#author policies

[dodgerkedavra]

Ministry of Magic

DodgerKedavra's Fanworks Policies

Binding: My fics are available for personal binds and gifts between friends. Don't sell them for money, or you will be forever cursed.

Podficcing: My fics are available for podficcing projects on an individual basis. If you'd like to record one, send me a message! Please don't use AI to record them.

Translations: My fics are available for translations on a case-by-case basis—please message me first. Please don't put them into Google Translate or any AI program for translation, and don't repost to websites other than AO3. Please link to the original work when posting,

Fanart: Please do fan art of my fics. I love it so much. I love it so, so much.

[communistkenobi]

This is moreover complicated by the fact that the [South African] apartheid state did not acknowledge itself as engaged in a war. The apartheid state in the late 1970s saw itself as engaged in a ‘total onslaught’, preferring to refer to its ‘enemy’ as terrorists rather than declaring an outright war. According to Cock and Nathan, the choice for the apartheid state to define the conflict as unrest or terrorism as opposed to war implied that liberation movement fighters were denied the prisoner of war status granted by the Geneva Protocols to those engaged in war against colonial powers.

— Women combatants and the liberation movements in South Africa (2015) by Siphokazi Magadla

its refreshing to see this so plainly laid out in writing. a terrorist is just someone the state has decided has no rights

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Keir Starmer appoints Jeff Bezos as his “first buddy”

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

Turns out Donald Trump isn't the only world leader with a tech billionaire "first buddy" who gets to serve as an unaccountable, self-interested de facto business regulator. UK PM Keir Starmer has just handed the keys to the British economy over to Jeff Bezos.

Oh, not literally. But here's what's happened: the UK's Competitions and Markets Authority, an organisation charged with investigating and punishing tech monopolists (like Amazon) has just been turned over to Doug Gurr, the guy who used to run Amazon UK.

This is – incredibly – even worse than it sounds. Marcus Bokkerink, the outgoing head of the CMA, was amazing, and he had charge over the CMA's Digital Markets Unit, the largest, best-staffed technical body of any competition regulator, anywhere in the world. The DMU uses its investigatory powers to dig deep into complex monopolistic businesses like Amazon, and just last year, the DMU was given new enforcement powers that would let it custom-craft regulations to address tech monopolization (again, like Amazon's).

But it's even worse. The CMA and DMU are the headwaters of a global system of super-effective Big Tech regulation. The CMA's deeply investigated reports on tech monopolists are used as the basis for EU regulations and enforcement actions, and these actions are then re-run by other world governments, like South Korea and Japan:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

The CMA is the global convener and ringleader in tech antitrust, in other words. Smaller and/or poorer countries that lack the resources to investigate and build a case against US Big Tech companies have been able to copy-paste the work of the CMA and hold these companies to account. The CMA invites (or used to invite) all of these competition regulators to its HQ in Canary Wharf for conferences where they plan global strategy against these monopolists:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077

Firing the guy who is making all this happening and replacing him with Amazon's UK boss is a breathtaking display of regulatory capture by Starmer, his business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, and his exchequer, Rachel Reeves.

But it gets even worse, because Amazon isn't just any tech monopolist. Amazon is a many-tentacled kraken built around an e-commerce empire. Antitrust regulators elsewhere have laid bare how Amazon uses that retail monopoly to take control over whole economies, while raising prices and crushing small businesses.

To understand Amazon's market power, first you have to understand "monopsonies" – markets dominated by buyers (monopolies are markets dominated by sellers – Amazon is both a monopolist and a monopsonist). Monopsonies are far more dangerous than monopolies, because they are easier to establish and easier to defend against competitors. Say a single retailer accounts for 30% of your sales: there isn't a business in the world that can survive an overnight 30% drop in sales, so that 30% market share might as well be 100%. Once your order is big enough that canceling it would bankrupt your supplier, you have near-total control over that supplier.

