Squeezed by Amazon
The making and unmaking of my prison memoir The Squeeze Machine
Hi Substacker! You ever hear the joke about Amazon and the third-party vendor? A real hoot. By way of setup, let me introduce myself. My name is Adam Roberts, and I am a peer counselor, educator, and working visual artist. I've been in prison since 1999 and currently reside in Fishkill CF. The algorithms will confuse me for the more popular author Adam Roberts, of the Oxford Robertses, and it doesn't help that he also wrote about prison. His, however, is a sci-fi "space opera" set aboard an orbiting prison, while The Squeeze Machine recounts my decades in New York state prisons working as a service provider keeping time with a host of lively characters.
As to the Amazon joke, after years of The Squeeze Machine kicking around the in boxes of dear ones, my buddy at Brainworx Media agreed to help get the book to market. Print on demand is appealing because it minimizes waste. Thanks to him, The Squeeze Machine is currently available on Amazon as an eBook, but the print version is languishing in Kindle Direct Publishing purgatory because Amazon and the ISBN vendor are pointing at each other as the source of the problem (i.e., an "unacceptable ISBN"). Badum-bum, that's the punchline. I know, very intriguing stuff here.
The hold up allowed me to question my motives and see that what matters is sharing the lived experience and humanizing depictions of my peers. I want to optimize for greatest reach, so here I am, on this platform I've read about in the pages of Wired magazine, with the help of another friend.
This is where you come in. If you believe The Squeeze Machine is worth spreading, I encourage you to share it. If you have an interesting idea about a print-friendly version or print on demand via creative commons license, I say run with it. Tag me, link me, do whatever the kids are doing these days. You have my blessing. I don't have the ability to connect to the internet and leverage free technologies and platforms--but you do.