Dear Authors: Not Every Story Belongs on Amazon

Traditional Publishing is Dying; Indies Should Be Innovating

I don’t want to throw a grenade into the writer-sphere, but not every story needs to be a novel. In fact, a lot of them shouldn't be.

We all grew up with novels as our medium for the written word. Of course we did; the big publishing houses were still firmly in control. But now, even in the wild west of the indie author landscape, a lot of us are still operating under the assumption that success requires churning out 300-page epics destined for Amazon's bestseller lists. This mindset ignores a fundamental truth about the current market—different narratives require different formats, audiences, and platforms.

I used to write fan fiction. X-Men fan fiction, specifically. So know that it comes from a place of love when I tell you that your weird self-insert daydream, if published at all, doesn’t belong on Amazon.

Because of the stranglehold of trad pub, writers have gotten it into their heads that every piece of fiction MUST be a novel. But it’s not true. Kid Dynamo is the finest X-Men fanfiction ever written. But even if it got the copyright blessing of Disney Marvel, Amazon isn’t the right place for it. It’s not accessible to anyone without 30 years of X-Men knowledge… and it’s still a self-insert fanfiction, albeit a good one.

We’re all still clinging to the idea that if our story was GOOD, it would be sold on the Zon. If it’s available anywhere else (or God forbid, it isn’t behind a paywall), then it’s not REAL writing.

This is my plea to indies to look around. Trad pub is dying. So why are you clinging to their business model?