On The Rebound

Yep, I went missing for a while and I'm sort of back but not with the same set of priorities I had before I went missing. In fact, as far as going missing is concerned, I went missing ten years ago last month when I started penning my first novel. And I'm still missing. Why am I still missing? Because, when you finally realize that you'd better do something you've always wanted to do and that you'd better do it now, before it's too late, you go missing from a world that no longer needs you or wants you because, my God, you've changed. Even though you haven't.

So, I'm still missing, all right, and I've been on the lam from the powers-that-be all my life, so that's nothing new. Not to me. And, as far as those Illuminati power brokers and the celestial pricks who toy with this planet like it was theirs and not ours, and all the rest of the bottom-feeding cowards are concerned, I think they stopped looking for me when they realized that, because of my unpopularity with readers who rely almost exclusively on the New York Times Bestseller List to tell them what to read, I'm no threat to The New World Order at all.

Hey, that's just fine with me. I've got better things to do than help keep a ship afloat that's been slowly sinking all my life, especially when the passengers couldn't care less about it. And, since I'm not the captain of this ship, I have no intentions of going down with it. You got it, this sinking ship is Earth. You got it, Jack. I've got other irons in the fire.

In fact, I just gave away $11,479.30 worth of eBooks through Amazon's Kindle Store in December and January — in a span of only five days of free promotion — and that grossed me a whopping fifty bucks in royalties later in January, from a few measly "Paid" book sales. Umm, hmm. That's right. I had to give away $11.5K in Kindle Editions to make $50, before taxes, after the FREE eBook giveaway. That's right, they were FREE for five days. Umm, hmm, you got the concept. I had to eat a potential loss of of almost eight thousand dollars in "missing royalties", before taxes, in order to make a few lousy bucks from a handful of readers who finally decided to risk spending money on the real McCoys.

Yessir, that's the reality of being an indie author. No wonder The New World Order no longer considers me to be a threat to them or to anyone else on this planet. The biggest threats on Earth come with the biggest price tags attached to them. That's a given — an "always was" and "always will be" kind of thing — that equates the poor with the powerless on this greedy, backward world. Which also means that only the rich will ever be powerful on this iniquitous planet.

Well, I might be an old indie dawg and a poor self-promoter but I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. So, those 2,970 free Kindle ebooks I gave away this winter might seem to be a necessary evil to other book promoters but, to me, they showed me something about people that I hoped wasn't there. But it's there and I have to face the awful truth.

Yep,one thing I learned, for sure, is that people will spend a fortune on smut and decadence and violence and vanities but, when it comes to clean entertainment and new revelations about life, they only want it if it's free.