solarbird | Jul. 3rd, 2015

Jul. 3rd, 2015

Amazon has been working on adjusting Kindle Unlimited – their streaming-service equivalent for writers – for a while. A fair number of people have been worrying about what that would mean. We’ve known for a while that the author money would come from a fixed-size pot – and that pot would probably be small. But we didn’t know for sure.

Now we do. Surprise! Pseudo-streaming for writers means the same thing as streaming means for musicians. Payment schedules which are somewhere between a joke and an insult.

I don’t know enough about the writer side of the world of things to know exactly how terrible this is, but given the zero-sum gaming of the system, and Amazon’s market dominance in the epub world, I’d have to say it sounds pretty damn bad – possibly even worse than for musicians, even if the actual rates are higher in some ways. The numbers being thrown around involve phrases like ’60-80% cut in royalties.’

Anyway, writers, you’ve been warned. Anybody with a better understanding of the book world want to chime in?

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I take back what I've said in the past about Comcast business internet support being better than their consumer level.

They've fucked up their internal routing of our mail for the third time, which means we can't contact comcast customer servers to deliver email. And despite the previous two times being in our customer records, they seem to have no idea what to do or even who should do it.

Primary support sent me to security assurance, because they couldn't deal with it. Security Assurance said they can't do anything about this kind of problem, and made me call back to primary support.

First tier primary support that time didn't even understand the problem, so they elevated me to tier 2, who just called me back also not understanding the problem. After eventually explaining in sufficiently small words, they've just told me they can't do anything about it and can't even escalate it and that I have to talk to security assurance. After I made it sufficiently clear that Security Assurance has insisted they can't do anything about this, he just kind of started repeating, "we cannot do anything about that here, we have no way to escalate it, you have to talk to security assurance."

This despite it being EXACTLY THE SAME FUCKUP AS THE PREVIOUS TWO TIMES AND IT'S ALL DOCUMENTED.

jfc.

eta: Aaaaaand I've been sent back to core support again. Because Security Assurance Doesn't Do Anything Like This.

eta2:: I am currently on hold. And elevated again to tier 2. And they're calling me back.