Don't play stupid games

Like a lot of folks, my mornings start out with coffee, checking the headlines, and scrolling through social media until the brain kicks in. Of course, all that is after I’ve done my duty to the feline lords of the house and the dog who really doesn’t understand why they meow instead of bark. Normally, other than politics, nothing really sets me off during this “wake up” time. Of course, there are exceptions and they almost always involve some level of “did you not think about the consequences before doing X or Y?”.

If you’ve read many of my posts over at Nocturnal Lives, you’ll know I have little patience for those who act without considering the consequences of their actions or who believe the rules don’t apply to them. That’s especially true when it comes to those who call themselves writers and purposefully manipulate the system even though they know what they’re doing is against the terms of service for whatever platform they’re publishing on.

Before we get to the stupid games part of the post, I’ll harp for a moment on another favorite topic of mine: back up your work!

This rant is brought to you thanks to an article I saw this morning about an author (or maybe I should say another author) who relied on Google Docs solely to keep track of her works in progress. IIRC, she had something like 10 or 12 WIPs loaded into Google Docs as the only place she kept her work. She did not have them saved out on her laptop. She did not have them loaded onto a thumb drive or external HD. Everything was in the cloud.

“In the cloud” is the key here. Yes, she was impacted by something that happened with Google Docs—specifically, Google believed she did something against their ToS and locked down the account. She worked to 1) discover what she supposedly did (or did not do) and 2) unlock the account so she can access her files again. It came down to Google’s bots or whatever thought she was spamming using her Google Docs account because she was using the platform for her alpha and beta readers and that meant a lot of activity going to a number of different mail accounts.

I’m glad she got her account back and, along with it, access to her work. But I have to ask why in the world she was not backing her work up in some way other than saving it to the cloud? Right now I have multiple save files for Warbound Legacy. They sit on my MacBook Air, my Acer laptop, on two different external drives, as well as existing in the cloud. The main files are on the Mac. It is my work computer. I save to the cloud once or twice a day. Those files are then opened and saved on the Acer, which I sometimes work on in the evenings while watching TV with Mom. Saves to the external drives happen once or twice a week, and often more.

Why? Because I am terrified of losing work. I’ve had hard drives crash and burn. I’ve seen file formats for writing programs change and no longer be able to open an old file without a lot of headaches, heartaches and frustration (does anyone remember WordPerfect by Corel, especially the DOS version?).

Do yourself a favor and back up until you worry you are becoming obsessive about it. Don’t rely on an external site to protect your work.

Now on to the consequences part of the morning rant. Over the last few months, I’ve seen several (more than several honestly) posts on various social media sites complaining about Amazon being mean. Specifically, authors have been complaining because Amazon has threatened or followed through with threats to shut down their accounts due to meta data misuse. Long story short, these authors have been fudging the system by using the subtitle option when they set up a title page to try to drive searches to that title.

You know the ones I mean. Say you search for a military science fiction novel. The search brings up “Jane Doe’s Adventures in Love and Animal Husbandry” with the subtitle of “a romance novel with a military vet who loves science and reads fiction at night. . . .”. Okay, that’s a lousy example but I’m too lazy right now to go find an actual example. What the one I made up does is hit key words, or meta tags, that have nothing to do with the book and that mislead the reader.

It is also something against Amazon’s ToS.

Here’s why I have an issue. More than one of the authors who got caught abusing the system complained about Amazon being mean to them because “every writer does it”. According to these folks, every writer who sales through KDP abuses meta data and uses the subtitle option to trick the search engine.

Except we don’t. We read the ToS and we know that sooner or later, Amazon’s bots are likely to catch up with us if we do try to skirt the rules. More than that, we respect our readers and don’t want to 1) insult them and 2) piss them off because they will leave negative reviews and report the title to Amazon.

So don’t go whining to the masses when you get caught doing something you know is against the rules. THAT is what pisses me off.

And now my coffee cup is empty, my stomach is growling, and the brain is finally functioning at a level where I can get to work. So I’ll climb off my soap box and leave you with this:

If something seems too good to be true, it usually is. Cutting corners might save a bit of time now but it can come back to bite you in the butt later. If you’re going to violate the rules, don’t brag about it and don’t cry and say it’s not fair when you get caught. Accept the consequences of your actions, learn from it, and move on.

Until later!