Another Mid-Week Business Update

A couple of weeks ago, I got excoriated by writers who didn’t agree with me about the whole PayPal thing being a business issue and not a censorship issue. In that post, I told writers to learn business and to fight something they disagree with on a business level. In last week’s surprise mid-week business update, I pointed out that Mark Coker of Smashwords–an excellent businessman–was doing just that: he was fighting business to business with PayPal to stop their new practice against certain types of erotica. Well, because Mark Coker knew what he was doing, because he fought this from a business perspective, he won. Here’s the link from a news article (in a paper that didn’t normally cover Smashwords before. More good work. This all got noticed).

He got a boost a few days ago, when the credit card companies, whom PayPal initially blamed for the policy, said that PayPal misrepresented them. The credit card companies were not to blame for PayPal’s business decision, leaving PayPal out there on its own, with bad press, a serious ding on their reputation, and large potential loss of customers. (This crisis has also shown other folks that PayPal has gotten too big, and now we need another business or two or five that serve as an alternative.)

Rather than shouting on various blogs, Mark Coker and others took action. And they won. This is how it’s done, folks. It’s a textbook example of fighting a bad business decision with a strong business-oriented response.

Good work, Mark. Congrats on the victory.

***UPDATE****

I have now shut off comments to this post because I’m getting spammed again by those who believe their opinions are important but don’t bother to read mine or see the point I made in my original post two weeks ago. I trashed this post, then changed my mind. I’m not going to let self-righteous people who can’t read shut down my blog.