Amazon boasts about this. They call it "the flywheel": Amazon locks in shoppers (by getting them to prepay for a year's worth of shipping in advance, via Prime). The fact that a business can't sell to a large proportion of households if it's not on Amazon gives Amazon near-total power over that business. Amazon uses that power to demand discounts and charge junk fees to the businesses that rely on it. This allows it to lower prices, which brings in more customers, which means that even more businesses have to do business with Amazon to stay afloat:

https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

That's Amazon's version, anyway. In reality, it's a lot scuzzier. Amazon doesn't just demand deep discounts from its suppliers – it demand unsustainable discounts from them. For example, Amazon targeted small publishers with a program called the "Gazelle Project." Jeff Bezos told his negotiators to bring down these publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle":

https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/a-new-book-portrays-amazon-as-bully/

The idea was to get a bunch of cheap books for the Kindle to help it achieve critical mass, at the expense of driving these publishers out of business. They were a kind of disposable rocket stage for Amazon.

Deep discounts aren't the only way that Amazon feeds off its suppliers: it also lards junk-fee atop junk-fee. For every pound Amazon makes from its customers, it rakes in 45-51p in fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

Now, just like there's no business that can survive losing 30% of its sales overnight, there's also no business that can afford to hand 45-51% of its gross margin to a retailer. For businesses to survive at all on Amazon, they have to jack their prices up – way up. However, Amazon has an anticompetitive deal called "most favoured nation status" that forces suppliers to sell their goods on Amazon at the same price as they sell them elsewhere (even from their own stores). So when companies raise their prices in order to pay ransom to Amazon, they have to raise their prices everywhere. Far from being a force for low prices, Amazon makes prices go up everywhere, from the big Tesco's to the corner shop:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Amazon makes so much money off of this scam that it doesn't have to pay anything to ship its own goods – the profits from overcharging merchants for "fulfillment by Amazon" pay for all the shipping, on everything Amazon sells:

https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/AmazonMonopolyTollbooth-2023.pdf

Amazon competes with its own sellers, but unlike those sellers, it doesn't have to pay a 45-51% rake – and it can make its competitor-customers cover the full cost of its own shipping! On top of that, Amazon maintains the pretense that its headquarters are in Luxembourg, the tax- and crime-haven, and pays a fraction of the taxes that British businesses pay to HMRC (and that's not counting the 45-51% tax they pay to Jeff Bezos's monoposony).

That's not the only way that Amazon unfairly competes with British businesses, though: Amazon uses its position as a middleman between buyers and sellers to identify the most successful products sold by its own customers. Then it copies those products and sells them below the original inventor's costs (because it gets free shipping, pays no tax, and doesn't have to pay its own junk fees), and drives those businesses into the ground. Even Jeff "Project Gazelle" Bezos seems to understand that this is a bad look, which is why he perjured himself to the American Congress when he was questioned under oath about it:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58961836

Amazon then places its knockoff products above the original goods on its search results page. Amazon makes $38b selling off placement on these search pages, and the top results for an Amazon search aren't the best matches for your query – they're the ones that pay the most. On average, Amazon's top result for a search is 29% more expensive than the best match on the site. On average, the top row of results is 25% more expensive than the best match on the site. On average, Amazon buries the best result for your search 17 places down the results page:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Amazon, in other words, acts like the business regulator for the economies it dominates. It decides what can be sold, and at what prices. It decides whose products come up when you search, and thus which businesses deserve to live and which ones deserve to die. An economy dominated by Amazon isn't a market economy – it's a planned economy, run by Party Secretary Bezos for the benefit of Amazon's shareholders.

Now, there is a role for a business regulator, because some businesses really don't deserve to live (because they sell harmful products, engage in deceptive practices, etc). The UK has a regulator that's in charge of this stuff: the Competition and Markets Authority, which is now going to be run by Jeff Bezos's hand-picked UK Amazon boss. That means that Amazon is now both the official and the unofficial central planner of the UK economy, with a free hand to raise prices, lower quality, and destroy British businesses, while hiding its profits in Luxemourg and starving the exchequer of taxes.

The "first buddy" role that Keir Starmer just handed over to Jeff Bezos is, in every way, more generous than the first buddy deal Trump gave Elon Musk.

