(I posted this the other day but had to roll my website backup back a few days and lost it, so I’m reposting it here so you know what’s going on.)
Long post ahead, sorry.
So my experiment with Ream is short-lived. There was a kerfluffle last week and the guy who’d been the face of the company was ousted by the husband and wife team who apparently were silent partners, the wife who is also a prolific and popular writer on the site…
…and they’ve been posting AI-generated graphics for promo for Ream. And then it turns out oh, by the way, they allow AI writing without it being disclosed. And then someone else dug up where the wife wrote an endorsement for one of the AI writing sites. And the husband (who is apparently also the developer?) started getting snippy in responses to people just wanting answers. Like, well Amazon allows it we’re small we can’t police it.
Um, you can NOT post AI-generated graphics and you can put up a disclosure policy so at least you’re not siding with AI-generated content, and how do we have any guarantees our posted content won’t be scraped by AI engines against our will? Also also, if you’re such a small company, how do we have any guarantees that the content we post won’t be hacked? (But I have a suspicion I won’t voice that maybe there’s an additional reason for them not wanting to side against AI content driving the handling of this situation.)
Blergh.
(And important note: PLEASE don’t hate on authors who are still using Ream. Some of them recently transitioned there from other platforms, or they can’t post their work on other platforms, and they literally don’t have other options right now. Just because an author’s using the platform, don’t automatically assume they’re pro-AI.)
So the past three days I’ve been holed up working on subscription stuff, testing, researching, and resisting the urge to stab myself in the eye with a fork to put myself out of my misery.
I’m currently testing a plugin for my website.
My concern is that with using Patreon it’s not a matter of if, but when I bump against their content guidelines. (And I’d always expected to eventually transition away from Patreon for this reason.) Especially if the orange nightmare is reelected. Romance writers will be lumped under “pornography” and run off the major platforms by credit card vendors who won’t want to run afoul of US regulators. While I’d love to use Payhip, the store I use for my online sales, even that’s problematic because while they currently allow romance and erotica, again, it’s not MY platform. At least with it being a self-hosted website, it’s far less likely that I will become a target and lumped in with a whole genre of content creators on a platform.
Plus, another annoyance I have is that because I have to be labeled an “adult content” creator on Patreon, I can’t offer free trials, or free tiers, or anything else like that. And their tier structure is restrictive. Plus, I only get the money once a month from them and they take out their fees, which are more than my Paypal fees.
It’s…a lot. On top of feeling like crap right now but since I can’t really write feeling like warmed-over dogcrap, at least I can “work” like this.
I’m struggling though. LOL I used to be SOOO f’ing ahead of the bell curve in terms of technology. I was self-hosting an online digital store back in 2001 selling embroidery designs and tutorials with ZenCart software, AND writing tutorials for ZenCart because there weren’t any and people like me needed them. LOL And now I feel like holy crap, with all the security and stuff to navigate now it’s a LOT. (Geospaces, anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)
But I’d rather nail this down now, instead of panic-reacting in November if things go…badly. Because if the worst case happens, I can easily imagine a situation where we wake up the day after the orange nightmare takes office again in January to find out that overnight Amazon’s banned books from their platform in certain categories or from small indie/self-pubbed authors.
Hell, the Microsoft outage this week just goes to show that we can be at the mercy of a third-party app. And now more than ever it’s so freaking important for authors to completely own their data/content and reduce the number of fail points between them and their content/readers so that they don’t lose everything in one fell swoop. At least this way, if something were to happen beyond the worst-case and I lose my hosting here in the US, I could find an overseas hosting service and get back up and running with system backups without having to build out from scratch.
I mean, I don’t want to sound fatalistic, because I’m hopeful about November, if for nothing else than the rage factor at what’s been happening lately.
But … this is my livelihood. So I have to plan worst-case options and hope it’s just being over-prepared for nothing. My anxiety demands I try to be prepared. Add into that I’m slowly regaining rights to my Tymber Dalton books as they reach the end of their contract terms and I want to be able to monetize them.
