Time For Yet Another Change

It seems like every couple of months that go by, I decide to implement another change in how I go about doing things here on The Storyteller's Corner. Well, here we are again, and pretty much on schedule, I've come to another such moment. A couple of months ago, I published a piece entitled "Kumbaya is Over", a brief essay piece clarifying that I had grown tired of feeling taken for granted, that I was going to implement a paywall here and allow everything older than 6 weeks to vanish behind that wall.

Fast forward to a few days ago, and I've decided to change tactics once again.

I'll be removing all paywalls for my Substack later today, but I've already taken steps to ensure that this isn't a big hit to my professional efforts as an independent author. You see, I've gone into my various Sections and deleted a TON of posts, reducing full-length novels to only 3-5 chapters. If readers want more of those stories, they can find the full book on Amazon or Lulu, where they are available for purchase.

A few of these titles aren't yet available for purchase yet, though, and that will be a focus for me for the 2025 calendar year; "The Justice of Amelia" and "American Goblin" are both already available for purchase, along with many other tales from yours truly over on Amazon and/or Lulu, or Thriftbooks.

This will also make it easier to publish my fanfiction tales on Fridays, so that I can avoid the murky waters of copyright law by not asking for money for works I don't own legal rights to profit off of.

Why am I doing this? Well, the reason is twofold. For one, I DO still want to try to earn some money from my efforts as a genre fiction storyteller. Secondly, while I still enjoy using Substack, I no longer believe the Subscription-First Model can maintain long-term viability, not for small-timers and indies like myself. I believe that for guys and gals who aren't already household names, a la carte is going to prove more feasible than insisting on getting a recurring payment from large numbers of patrons.

So, a few new Posts will appear here soon, assigned to the relevant Sections and linking folks to the full titles associated on Lulu, Barnes and Noble, Thriftbooks or Amazon (in order of preference from most to least there). I'm never going to be an Amazon First or exclusive guy; I've worked in one of their Fulfillment Centers, and there's no way I'd back the Beast of Bezos ahead of other distributors. Frankly, Amazon-exclusive authors are, in my opinion, taking a steaming shit on the entire Art of the written word, but that's a topic to cover another day.

For now, though, folks, I invite you happily to join me for what DOES come to the Substack front of The Storyteller's Corner. Don't worry about everything I do becoming completely commercial or mercenary; I'm just not that type of guy. But I'm not going to be pushed around anymore, not by the market, not by folks demanding endless freebies, and not by the likes of monopoly-loving Bezos and friends.

This is my Corner, and I'm shaping it into what works for me. As a sort of side-note, that also means that I'm going to be a little more aggressive toward certain fevered egos here on Substack, and I don't give a tin shit how big or small their following is, some folks need a reality check.