more-a-yer blues

Things are looking grim, as people who promised to read my work basically aren't doing it, or are doing it away from the counter, where the zon would pick up on it and deliver it unto me. There are perhaps four or five out there, who by posting on the trains, pledged to read mine, and are not delivering. Some may read tonight, as there's no real time limit saying they have to read it in the day, and that I can only hope for. I'm grateful that their downloading and reading maybe two or three pages has at least triggerred the ratings bump that I was looking for. But I'm disheartened that, bottom line, I was just looking for readers. These folks aren't reading.

I wrote to one and said, hey, you've stiffed me again. He was about eight days into it, and he had stiffed me before. Last time, he just apologized and read it. This time, I'm not sure what he's thinking. He posts on these trains all the time. What does he do, just stiff everyone he can? I find it hard to believe that you can just space out a responsibility.

Of course I have three possible recourses. One would be to complain to authorities, which I hate to do. The other is to download one of his books surreptitiously and give him a 1, or worse yet a 2. This also doesn't sit well with me and I will probably not do it, since I believe that a rating should at least generally be related to the quality of the work. Finally, there's ragging him but, if he really doesn't want to read it, what does that say? It's depressing. And it could be true for the other three as well.

There is one kind of recourse that feels better to me. That is to just wait until he posts again on one train or another, and post under him. He would need a lot of nerve to complain if I were slow here, since I think deep down he knows that he's over a month slow, owes me a read, that kind of thing. In a sense I just get paid back this way. I'm off the hook, reading his, knowing that now we're even.

I don't like this either, bottom line. Why are authors such dishonest bargainers? It seems like I'm hanging around the wrong crowd. If they think so highly of themselves, and have so little respect for a guy who's basically coming up from the bottom, what does that say for the kind of environment I'm in? When I get where I'm going, why should I even look back?

Before I go any further I should say that the vast majority have not been like this. I seem to have run across a nasty spell here, with one person who gave me a review after only reading ten pages. You think I didn't notice? Somewhere there are readers who want to read my work, and I'll find them. I'm working on a Kindle Vella project now; maybe that will go somewhere.