by CD Damitio
I spent years telling anyone who would listen that Amazon was the problem. Not a problem — the problem. The monopolist eating indie publishing alive, the algorithm overlord that made serfs of writers, the company that could delist your life’s work on a Tuesday afternoon with no explanation and no appeal. I believed all of that. I still believe most of it.
So why are all my books going back up on Amazon?
Because millions of people are there. And my work needs to be in front of millions of people.
That’s it. That’s the whole argument. I wish it were more complicated, more philosophically satisfying, more consistent with the person I’ve been telling myself I am for the last decade. But the truth has a way of cutting through the stories we tell ourselves, and the truth is this: I’ve been so focused on the ethics of distribution that I lost sight of the purpose of writing.
The purpose of writing is to be read.
Baoism — the philosophy I’ve been building and living for years — exists to help people find meaning in a world that has systematically dismantled the old structures of meaning. It’s emergency infrastructure for the human spirit. But emergency infrastructure that nobody can find is just a bunker in the woods. It helps no one. I’ve been tending that bunker while people wandered lost above ground.
Same with the Sultanate of Baboob, with Notes from Nowhere, with everything I’ve put on the page across 30+ books and counting. These aren’t just stories. They carry a worldview, a way of moving through the world, a permission slip for people who feel like they don’t fit the default settings of modern life. But a permission slip sitting in a drawer signs nothing.
I tried to build the alternative. I still believe in the alternative. Xcrol exists because privacy-first social networking matters. W3WU exists because collaborative worldbuilding should belong to its creators. MicrovictoryArmy exists because small wins compound into lives worth living. I’m not abandoning any of that. These platforms are real and they’re growing and they matter to me more than any royalty percentage.
But here’s what I learned from years of trying to route around Amazon: you don’t build an audience by being principled in a room by yourself. You build an audience by showing up where the audience already is, earning their attention, and then — if you’ve done your job right — they follow you somewhere better.
Amazon is a discovery engine. Imperfect, extractive, occasionally infuriating. Also the place where someone in a small town in Ohio who’s never heard of Farcaster or decentralized social networks goes looking for something to read on a Sunday afternoon. That person deserves to find my work. I deserve to reach them.
The goal was never to win a purity contest. The goal was always millions of people — millions of lives touched, millions of minds opened a little wider, millions of quiet moments where someone reads something I wrote and thinks: oh, so it’s not just me.
Going back to Amazon doesn’t mean I’ve stopped believing in what I’m building outside of it. It means I’ve stopped confusing the means with the end.
The work is the point. Getting it to people is the mission. Everything else is tactics.
And right now, tactically, Amazon reaches people I haven’t reached yet.
So here we are.
CD Damitio is the author of 30+ books, the creator of Baoism, and the founder of Xcrol.com and W3WU.com. He writes INDIGNIFIED, a newsletter exploring utopias and dystopias, at https://indignified.substack.com