Experimenting with social media again

So, it’s come to my attention that I’m something of an “internet hermit.” (thanks J.R.) Which is actually unintentional. I quit Facebook in 2014 and Twitter back in 2016, and while I’m still active on Goodreads, I mostly just use it to post book reviews and keep track of my TBR pile. After I moved back to Utah, the blog went mostly dark, which combined with everything else means that my online presence has practically gone to nothing.

I quit social media for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with privacy concerns. In the last couple of years, though, my reasons have changed. There’s a fascinating talk on YouTube by Chamath Palihapatiya, one of the founders of Facebook, where he speaks about the negative long-term effects of social media on individuals and societies. His observations are sobering. If you have the time, it’s worth it to watch his talk in detail, but this video does an excellent job of discussing the relevant points:

So with all that said, why am I experimenting with social media again?

Because it’s come to my attention that the people who are looking for me don’t really have a way to find me, and that’s a problem. There’s this blog, of course, but this isn’t the 00’s anymore, unfortunately; people don’t typically go searching for blogs anymore. They search Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or Одноклассники, or whatever social media they happen to use the most. For better or worse, if you don’t have a presence on these platforms, you’re effectively invisible to a whole lot of people.

When I quit social media, I was more concerned about my personal usage of these platforms than my own visibility. Not a lot of people were looking for me back then. There might not be a lot of people looking for me now, either, but I do want to set things up so that as my readership expands and my writing career grows, people have a way to find me.

So here’s what I plan to do: set up social media accounts, link them to my blog feed, and post content primarily through my blog. If people want to interact with me on social media, I’ll log in and interact with them, but my primary home on the internet is going to be this blog.

We’ll see how it turns out. In case you’re interested, I have a Facebook page here and a Twitter account here. If there’s any other social media you think I should have a presence on, please let me know.

Mid-May update

Holy cow, it’s been forever since I’ve written a proper update. For a while there, it seemed to be nothing but more of the same. Then I got caught up with all the other things that come along with writing and publishing, and the blog sort of fell by the wayside.

Don’t worry, I’m still writing. In fact, I’m only a couple of scenes away from finishing Victors in Liberty, the last book in the Sons of the Starfarers series. A couple of days ago, I wrote a scene that I’ve been waiting to write for the last four years. Good times.

I was hoping to have this book up for preorder right now, but I think it will be better for the delay. Still aiming for a release date in July. My editor says he’s got an open slot, so I should be sending it out to him before the end of the week.

The more pressing stuff has all been on the marketing end. The GDPR has half the indie writing community in a tailspin, and I had to do a bit of research and make a few changes, like uploading my email list software. The GDPR, in case you haven’t heard, is the EU’s latest attempt to shoot sparrows with howitzers. It’s a series of data regulations aimed at big corporations like Facebook and Google, but it’s really the small businesses who are feeling the crunch. Let’s just say that my first-generation Czech immigrant ancestors made the right choice when they told the rest of Europe “y’all can go to hell—we’re going to Texas!”

Fortunately, everything is more or less in order as far as GDPR goes, or at least clost enough. The truth is, nobody knows. It’s stuff like this that made me want to write about the Outworld frontier in the first place, where there are no laws or government bureaucrats to control you. But I digress.

On a much lighter note, I’ve taken advantage of this opportunity to reorganize my email list. Specifically, I’ve split it into three lists of approximately 2,000 subscribers each, which I hope to eventually grow into five. The idea is to spread out my email campaigns over the course of four or five days, so that instead of getting a huge sales spike (which the Amazon algorithms tend to push back against), sales will be a bit more even, hopefully leading to better alsobots and other favorable treatment from the algorithms.

Being the eclectic nerd that I am, I have given these lists the following names:

  • LEGIO I PIA FIDELIS
  • LEGIO II VICTRIX
  • LEGIO III FELIX
  • LEGIO IV FIRMA
  • LEGIO V FULMINATA

And now I’m going through all my titles, updating the backmatter to add a signup page for my list along with the teaser chapters and other links.

So that’s what I’ve been up to, mostly. I’m also reading a lot more, and will have some book reviews real soon. Also, there’s the secret project, which I anticipate will take the next several months, possibly even years, to come to fruition.

Next WIP: Gunslinger to the Galaxy!

Sophie’s Third Choice

“Your wife, or your child? You must choose between them. If you do not, I shall kill them both.”

“Then take me instead.”

“My good man. Did you not hear what I said? If you do not choose—”

“I do choose. I chose myself. Are you going to respect my choice or not?”

“That isn’t one of your choices.”