So in the midst of all (frantically waves hands around) THIS (life, health, politics, stress, anxiety) If you’ve made it down this far (Goddess bless you) Yes, Bleacke Shifters 9 & 10 are coming. (Patreon members are getting at least 2 chapters a week now as I work through edits and finishing 10 because I’m going to release them close together). I’m going to be in 3 anthologies, one is a charity anthology for Smut Lovers: The Conference that benefits the Center in Orlando, an LGBTQIA+ charity. I’ve also agreed to join an ongoing multi-author series with a book that will hopefully come out next May (while it’s not a “secret” I’m freaking PARANOID AF right now–have you SEEN how my year’s gone so far? *cue hysterical laughter*) in a BDSM series. (Thank you for hooking me up, Eden!)
This last part comes full-circle and touches back on the first part of my post about Ream. I spent the better part of 2 weeks setting stuff up on there for Spouse with their books, and some other pen names–and literally just a couple of weeks after setting up the service, all this ish comes to light about them, and I’m just…
Tired. So fucking tired.
Because I saw a potential for Ream to help me do something, which is build up a following for some secret pen names I’d played around with over the years, especially once I went exclusive with Siren with my Tymber Dalton pen name.
But, haha, joke was on ME, because I was too exhausted on the hamster wheel of writing books for Siren to, you know, pay my bills, that I never had time to do anything much with any of them for the most part.
And these pen names came about for various reasons, to play with other genres, or to just write something off-the-wall that’s completely off-brand for me, or stress relief. Because believe it or not, some of us writers, if we get burned out writing our usual genre, we might be able to write something completely different and it helps us replenish our creative well and rediscover our love for writing that other genre. And that’s definitely a THING for me. Especially now that I know I’m AuDHD and that some of what I’ve gone through were periods of autistic burnout.
I have waffled back and forth on this for…a while. I’ve bounced it off readers, fellow writers, friends, the Bard, and Spouse. (I had been thinking about it a couple of years ago and even talking about it with Russ, but then he died and…yeah.)
I’d tried posting titles for one of them on Kindle Vella with very little traction gained. Then I thought that I could maybe work on building up those pen names with Ream, but it’s like the Universe is smacking me around saying no, just f’ing own them already. Add in the flood of AI garbage now, it’s almost impossible to get a “new” pen name going unless you basically tell everyone it’s you right out of the gate, and they’re just separated as a matter of keeping the brands separate.
And, as I said, I’m so. Fucking. Tired. (Not to mention broke. LOL Did I mention broke? *more hysterical laughter*) But–rightfully–readers are now damned reluctant to try new-to-them authors if they don’t know if they’re AI garbage or not.
And I do want to openly play in some of the worlds I started creating with those different pen names. I want the flexibility. And if I finally own them, I can also then start posting them up on Radish, because some of them lend themselves remarkably well to a serial format. (Because I started writing them as serials years ago.) And if I’m setting up this new subscription system on my website, then on top of that add multiple pen names, trying to set it up–and manage, AND write, AND AND promote, AND AND AND worry about keeping them “secret” and not accidentally fucking up and posting in the wrong account–I need to streamline this fucking shit. (This is another reason why I haven’t done much with them, because I just can’t do much with them because I don’t have the brainpower and energy and time in the day when I have to focus primarily on my Lesli/Tymber writing.) And if I don’t diversify how I’m spreading out my writing in terms of possible revenue streams (retail sites, direct sales, Radish, etc) then I run the risk of a serious and devastating problem should something happen to any of those things.
Saying all that, may I present to you PT Long, Ravyn Wolf, Zoe Park, and Calliope Clockwork.
I have the membership site up and running for free subscriptions right now. I don’t have the paid tiers set up yet, but there is free content to read for my Ravyn Wolf and Calliope Clockwork pen names: https://tymberdalton.com/memberships/
Also, I’m giving serious thought to renaming the Facebook group. When I first started it, I called it “Tymber’s Trybe” because, duh, I love puns. I gave no thought to it possibly being disrespectful to indigenous people. Now, no one has approached me about this–this is a ME thing I’ve been pondering for the past couple of years. In fact I was starting to think about changing it when Russ died.
Cause, yeah, on top of EVERYTHING that was traumatic and threw me mentally and emotionally into a tailspin I almost didn’t climb out of.
So I’m thinking about renaming the Facebook group “Tymber’s Tryblemakers” because I still get the punny use of the y, it kind of looks like Tribble, which makes my Trekkie geek side happy. BUT… I’m open to suggestions! Preferably only 2 words, and starting with Tymber. (Bonus points if the Y can be worked in there in the second word.)
There you have it. Love you guys, and I appreciate y’all so, SO much. I literally couldn’t do this without y’all. ((HUGS))