here's something else Fat Prick wouldn't know about what Doordash and others are doing. big chains like Pizza Hut and Papa J's have no problem recouping the loss inflicted by these services because they naturally do loads more business than others. if you are a
local business, you actually
lose money when you deliver via Doordash and if you aren't doing
good enough then the benefits of Doordash/Ubereats won't outweigh the costs. there are several local eat-outs down my street and i patronize them all. i have even
worked in one of them for a few weeks. they do not like Doordash and fucking hate gig drivers because sometimes they drop shit and the entire order has to be remade, and because every Doordash order makes them less money, and that's to say nothing of Doordash's carryout option. if you order from Doordash, you have the option of picking it up yourself for much cheaper than paying the driver's tip
and they give you some credits back to use on your next order, making it cheaper. the problem is that it effectively robs the business a little over half of what the customer is paying for their items.
i, too, share Null's extreme hatred and spite for payment networks and processors like Stripe. i won't linger on this topic specifically but, of course, Fat Prick won't utter a peep about how insidious these Antichrist worshipers are.
remember how back in July, Stripe did the following?
Stripe is preparing to add a fee of $25 on every transaction dispute charged to the business owner, even if the owner wins the dispute.
This can be weaponized against small business owners by purchasing small items in bulk under $25, each in separate transactions, and then performing chargebacks on each transaction, wiping out the seller's margin and the cost of the goods sold.
They may get their goods back, but they'd still be in the hole.
alright, Patty, what about... i dunno. Unions? Unions cause tons of problems for businesses, chief of which are the dock Unions that have been holding up the flow of goods in our ports and still dole out full wage to every lazy cocksucker on the payroll since the China Virus pandemic. "legit" Unions, that is to say, Unions that aren't internal to a company, like Apple's, collect ridiculous fees and do jack shit for their members. Kroger's has a fucking Union. guess what good it's for? nothing. it keeps you from getting any meaningful raise or promotion and you make nothing but minimum wage in soul-sucking retail. if there's someone with just a day of seniority ahead of you, you will never 'make it'.
it goes without saying that Unions sponsored by corporations are the antithesis to what a Union stands for and do jack fucking shit for their plebs. here's
something from back in May.
"A big ask from our team when preparing for negotiations was to include some sort of profit-sharing or bonus structure," the union said in the thread. "We thought a lot about the easiest way to accomplish this and we thought adopting a model already used by other workers who provide services to their community might be the simplest to implement."
Apple invented their own Union and keep it undercover. this is not an independent Union. get a load of this corpo-rat speech - the entire article is this kind of bullshit.
Tipping is NOT Profit-sharing - Tipping is getting the customer to pay directly for a service that workers are employed to give. Tipping via credit card is what allows the tax man to come knocking for what little everyone is making, too. Apple's workers will have their hourly wages diminished below the federal minimum wage and be expected to try and eke out a living by pressuring their customers to give up more and more. a real Union would have done the following: pressured Apple for sales commissions, allowing employees to earn a small fraction of the purchase price on top of their salary. even Sears, catastrophically mismanaged as they are, was smart enough to do this. for the folks doing repairs and other non-sales jobs that don't involve customer interaction, gratuity doesn't work.
tipped workers are
not subject to the same minimum wage labor regulations that most people are accustomed to, either.
Unions only make sense when you have work available that requires hyperspecific technical proficiencies... like making cars. i don't know of any automaker that has a Union these days, though! there are so many fucking "workers rights" laws on the books that Unions are literally obsolete. people think that Unions magically enforce laws and champion worker's rights when the reality is, nobody is actually enforcing the laws we
do have and segregation is alive and well in the modern day US of A. the only people that benefiting from modern Unions are the Union bosses and the sad saps who joined 40 years ago and still have meaningful benefits. the Useful Idiots that walk on the picket lines haven't figured it out yet and probably never will.
with all of
that out of the way, how about i bring up something that is
very relevant to Fat Prick's own interests? he mentioned Amazon, but nothing specific.