Starmer's government claims they're doing this for "growth" but Amazon isn't a force for growth, it's force for extraction. It is a notorious underpayer of its labour force, a notorious tax-cheat, and a world-beating destroyer of local economies, local jobs, and local tax bases. Contrary to Amazon's own self-mythologizing, it doesn't deliver lower prices – it raises prices throughout the economy. It doesn't improve quality – this is a company whose algorithmic recommendation system failed to recognize that an "energy drink" was actually its own drivers' bottled piss, which it then promoted until it was the best-selling energy drink on the platform:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

There's a reason that the UK, the EU, Japan and South Korea found it so easy to collaborate on antitrust cases against American companies: these are all countries whose competition law was rewritten by American technocrats during the Marshall Plan, modeled on the US's own laws. The bedrock of US competition law is 1890's Sherman Act, whose author, Senator John Sherman, declared that:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Jeff Bezos is the autocrat of trade that John Sherman warned us about, 135 years ago. And Keir Starmer just abdicated in his favour.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

Image: UK Parliament/Maria Unger (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keir_Starmer_2024.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeff_Bezos%27_iconic_laugh.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[nellasbookplanet]

I recently started reading (and ended up dropping partway through) an m/m retelling of an old legend, and it made me think of this reoccurring thing I've come across a handful of times now in m/m fiction and how they approach women, equality, and world-building.

Let's call it the omegaverse problem, because that's where it seems the most blatant (I've only come across it twice outside of fandom spaces that I can remember). Basically, it's when the writer looks at the unequal and sometimes oppressive roles women serve in society (today and historically), and goes 'this is a good basis for dark romance but there are too many women here' and then just. plops men into the roles traditionally served by women and recreates heteronormative tropes but They're All Men Now, none of those icky women.

Now, completely removing any and all gender based inequality isn't a bad basis for a queer-inclusive fantasy! But thing is, this type of narrative isn't interested in women, so they often read as if women have mysteriously disappeared from society (except for the occassional mom or sister). They don’t bother to include women in traditionally male areas (the book I dropped had plenty of male courtesans, with diplomats and bodyguards and advisors also being male) nor to create new roles for them.

They also generally don’t bother to look critically at the systemic and societal inequalities they're mimicking. The concept 'typically sexist society but they're all men (or all women)' could be used to alienate and deconstruct our ideas of what’s 'normal' and what’s oppressive, a way to compare the intersections of class and gender. Instead, this kind of story is only interested in using inequality as inter-character conflict and set-up for romance. And it sucks.

[mariesbee]

i need whatever they put into kendall knight injected into my veins. especially big time audition kendall, he was 1 step away from beating the crap out of gustavo (lmao) that's not to say that i don't absolutely love the softer kendall we get almost literally from episode 2 and onwards, he's a sillier, softer-edged version of himself, just like bad boy kendall is his existing personality cranked up by like 20% and we do get moments later on where his bta edge comes forward, just not as strong.

i just. have a lot of feelings about him as a character

[mangosaurus]

JWCT FANDOM PSA!!! if a transcript and/or images of today's panel come out and you decide to blog about it, please remember to tag your spoilers!! we don't wanna ruin the first episode for people who'd rather wait to watch it themselves!!

[1000sunnygo]

Do you ship lawbin?

I don't exactly ship them but I don't hate the ship either.. Just neutral, I guess? It's such a harmless ship but massively hated for no reason lmao.

I discovered it was a thing only after Sawyer7mage talked about them in a chapter review (good reviewer btw! some sarcasms he made here reminded me that he's a professional therapist pfff) Initially I didn't like the idea but some valid points have been raised in favor of the ship by him and others. Law/Robin don't have a lot going together so far, but public opinion can be easily swayed if Oda lets them interact more. Given the recent developments in late Wano, the chance is quite high.

Only problem is that these two seem to be drawn towards the type of people that are opposite of each other. Robin had flirted with larger and older men who aren't "conventionally attractive", and Law's buddies are all silly little fellows with little pride who like to pamper him all the time. But fanarts like this by @/takara_op did a great job convincing me that they'd be pretty fun to follow as a duo 👍🏼

Oda's depiction of Law and love and his character dynamic with women is an entirely different topic and I have a year old draft meta on this,,,,maybe I should post it some day 🫠 doesn't have much Lawbin in it though

[altaneenarts]

"Shrike" Printable PDF

Here you have it, a physical print of "Shrike", the prequel to the wonderful "Passerine"! Ever since the prequel was finished I wanted a copy to go alongside my "Passerine" print. With the author's permission, I made one for myself and now you guys! For those that loved the stories as much as I did, here you go <3

The files included are a 169 page PDF (which has been lightly spellchecked & grammar edited), a summary of the fic, a table of contents, some decorative graphics, and a separate PDF of a book cover (both for Paperback & Hardcover). They're all sized for an 8.5" x 5.5" (Digest Size) book.

