Rented Land

What You Own, What You're Borrowing, and What Happens When the Landlord Changes the Locks

Every author is a tenant somewhere. This book tells you exactly how much of your business would survive a move.

Rented Land is a book in the Indie Author Guide Line: short, source-checked guides for independent authors who have finished writing and now have to be found. The platform changes its terms, the algorithm reweights overnight, ad costs double, the service you built your back matter around disappears — and the readers you thought were yours turn out to have belonged to someone else. This book maps the whole estate.

This is not an argument to leave Amazon, and it won't tell you the platforms are the enemy. What you get instead is a precise, sober accounting of what is genuinely owned, what is leased, what is squatting, and what it costs to move — written from a house that has watched a service it depended on disappear.

What's inside:

• A full map of what an author business actually owns versus what it merely occupies
• What it costs, in practice, to move your business off a platform that changes on you
• Why "the readers are yours" is often not true, and how to tell when it is
• The specific, firsthand cost of losing a depended-on service, priced rather than dramatized
• How to build the part of your business that would survive a platform shutting its doors
• What exit-readiness actually looks like, without the doom that usually accompanies the topic

This is not alarmism, and it won't tell you to abandon anything that's working. What it will do is give you an honest map of your own estate, so a change you don't control never costs you more than it has to.

From the Indie Author Guide Line, from Novel Concepts Publishing.