a business course, and that business model makes me question just how damned authoritative you actually are. Business is about relationships and transactions with your customers. I am your customer, and you totally and completely failed me.

• PUMA supporters. Which, apparently, stands for “Party Unity My Ass.”  Have you heard of this?  All the sad supporters of Hillary who are upset she lost and decided that Obama is the antichrist, and that McCain/Palin is a good choice because Palin is, like, a chick? God, I’m so tired of everyone backhanding Obama and treating McCain/Palin like they wouldn’t be 8 more years of the same. Dear female PUMA supporters; take your heads out of your collective twats long enough to acknowledge that feminism is about more than simply voting for anyone in a skirt.

• McCain/Palin. McCain had his shot in 2000 and blew it hard, and it’s honestly a damned shame that the past 8 years weren’t a McCain administration, but his time is now gone. He sold out every ounce of integrity he ever had for the nomination, and when once he valued straight talk he now can’t speak without a teleprompter. Add to his equation Caribou Barbie, who is a non-issue and whom I will now begin treating as one, because calling her a Tina Fey-lookalike is a total insult to Tina Fey. Take your polar bears and your bridge to nowhere and your $20 million in debt for Wasilia and retreat to your northern hinterlands, because a view of Russia is not foreign policy.

  They’re full of more fail than Houghton-Mifflin’s textbook.

• Lulu.com, printers of my collection. Between their basic nadir of customer service (which seems to spring from a complete and utter lack of respect for their customers/authors), their total unprofessionalism in moderating their user forums, and their completely ambiguous cover-their-arses clauses they disguise as a “terms of service” contract, pretty much the main reason I’ve decided to remove my collection from availability via their site is that my readers are my highest priority, and you deserve better (I assume you are a reader if you are reading this).

• The self-publishing community, which is largely (though with some notable exception) filled with self-righteous amateurs who couldn’t produce a salable manuscript even with James Patterson writing every other paragraph. Dear authors: publishing doesn’t owe you any-fucking-thing, and neither do readers, and if you’re not finding either, chances are it’s because you think you’re entitled to both and you’re simply not.

• People who invoke Shakespeare in the ‘genre v. literary’ debate even though it seems that they never read anything the Bard from Avon actually wrote (I’m looking at you, IO9). Dear bloviators: just because old white guys completely out of touch with anything awesome wet their collective knickers at his mention, let’s not forget Shakespeare wrote not a single play that didn’t include sword fights, fairies, witches, or romance, and often got ‘em all at the same time.

  Know why? Because Shakespeare was awesome.

the glorious day when there will no inventory anywhere except for dumps of the Important Thriller, the Big Romance, This Month’s Diet Book, and All About Jesus, with everything else existing only as a month’s projected sales and digital files.

Personally, I find the whole thing a non-issue. While I buy just about everything from Amazon anymore (books, CDs, DVDs, videogames, and even my iVoice [an iPod speaker dock]), if Amazon didn’t exist, I’d still buy those things. In addition, my collection is available exclusively by way of Lulu. There is, quite simply, no other place on Earth to get it (well. Unless you happen to meet me on the street, and I happen to have a copy on me, and you buy it off me. So far, that’s never happened, and probably wouldn’t, for the simple fact that I don’t usually carry my book around [unless to give to someone]).

Know what? I don’t think its reception has suffered for it; so far as I can tell, it’s sold a remarkable number of copies, especially considering it’s a self-published, print-on-demand collection by a basically completely unknown author–I’m not really into numbers and such, but I’ll say it’s sold more than a hundred copies but less than a thousand. Mind you, that’s the collection itself; when you factor in the downloads of the individual stories, the numbers are substantially higher.

All without Amazon. Shit, my book doesn’t even have an ISBN, and I’m not sure I’d ever buy one. I mean, really, what’s the point? That someone could go to a bookstore and order one? That’s not a point, if only because they could go to Lulu and order one. To be honest, I think the whole ISBN/Amazon thing is counterproductive, certainly for what I’m doing and in addition for what I believe a lot of other authors are doing; Amazon’s mark-up is such that it reduces royalties often by nearly 75%. The plain and simple fact is that I get to charge readers less because I use Lulu exclusively, and I’ve been working since the beginning to bring the price to its most effective point (I think I’m there, now).

And seriously, how many self-published, POD authors are doing booktours? I haven’t done a single reading to support my book. Not even in my writing program (I may this month. We’ll see). I did a reading the week before it came out, before copies could actually be purchased, but otherwise?

Mamatas’ second-best point is the sales; most aren’t selling many copies to begin with. Most books, in fact, regardless of their distribution method, sell fairly few copies. There are exceptions, of course, like Rowling and Brown and King, but I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that more than 90% of all books published, in general, sell fewer than 1,000 copies (actually, I’m sure I did. here’s a source. In the interest of full disclosure, there is some debate over said statistics, but, then, 94% of all statistics are made up on the spot, anyway). In fact, according to same, 80% sold fewer than 99 copies.

But this isn’t about numbers. This is about the fact that, lately, it seems self-published authors will jump into any argument headfirst to rant and rave simply to start a kerfuffle for the attention, without every considering whether the argument is actually worth it.

Yes, I buy books from Amazon, but will it bother me, or has it ever, that Amazon won’t carry my book? That I won’t get some shiny frickin’ button to use to sell the damned thing?

No. Because shiny frickin’ buttons never sold shit. Might dupe people into paying for something they didn’t actually mean to, but quality is what sells. Good stories sell.

And good stories will sell whether people purchase them from Amazon or not.

And when self-published stories sell, I suggest the authors who sold them might want to use the proceeds to purchase a clue, rather than a shiny frickin’ button.

Or a good editor. Lord knows most self-published authors could use one of them, as well.