let's talk about what Amazon's effect on the publishing world has been, using examples from 2023 alone. in order to talk about this effectively and illustrate the bigger picture, i will first talk about the FAG-AFTRA Strike in Hollywood earlier this year. i must, because Amazon Kindle Publishing is effectively a streaming service but for books, and
all Streaming Services have effectively
lost countless billions, with Disney's
Disney+ being the biggest loser of them all. Streaming Services - Spotify et al - are an entrenched grift that only benefits an extreme minority and nobody realizes that using them regularly screws
everyone, including
yourself. ON EVERY LEVEL. the only people who aren't losing are the owners of the platforms and their companies - ergo, the avaricious cunts who've been manipulating young and passionate artists into being the meat their systems can feed on.
one of the biggest reasons for the FAG-AFTRA strikes in Hollywood pertaining to their actors and writers is that they weren't getting paid. residuals for actors and writers on streaming shows suck ass. they suck ass because everything they make sucks ass.
read this and you will see very clearly what the problem is. no one is watching what Hollywood is making, even 'hit' shows.
THE INDUSTRY HIDES ACTUAL STREAMING NUMBERS FOR THEIR CONTENT; studios don't release numbers or viewership stats on anything anymore. if the true stats for streaming services were shown, every studio would have an instant shareholder revolt. they would unironically bring back guillotines for the kind of bloodthirsty frenzy that would unfold.
"you spent billions to get HOW MANY viewers!?!" the studios also thought the strikes were great because it gave them casus belli to cancel everything, which means in the long run, both sides lose completely. all the studios are floundering like crazy besides; everybody in the Streaming gig has
only lost - bigly. nobody was getting paid, because there was no money. the strikes failed because nobody is watching anything
and they're greedy. the FAG-AFTRA types not getting paid was also only a symptom of Hollywood's greater corruption that, conveniently, nobody ever discusses because the influence of the Antichrist protects his own. Hollywood is a gigantic money laundering scheme where douchebags push around truckloads of money until half of it disappears into their pockets. most people don't go to theaters anymore, paradoxically, and that was a real transition even before the China Virus struck.
what has
actually increased is Movie Piracy. Streaming Services are great* for the end user but horrible for creators. they're 'Great' for the end user at least until licensing and copyright drama prevents paying subscribers from watching things they might or would want to view, so they cut their subscription and turn to piracy. the film industry, Hollywood et al, is a consumer-hostile market with shows no longer worth putting up.
Spotify and Ticketmaster have ruined the Music industry entirely, to say nothing of the RIAA's insidious yet astonishingly clever maneuvers over several decades to legally dryfuck every single musician's asshole. Record Label companies coopt the rights of the creator and do whatever they want while also pillaging royalties - another problem that spans decades - and you as a creator have no say in this; you do not get to choose whether your work goes on Spotify and quite frankly nobody even knows who owns the copyright to anything anymore. these same companies have also harassed the shit out of people over copyright for the most insane reasons -
just whistling a song in the UK got a woman legally bullied for months. they utilize Pinkerton-tier enforcement to assault anyone who doesn't bend over and they're entirely within their rights to do so - rights they gave themselves, of course. there are so many layers to Streaming Services, all these companies and fronts and rights management groups designed to obfuscate, distort, and confuse.
so how does Amazon Kindle Publishing factor into this? well, again, it is a Streaming Service. at least the author has the
choice of fucking themselves with KUP and it's not forced on them. here are some insightful topics on what makes KUP terrible for the creators and the consumers yet of no consequence to Amazon.
