Wei has asked me to send a shout out to all the Days of Leviathan readers. He has the new page, but it still needs a few touch ups. He would rather have a late, good page than an on time crappy one. He’s expecting to update on Saturday. I think it has a little to do with his final projects piling up as well, so I think giving him a little break might be the kind thing to do

In my world, I’m dealing with intense frustration with amazon.ca. As many of our readers will know, we live in the wonderful city of Vancouver BC. As Canadians, we don’t really have the option of selling our books on amazon.com, so we’re left with our rather decrepit Canadian version. Amazon.com has this wonderful feature for self publishers: the Advantage program. You can sign up, list your books and they take 55% off the top. Pretty much the same as any warehouse or distributor. It’s pretty sweet. Alas, we do not have this in Canada. You have to apply as a vendor and hope that someone at amazon will eventually get around to looking at your application. It’s dire, and frankly, kind of insulting.

I’m sure many won’t understand, but in Canada we have always had a cultural issue with living next to the United States. We love our brothers and sisters to the south, but find it so frustrating that we’re overrun with American content. It’s just another example that Amazon will list all of the books by big American publishers working in Canada while strangling independent Canadian content with an outdating and weak vendor service. I sometimes feel like crying at the frustration, if it’s not being blocked on the internet, it’s dealing with border harassment to go to conventions. I just want to make comics, I just want to sell books and I want the opportunity to share my content with a continent that seems so unfairly balanced.

To think, we’re really nice about it. We’re not really like many other countries where America forces it’s way in, we just try to make friends. I hate being nice about something and then being taken advantage of, but then my Canadian manners stop me from getting all righteous about it all the time.

I hope hope hope Amazon will actually take the time to look at our application. They say they list products by demand, but then didn’t ask me for any product details. We have 3000 books from our Xeric grant. In my dreams I will sell them all, but I could be happy with selling a few. With Amazon. Come on guys, work with the people who actually want to work with you.