Below I've attached printing instructions and the needed files to print your own book. I've also created a Google Drive with other printable fics I've made if you want to check those out too :D To be clear, I am not selling this or any of these books and any price you pay will be strictly printing and shipping costs. These files are for personal use only and if I find anyone selling copies/files I will take them down. I hope you all enjoy!

INSTRUCTIONS:

Create an account on lulu.com

Go to the home page and click on Create > Print Books > Start My Print Book

On the Start My Project page select Print Book for both the Product Type & Select a Goal. For Book Details put whatever you'd like & click Design Project

Upload the interior file PDF (ignore the transparency warning)

For Book Specifications I recommend Black & White Standard > 60# Cream > Paperback or Hardcover (depending on your budget/preference) > Matte

For Book Cover Design, upload the respective Cover PDF (Hardcover or Paperback) > Click Review > Publish

Once published, you can add the book to your cart and buy it :)

FILES:

Interior File PDF

Hardcover Design PDF

Paperback Design PDF

Other printable fics!

[isfjmel-phleg]

I have to order books for the library today and I just put all the current requests in the cart and I want to run away and forget they exist

[strangeauthor]

did u know the hoa fucking sucks??? cause they do.

[duckiemimi]

if honesty corner stsg didn't get back together, gojo would be on track to become a billionaire ceo and geto would become a politician.

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Author pushed against fans, went into a mini rage and missed some good points...

I'm not going to quote what they said word for word to make it harder for you to find it. If you know it, don't make it easier to find it.

The thrust of what they said was that everyone in a particular thread must "hate romance" and that "book twitter " "wasn't real" and then they missed some really good points from the thread.

If you need 3 page critiques in order to understand criticisms from buyers, then you didn't get enough critiquers on your work. You should 100% understand all of the criticisms that are going to come your way.

So the opening tweet said that the book was the worst, but the later tweets went onto explain.

The person specifically doesn't particularly care for white straight cis het romance (as in all of those things combined). But they are a book reviewer, so felt obligated. They mostly read YA, in general. Book reviewers often have to read books they don't like. It's part of the job. Raging at them for reading a book they didn't like isn't going to help.

The author 100% missed that fact by not scrolling down the thread and seeing *gasp* Romance recommendations which were filled to the brim with straight PoC romance. Queer romance, etc. Diverse book choices. Does this mean the author is required to write those things? No. But it's something to note and keep in mind when someone is criticizing you for being the worst.

The reviewer also thought that the enemies to lovers was lukewarm and it was trying to be "trendy" but also pointed out that the cover was a rebranding from an earlier work.

They thought enemies to lovers only works in fantasy and stated as much.

And this seemed to be a criticism the commenters agreed with. It's a valid specific criticism of the premise.

The reviewer did bother to correct some people on misconceptions of the book, so it's clear they read it, despite what the author said.

But the author held that the majority of the criticism was about the cover (see above, not true)

The author didn't bother to read the thread to see *what* was said about the cover.

This divided into two parts.

One was that people didn't like the cursive on the blurb.

And, BTW, this is a valid concern. The reasons for this (dusting off my typography) are:

Cursive is harder to read at smaller type which makes it much less friendly to websites and digital marketing. (yadda yadda about negative space which makes the positive space more readable which I said about typography many times before)

Cursive is not disability accessible. It's particularly bad for dyslexia as the shape of the letters gets often distorted, which makes everything worse. None of the cursive fonts show up on the list of fonts good for people who are dyslexic.

People were CURIOUS about the creepy crawly on the cover

Be sure to sort the emotion behind the thought when regular fan, not your critiquers, are commenting on your work or your partner's work (i.e. the book cover artist).

The cover artist didn't go into a rage like the author did, but the author went into a rage about the fact they commented on the cover. Any work that wasn't yours DON'T comment with all that negativity. Shut up.

Some people didn't like how the blurb was written and thought it gave away too much or didn't draw out the tension enough to argue enemies to lovers.

That is a specific critique, isn't it? Write your blurbs better or ask your publisher to take note of what the public wants.

The author 100% missed the positive reviews in the thread about the book and threw also those people as "negative" because they said the whole of the thread was negative.

There were some genuinely positive reviews. Some mediocre reviews where they said they read the book a "long time ago." With the negative reviews, some people said they were curious to read it (but it was middle of the week.) But the author saw the criticisms, and didn't actually read the thread, or selectively chose the negative reviews and saw all of the likes and failed to see the context, thus threw out all of the positive reviews and commenters. This was prior to the author commenting.

