For the past year and a half, my book “Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act” has been free on Amazon US. As of this month, that no longer appears to be the case. This is, unfortunately, completely out of my control.
KDP (the service through which I publish to Amazon) doesn’t allow me to set a book’s price to $0; the lowest I can go is $0.99. To make a book free, I’ve historically had to price it at $0 on other storefronts (Smashwords, Kobo, etc.) and then file a price-match request with Amazon.
If this whole process sounds weird and overcomplicated to you, that’s because it is.
The last couple of times I’ve tried to price-match a book to $0, it hasn’t worked; KDP support has responded to my requests by saying Amazon “retains discretion over [their] retail prices” and “cannot offer a price match in this case.” And now it looks like the form through which I used to file the requests is gone entirely.
It’s possible Amazon now feels secure enough in their monopoly over bookselling that they’re no longer maintaining their “most favoured nation” policy. Which would be fine, except that the change in policy inconveniences me in this one specific way.
Anyway, “Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act” is still $0 on Amazon in Canada and the UK. If you’re in the US and would like to read the book for free, you can do so on the Casefile of Jay Moriarty website or basically any other ebook store besides Amazon.
Podcast Appearance: I Will Fight You
In this episode of I Will Fight You, we revisit Love Never Dies: the terrible, terrible sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. Listen in horror as a 60-year-old man relitigates his decades-old divorce by projecting everything onto his self-insert character:
New Release: The Exploits of Jay Moriarty
The second collected edition of The Casefile of Jay Moriarty is finally out!
This Week’s Links
Rockstar had a mole in the union worker Discord server “for over two and a half years”, GTA 6 company reveals during legal battle
According to the former workers, one employee was told after joining Rockstar “that the use of the word ‘cunt’ was an ‘apparently acceptable use of language in Scotland’ and was used by management regularly”.
They Want You to be Nothing
Perhaps you also are overwhelmed with the desire to matter, to be seen, just like the people in this video. Unlike them, though, you hold yourself back. And in watching them, you can feel pride in your relative restraint. You reveal yourself to have the highest virtue in a purity culture (and this is an emerging, relatively irreligious purity culture): prudence.
I Killed A Business Model
Everywhere you look, institutions are gatekeeping public domain media and are making it difficult to access or charging for it. … I’ve solved this, for a small fraction of available footage, by making destockd.com.
The Exploits of Jay Moriarty was a featured new release on Smashwords, which means I shared a carousel with the latest issue of the official BattleTech magazine, Shrapnel:
I am unreasonably pleased about this.
-K
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