I’m happy to report that the audition process for the Action Figures audiobook project has taken a turn for the better.

The first several auditions I received were disappointing as a whole. A couple had promise, but nothing wowed me — until last week, when I got a really exciting audition, and word from an old actor friend of mine she might be interested in the project. I’m hoping to wrap up auditions this week and move on to the recording phase.

On another note…

You may have heard that there is a consumer-led Amazon boycott this week, a call to refrain from buying anything from the retail giant, using their Alexa products in your home, viewing anything on Amazon Video, etc., to show support for workers whose efforts to unionize have been thwarted by the company.

To be clear: I support the unionization of Amazon workers and I support the boycott. Amazon is absolutely a problematic company, and consumers should take the action they deem necessary to send the message that Amazon needs to do better.

Now, whenever similar past initiatives have popped up, there’s often been a corresponding response among indie and small press authors begging consumers to make an exception when it comes to buying books. A lot of indie authors are able to make a living on their writing thanks to Amazon, so of course they’re going to be squirrelly about even a week’s worth of lost sales.

Further, Amazon is largely responsible for the rise of independent authorship by giving writers a truly national, even global sales platform. Fifteen, maybe even just ten years ago, an indie author couldn’t get their books on Barnes & Noble’s or Borders’ websites, but Amazon let them all in, and gave indie authors the tools to produce professional-quality products.

Amazon rightfully deserves a lot of the criticism it receives, but it deserves credit where it’s due as well.

Anyway, the immediate point I’m making is this: Amazon is a necessary evil for a lot of us, and it’s not easy to break away from the Zon and sustain our income levels. Some have done it, absolutely, but they’re what’s known as “the exception to the rule.” For every author who successfully “goes wide” — diversifies their retail outlets so they’re not selling solely through Amazon — there are several more who have tried and have never generated enough sales traffic to justify leaving Amazon, partially or entirely.

Consumers are a big part of the reason why so many of us can’t make a go through other retailers. For all their Amazon-bashing, they still turn to Amazon on a regular basis, and probably always will. And even when they say they’re going to spend their money elsewhere, they don’t do it — not to any appreciable degree.

After receiving a lot of feedback from readers, including people who wanted my books but didn’t want to give their money to Amazon, I tried going wide. My entire catalog was on B&N and Kobo for more than two years, and I saw a grand total of four sales between the two platforms in that time. I literally sold twice as many books through my website in that two-year period. I promoted these other retailers aggressively, told people directly at shows that they could buy my stuff through B&N, and they always said, “Oh, great, I’ll look that up when I get home!”

And yet, more than 95 percent of my total sales were through Amazon.

The hard, unfortunate reality is, a lot of indie authors, myself included, can’t survive without Amazon. We just can’t.

We’d love to, but we can’t.

And even if another viable platform popped up to challenge the mighty Zon, we wouldn’t be able to all jump ship and continue to make sales on-par with Amazon overnight. There would be a transitional period during which our sales would drop off, perhaps too sharply and for too long to keep us going until things leveled out again, so that would drive us to resist making that change.

We’ve all thought about this, a lot. I’d love to no longer be so beholden to Amazon, but I am. All I can do is make the best of it and be honest about my decisions — which, yes, are almost entirely financial. I’m in no position to take a moral stand and abandon Amazon as my primary retailer. I’ve gotten spoiled by having a home and food.

I may say that flippantly, but it’s true nevertheless.

Go ahead and boycott Amazon this week if that’s your thing. I certainly won’t hold it against you.

All I ask is that you don’t hold it against me when I go back to pushing book sales on Amazon when it’s all over.

This week’s big news is that I am working on getting the long-delayed Action Figures audiobook project back off the ground.

I’d initially started work on that in late 2017, but for multiple reasons I’ll simply call “behind the scenes issues,” it stalled out hard. My original narrator left the project amicably, and now I’m on the hunt for a new narrator to tackle not just book one, but the entire series.

The major challenge here will be to find someone who can tackle what has become a huge, diverse cast of characters. In writing up notes for whoever eventually gets the job, I realized I had more than fifty regular and recurring characters and countless incidental character who pop up over the course of the series. That’s a LOT of distinct voices to juggle.

I plan to take my time reviewing auditions and be ruthlessly picky about who I ultimately choose to take this on, but I hope to get the first — and maybe even the second — audiobook out this year, and maintain a two-audiobooks-per-year schedule until the series wraps in 2023.

Bit of a slow week this week, but I am happy to report that Beneath the Mask: A Superhero Romance Anthology got off to a great start in its first week on sale, breaking the top ten on three Amazon best-seller lists! Reviews have also started coming in and it’s doing well there so far (four star average on Amazon, 4.5 on Goodreads). If you’ve already picked up the book, please remember to leave a review!