by Every day I get several messages, comments, tweets from gamma males trying to assert their non-status by either trying to act like they’re smarter than me, or trying to pull a “you’ll be sorry when I leave!” when I don’t respond kindly to their “well, acktualllly….” style comments.
The last couple of days as I’ve been hammering on the topic of gammas has been particularly bad in this regard. I’ve also, of course, put out a couple test the water posts to draw out that kind of behavior and make it easier to block.
The most common I get is of course “I was going to check you out, but NOW I’ll never buy your books!!!” i.e., they never bought my books to begin with and are using an empty threat to try to get me to cower to them.
Here’s the problem though — I probably don’t want them reading my books. It’s just going to be endless nitpicks and demands from that type of person which will make their $5 read of the book not worth my time, as they’ll constantly try to suck up my time from that point forward which could be better spent writing another book.
And that’s being generous and assuming they would actually read the book. Most of those comments are prefaced with “going to” because they are making some magical assertion of another reality in which they sort of maybe might have done something.
I don’t got time to worry about that.
This morning I got a concern gamma on youtube telling me I’m not as good as another youtuber. I hope not, as I put almost zero effort into my videos. I’m on there specifically to impart information that I find interesting, talking about books and writing and topics of my choosing. If people want insight into me as an author, I figure it’s a decent way to provide that without spending a lot of time (when again, I could just be writing). I in no way intended to edit videos, work on lighting, make a professional production out of youtube. I am an author, not a youtuber.
When I told him to get lost, his immediate response of course was “you’ll never be getting much above 1,000 subs with that kind of attitude!”
As if I care. I know his favorite youtubers buy subscriptions to make their numbers look better than they are. I know I like the people who watch me on a regular basis. I don’t care if he or anyone else joins them. It’s their loss.
And that… is why the gamma male will never win and remain in a tortured reality. They care what everyone thinks on the internet to the Nth degree. They demand that everyone else do too.
And I don’t.
Gonna go write more books now. In the meantime, catch up on my Justified series. It’s the best science fiction series out this year if not in the last decade or more.
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