Why Is Everything Here Free? Are You Crazy?

I might be crazy. After all, I once made a small income as a writer. (I never cracked the big leagues, so the money was never more than supplemental, anyway.) So to turn around and give my work away for free may very well be crazy. Many would say that choosing to go from being an agented, traditionally published author and columnist to a pseudonym-wearing writer toiling away in the unknown depths of the internet is nothing short of insane.

So be it. There is a method to the madness of my choice. And since the choice makes me happy, that’s all that matters. But I’ll explain for the curious.

I’d rather write than worry about marketing my work. Or getting pirated, or having my work gobbled up by some ravenous AI model, or having to pigeonhole my work to one genre, or being told that my work is too commercial (or not commercial enough), or having to dumb down my words for short attention spans, or gaming some algorithm for exposure, and the list goes on. It’s not that I’m opposed to money or commercialism. I’m not coming at this from some hippie mindset about being a sellout, or a “capitalism is evil” political position. Money is great and if writing for money makes you happy, have at it. But there are tradeoffs involved in selling work that I’m no longer willing to make.

I’m fortunate to be able to make this choice because I have another job that actually pays the bills. I don’t have to get paid for my creative work, so I’d simply rather do work that makes me happy than to deal with all the other stuff that comes along once money is involved.

I wasn’t happy as a traditionally published author. I thought it would be a dream job, but it quickly turned into, if not an outright nightmare, at least one of those disturbing dreams that leaves you asking, “What the hell?” when you wake up in the morning. It actually made me depressed.

I didn’t enjoy the constant marketing that was required of me. As a mid-list author, I got very little marketing assistance from my publisher. Gaming the algorithms of Amazon for exposure was a dystopian nightmare. Trying to outwit the bots felt too much like something out of a Terminator movie. And it was never-ending work, because the bot was constantly evolving to thwart my efforts. Hours wasted only to be wiped away when a new update occurred.

Social media just made me angry and felt like a waste of time. No matter what I tried or which platform(s) I used, it was never fun. It’s possible I just suck at it, but I couldn’t see the point of rotting my brain cells on it (and wasting precious life hours) if I wasn’t getting something positive out of it. It never felt “organic” to me and the notion of chasing the popular aesthetics to be popular just felt like high school all over again. And when the world went pear-shaped and every platform turned into a toxic stew, and corporations intentionally manipulated it to be as harmful as possible, I knew I couldn’t do it. At least not to the level required to be “successful.”

Then there was the fact that any money I was making (which wasn’t a boatload to begin with) dwindled as piracy took over. It was too exhausting to keep up with where my work was popping up every day, and filing cease and desist letters did very little to stop the problem. Sales edged down as the amount of legal filings went up. The final straw was discovering that my books had been fed into the wood chipper of Meta’s AI model (and probably others). Obviously I was far from the only one victimized by this, but the writing was on the wall at that point. Piracy was never going to go away, and large corporations and the government were even legitimizing it. I stood no chance.

The writing stopped being fun, too, which was the worst thing of all. I was pressured to string out a series long after the story should have ended. Those stories were over and I was ready to move on, but I couldn’t. The series suffered for it and ended, I thought, badly. When I finally did try to move on, I wanted to switch genres. Nope, can’t do that, I was told. “People know you as a fantasy writer. You can’t switch.” (Also, I was told I’m too old to break out into something new, as publishing likes to debut young authors, not old farts. It’s ironic that ageism is the one thing that never gets old.)

But I have a broad range of interests, and a desire to stretch myself creatively. While fantasy will always be my first love and you’ll find a lot of it here over the years, I enjoy writing in many different genres. If I was going to have to use a pseudonym and start my career over in order to switch genres, I figured I might as well do exactly that.

Get a pseudonym and start over. And if I was going to have to start over, it wasn’t like I’d be making any money, anyway. I’d be back to square one, professionally and financially. So I asked myself, “If I have a job that pays the bills, does it matter if I get paid for my creative work?” The answer came back, “No.” So I figured, what the hell. Just do it for free.

And, finally, I got old(er). That may be the biggest reason why I’ve set my work free. The older I get, the less bullshit I’m wiling to put up with. And everything described above just felt like bullshit. Yes, there were some good moments. I loved in-person events. I loved connecting with readers (even those who didn’t like my work) as long as they engaged with me thoughtfully and from a place of constructive criticism. I loved hearing that my work had impacted someone positively, tuned a kid in to reading, or made someone think. I loved connecting with other authors, booksellers, and librarians. Those were the days when I thought things might be okay, after all.

But none of that happened often enough to offset the misery of people just dropping, “You suck,” and “You killed off my favorite character, so you need to die, too,” randomly into my social media feed. And it didn’t happen often enough to offset the misery of dealing with pirate sites, spending too many hours “marketing” and battling bots and not writing, or being forced to tailor my work to a market that no one, not even my publisher or agent, seemed to understand or be able to keep up with.

Being old(er), I’ve realized that my time is finite. And that time grows shorter every day. While I doubt I’m going to die tomorrow, I’m also beyond the age where if I did die tomorrow people would say, “What a shame. They were so young.” I’m old enough now where people would say, “Well, it’s not so shocking, really.”

And that lights a fire under my ass to do exactly what I want with whatever time I have remaining. And what I want to do is write. I want to write what moves me on any given day. I want to write for fun and love, not to chase money or social media “fame.” It’s all I ever wanted to do, really, since I was a little kid.

So for now I’m just going to write and put it out there for you to read. Or not. If you don’t want to read my work, fine by me. Read what makes you happy. I’m not going to try to talk you into reading my work, or convince you you’re missing out if you don’t, or set it to some catchy tune with a pretty aesthetic on TikTok. My new motto is read it, don’t read it, I don’t care. I’m doing this for me and if others enjoy it, find it, and want to follow along, I’m happy to have you.

Hopefully some of you find enjoyment in these stories and essays, or they make you think.

That would be all the payment I could ask for.