Again, have someone cold sort your reviews and *get better critiquers* By the time of publication, you need to know what the critiques of your book are going to be. If you're up shouting because you haven't heard it before, then you need better critiquers to lay it out for you. Know the downsides of your story in advance so you know your market.

In addition, the author gave them all less than ONE day to translate that into sales before throwing their fit.

When I looked up the "questionable" tweet it had been less than one day and the author had made a comment already.

The comment was made in the middle of the week. Most people don't get paid until Friday. Do the math and hold your tongue. Not everyone is rich, especially if your target demographic is teenagers and college students.

Defense of the author by others

But all reviewers need to be helpful

Everything must be self-contained into one tweet.

But the critique was so mean

they are clearly anti-romance

*blaming the reviewer for the state of what the whole internet does*

After your work is "out there" past the publishing doors, no, reviewers have no obligation to be helpful. They are average readers who don't have a deep understanding of say the story theory you put behind it.

And no, one Twitter, no, you do not have to self-contain reviews. Read the thread. If you're arguing facebook or another platform with longer writing space, yes.

The critique wasn't nice enough? Tough luck.

People didn't read the thread. They were anti a specific type of romance, the mediocre lukewarm enemies to lovers. How does that translate into "all romance is horrible forever and for all time"? The reviewer gave a specific type of romance.

Conclusion

The reason I didn't name the author is because I am not out here trying to hate on a particular author or send people after them. What I'm trying to say is that all writers need to consider various things before they get published:

Reading reviews can make you blind to the positive, especially if you were told it's all negative. You feel under attack and then are likely to exaggerate what was said.

If negative reviews of your works sends you into fight mode, you might want to give the policy: "Please do not ever send me any of my reader's reviews no matter what, that includes all critiquers."

If you can't handle it, ask someone else, like an agent to handle it and have one of their lackeys handle it.

If your critiquers missed a critique, then you need to get better critiquers so you know your audience.

If you *do* decide to handle your own reviews, etc, grow thicker skin, don't read them, or learn how to cold sort like I did above. "Ah, they wanted something queer because of the lack of queer rep in the market. Maybe I can do something with my marketing in my other books to do something like that". "This negative tweet is popular, how do I make myself look better through this." (An example for this specific book would to say "Yup, the creepy crawly might be the worst, but you'll find out why it's on the cover if you read my book!") If you can't twist negative reviews into actual sales, then you can't handle it and give it to someone else who can. Pushing back on people never goes well. 100% I get that one might feel attacked, when they are receiving critiques. But as with above, you might miss the positive with the negative. And if you start attacking "all of Twitter" and all of "tiktok" and start saying everyone in a thread was "negative" then you might want to reconsider your policies as an author or before you are an author. Especially, especially if you are demanding that criticisms translates into sales in the middle of the weekday and you aren't thinking "Huh? Who is my target demographic and when will they likely have money?" on a book that's getting a new cover.

There were people who genuinely were curious and hoping that the creepy crawly on the cover translated to a critical thing in the book, but if you blast them blindly are they going to feel warm and fuzzy about buying your book? Nope. So throwing them out isn't going to help your cause–it alienated potential buyers who wanted to know if the book itself was "that bad". It's better to change your policy and shut up. The author wasn't even on twitter and the reviewer didn't send the critique directly to the author, which means it's in the reader's domain. Saying one has to confine their reviews to only Goodreads is ridiculous. Change your policy so that no reviews are sent to you.

This is a lesson, you are a marketer after your book is published. Put that hat on and think about how best market your book. Sometimes negative reviews do translate to sales. So approach it well.

And for everyone else out there–it's generally bad policy to send reviews to your favorite authors. If they weren't at-ed, or otherwise directly informed, it's a bad idea to do it. They might have a policy like above or they don't have good emotion regulation or whatever. So don't do it. If you feel like the "whole genre is being attacked" and you need to absolutely send it. Don't. Really? In less than 24 hours you're doing it? You didn't sit down and think about it.

[harriswalz4usabybr]

Speech Vice President Harris will give in Juneau, AK!

~BR~

[madtomedgar]

Reading the employee handbook and just. Screams in autism.

[aromacaque]

professors will say they're understanding of mental health until your mental illness actually becomes an obstacle in their class