At the start of this month, Amazon closed the account that had carried my books for six years. No explanation I could act on, no person I could call. Five appeals, five copy-paste answers. Somewhere in a system I will never see, a switch flipped, and half a decade of work went dark overnight.
My first instinct was anger at Amazon. It passed quickly. Not because the decision was fair, but because I realized the anger was missing the point. The point is not that one system got it wrong. The point is that for years I had been building a house on rented land, and behaving as if it were mine.
The network is not yours
Years ago I had a heated argument with a friend. Through one platform he had built a base of thousands of clients, and he told me, with full confidence, that the network was his. I said no. The network belongs to the platform. Your clients are records in someone else's database, reachable only through someone else's door, under rules that change without asking you. I ruined his evening. I thought I was right the way a person is right about something read in a book.
Years later I felt that truth firsthand. The distance between theory and skin is enormous.
Rented ground
What happened to me with the books is not a publishing story. The same mechanics apply to anyone building anything digital. Your Instagram following is not yours. Your Facebook page is not yours. Your YouTube channel, your TikTok audience, your listings on any marketplace, none of it is yours. All of it lives in someone else's ledger, and anyone can be cancelled: a policy change, a flagged post, an algorithm you will never meet and that owes you no explanation.
PlayStation customers learned this the hard way: the films and games they had "bought" turned out to be licenses, revocable at a distance, gone from the library without a refund or an apology. Same lesson, different industry. On rented ground, ownership is a feeling, not a fact.
On rented ground, ownership is a feeling, not a fact.
The boring route
And here is what happened when I stopped renting. In three days, the books came back. All of them. Four languages, in print, ebook, and audio, live across more than sixty stores and library services. Not through a backdoor, not through a trick. Through the boring, unglamorous route that had been open the whole time and that I had ignored for years: own ISBN numbers registered at the national library, my own name as publisher of record in an official register, print-on-demand that feeds the global bookstore network, distributors that treat you as a publisher instead of a user.
On a platform, you are a guest. The account is yours, but the rails are theirs. When the walls close, everything inside closes with them. On your own rails, every piece carries your name. A store can delist you, a distributor can disappoint you, and the operation keeps running, because no single door is the only door.
The drawer
The whole move cost me a few evenings of paperwork, a state fee smaller than a dinner out, and a certain dose of humility. Along the way, things I should have dealt with long ago surfaced from the same drawer: a dead company from an old chapter of my life, a forgotten distribution account that had owed me money for years without my knowing, a domain paid in installments since 2020. Cleaning that drawer was years overdue. The termination just set the date.
That may be the most unexpected gain of the whole episode. When you are forced to open the drawer, you also find what you forgot yourself.
The rails
This is the same principle I keep repeating about money, and the reason Billingz exists: visibility and control over your own operation are not luxuries for later. They are the difference between owning a business and renting one.
The books are back. The rails are mine. The next ones will ship on them from day one.
The books are back. The rails are mine. The next ones will ship on them from day one.
Radovan Vitosevic
Written in August 2026
These Notes are not written to teach. They are written to preserve ideas that experience has taught me before time quietly edits them.
Some begin as observations. Some become conversations. Some eventually become chapters in future books.
Together, they form an evolving record of how I think about business, leadership, decision-making, and building meaningful companies.
Radovan Vitosevic is an entrepreneur, business leader, and author.
After more than two decades in banking, international corporate leadership, entrepreneurship, and board positions across multiple countries, he now focuses on building businesses with long-term value and writing about the principles that shape them.
His essays explore leadership, entrepreneurship, decision-making, company building, and a quieter definition of success.
These Notes reflect my personal experience and perspective after more than two decades in business.
They are not intended as universal truths, nor should they replace professional financial, legal, investment, or other professional advice where appropriate.
Unless otherwise stated, the views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any past or present organization with which I have been associated.
Like any perspective, these ideas remain open to challenge, refinement, and change as I continue to learn.
For most of my working life I believed a serious career was supposed to feel heavy. This is an essay about what changed, what I learned across eighteen years, and the kind of company I want to build now.
Sending invoices stopped being hard a decade ago. The category solved the wrong problem and never moved on. The real problem is position.
Freelancers don't need better books. They need to see what's real, what changed, and what's about to hit them. That's a different product.