- starting in January 2023, authors began to notice a decrease in their revenue. you see, Amazon's Kindle program pays out BY THE PAGE READ, incentivizing creators to be as verbose as possible. i'll get back to the pages read metric in a bit because it's important. folks also began to notice their revenue was dropping because of a few bad actors mass-uploading AI-generated books and then using AI to read through them all, a fuckton of times, to give themselves tons of pages read. this essentially poaches all of the money in the pot. i never knew about this until this event came across my feed. my first question was, "Why the FUCK would you base payouts on pages read? Why isn't EVERYONE on the platform using AI to thumb through their own legitimate books then?" what a farce. Amazon has no obligation to deal with this because they're still getting the dumptrucks of money from their Prime and Kindle subscriptions and are making way more than what they pay out to authors. after all, the Prime/Kindle subscribes have already paid and are getting what they were promised. why bother?
more savvy readers will immediately cotton on to the fact they've been trying to finagle twitch.tv into this exact same position and failing spectacularly at it. there are people who say livestreaming (on twitch, or youtube) is a career. it is not. you have NO RIGHTS. You have NO PROTECTIONS. It can all be taken away from you in an instant, and you will have NO RECOURSE. it is a career only for sponsored shills. the amount of shit that Amazon has gotten away with concerning twitch is staggering. twitch has never been profitable for Amazon. streaming HD video is massively expensive and any Tom, Dick or Harry can fire up a broadcasting suite. and it's not profitable, despite Amazon's desperate attemps to shill the platform to mainstream media like ESP and give them front-page visibility. it is not profitable, because they feel the need to keep disrupting live content with invasive ads that last longer than a minute. talking about anything else would be too much for this already spergtastic post.
- According to Tuscany Bay Books, they ran an experiment to see how much KU is ripping people off. RD Paolinelli tweeted about this and the thread has since been mysteriously deleted. ignoring any of the AI-generated payout scamming, here's what he described:
This is why I hate Kindle Unlimited and why no author should be loading their books onto it. There is a couple of books at Tuscany Bay Books that we have on KU as an experiment. Primarily to see how much we're getting ripped off by Amazon. We were credited for the page reads of one of the books - the full 223 pages of the book.
KU royalty earned?: $0.91
Royalty earned if the book were purchased at full price?: $4.12
A loss of $3.21 for us and almost a dollar in royalty to the author.
Now do you see why I cannot stand #KindleUnlimited? Now do you see how badly you are harming authors by subscribing to KU?
in short, going the self-publishing route via Amazon means you have to write as verbosely as you can in order to maximize on what little you stand to earn. this means everyone is encouraged to write soulless fucking dross to make it meaningful, which means quality nosedives.
one last thing to mention. Fat Prick recently tweeted about audiobook royalties to try to make himself look good.
@Boston Brand has shared information in this thread previously that shows fatloaf has
terrible fucking metrics, so don't be fooled - audiobook royalties are even worse despite the fact audiobook rights sell for 10x normal book rights. audiobook stuff is also an absolutely staggering amount of work for how little you get paid unless you are a big name. i am friends with a voice actor who's been in the biz since the early 90s and he confided in me once about his issues with audiobook work, which he vehemently dislikes.
being an author sucks ass. the marketing portion of it is so insane. how do you find your market? with vidya game publishing, Steam at least makes that part actually doable, and it's surprising how well Valve has scaled their platform - and how not a single other industry can replicate the success. but with a book, what are your options? the best thing anyone can think of is making an audiobook version and trying to get noticed on Audible, which is its own can of worms. in our very own Arts & Literature subforum, i read a post by our very own
@Wampak, and one by
@Three Gorillion Dollars. i'll let them speak for me here.
I agree, but most books written today are bloated and have no reason to be so long. I mean, aside from padding it out to make the audiobook longer. That's the reason I've been told as to why word counts are so high now. Audiobooks are big business these days. Most of the time they outsell the print and ebook versions by several magnitudes. And since Audible uses a credit system (so I've been told, I don't use Audible) where one credit buys you one book regardless of length, people want to spend their credits on longer books so they feel like they've gotten more value for the money. Why buy a six hour book when you can buy a 40 hour book for the same price?
Of late, I've heard that the offer for audiobook rights alone can exceed other publishing rights by ten fold. I feel like there's a bit of a gold rush going on as some audiobook companies have had some serious investment capital shunted in over the past year or so. Of course, audiobooks also pay less royalties to the artist, as Brandon Sanderson recently made some noise about.
everyone i know who uses Audible make all their purchasing decisions based on the credit system, for what it's worth.
anyway, i'm done. happy new year, fellow kiwis.