Ready to stop begging Amazon for scraps?
Resistance expert Kit Perez on building structural trust outside the system
Most indie authors hate Amazon but keep feeding it anyway. They complain about the algorithm, the pennies-per-read, the soul-crushing rankings—then immediately upload their next book to KDP.
Kit Perez (@shepardscale), an intelligence analyst and resistance expert, explains why this happens: we’re trained to emotionally trust systems that will never reward us. In this week’s interview, she breaks down the difference between owning customers (Amazon’s game) and owning readers (yours), why traumatized writers fall hardest for publishing scams, and the three non-negotiable rules for building a parallel economy that can’t be stripped away by algorithmic whim.
Watch if you’re ready to stop performing for a machine that sees you as extractable value.⬇️
That’s an interesting point I hadn’t thought about, who owns your characters? As a book author, you might sell the rights to a book to make a movie… But the sequel books you are still writing, or may have already published still have those characters. You would like to hope that Netflix wouldn’t transform your European character into a African tribal leader and completely change their world view… Except that they don’t have a very good track record on that. Next thing you know, your two side characters are in a gay relationship And it’s all woke as hell. It makes me wonder if an author should trademark their characters, and then when they sell the rights to the book, the studio still must also buy temporary rights to portray the characters accurately in the movie.🤷♂️