“Yes it is. You may have the power to take our lives, but you don’t have the power to force me to make such an awful choice. Kill me, and let them go free.”

“Very well. If that is your choice, then I shall kill them both.”

“You think you have power? Life and death is nothing. Liberty is everything. With all your power, you cannot take that Liberty whereby God has made us free.”

“There is no God.”

“Then put that gun to your own head, because when all is said and done, the only power that matters is the power to face your own death manfully; all else is simply cowardice. But if not, know that the day will come when you and I will stand before the judgment bar of God, and I will be called to testify of what you did this day. Then you will weep and wail, and cry for the mountains to fall upon you and hide your face from the wrath of Almighty God. But they will not, and you will be compelled to stand before God with a perfect knowledge of all your guilt, and a perfect memory of all your crimes. Then we will see who has power. Then we will see who is free.”

“You try my patience, son. Try it any further, and I shall kill all of you.”

“Then shoot, and be damned.”

There is always a third choice. There is always a solution to the Kobayashi Maru. Never believe in no-win scenarios.

“Do you have any Republican friends?”

Will Witt from PragerU recently went to New York and asked a bunch of random people this question. The result was this video, and holy heck. I’m not even a Republican, and I’m infuriated.

We have a word for people who don’t tolerate anyone who disagrees with them. It’s INTOLERANT.

We have a word for people who only make friends with people who think and believe exactly the way that they do. It’s CLOSED-MINDED.

We have a word for people who are so convinced that they’re morally superior to everyone else that they won’t even consider an opposing point of view. It’s BIGOTED.

This is why Trump is your president, you intolerant, closed-minded bigots. After eight years of putting up with your side’s hypocrisy, the rest of us got so sick of it that we voted for the one guy who tells it like he sees it.

Trump may be an asshole, but at least he isn’t a hypocrite about it. You, on the other hand…

To be fair, there’s no way to tell how many of the people Will Witt interviewed were as asinine as the people in the video. All we’ve got are a bunch of anecdotes, and the plural of anecdote is not data.

But still. Holy heck.

Thoughts on #AmazonClosed and disappearing KU reads

There are a lot of scandals happening in the indie publishing world right now. The latest one has to do with Amazon deleting KU reads from March: some authors have seen their page reads retroactively revised down as much as ninety percent.

The speculation is that this is connected with Amazon deactivating several customer accounts, allegedly on the basis of those customers accepting free or gifted items in exchange for reviews. It’s also supposedly connected with Amazon’s recent legal arbitration against book stuffing in KU, which scammers use to inflate their page reads. Until now, Amazon has done precious little to push back against endemic scamming in KU.

The best potential explanation for this that I’ve read comes from TexasGirl and PhoenixS over on KBoards. TexasGirl writes:

I think it goes like this:

— An author hires a bot reader to inflate their page reads.
— The bot account opens the book and page reads through it.
— The bot then spiders the sales page for other books like it, to strengthen the association with other books Amazon has placed either as 1: normal also-bots 2: sponsored products
— The bot opens the also bot or sponsored books and reads them too.

This creates synergy between the paid bot book and collaterally botted book. This means the other bot accounts will do the pathway as well, creating more page reads via bots by the bad accounts. It ALSO muddies the waters as to which books hired the bots and which were just secondary opens.

PhoenixS adds:

A good portion of those “bots” may well be incentivized readers. Once a real reader account has been identified as a recipient of incentives either for leaving reviews or for borrowing or for reading — or skimming through — a book, then all their reviews and borrows/reads become suspect. So anything they might borrow, even for their own, real personal pleasure (often within the same subgenre they’re getting incentivized for) would be dinged.

In other words, KU authors who use AMS ads are inadvertently shooting themselves in the foot, as the bots and click-farms use the sponsored links to find legitimate books to borrow (in order to mask their illicit activity). Also, when Amazon deactivated a bunch of customer accounts, they also removed a bunch of legitimate page reads, putting the screws on some of their KU authors.

I have many thoughts on this subject. Personally, I haven’t been affected at all, as none of my books are in Kindle Unlimited. I do feel for the authors who have been hit, though. It takes about two months for book royalties to show up in your bank account, so when you think you have $$$ coming only to have it arbitrarily disappear, it can create some heartburn-inducing cashflow problems. No one likes to be jerked around like that.

In my view, though, this is all just one car of a much larger train wreck.

The big tech companies that comprise the FAANGs all seem to suffer from the same hubris: that the fundamental laws of nature, economics, and human behavior can all be overcome by a sufficiently advanced algorithm. Combined with this is the equally arrogant hubris that they, by virtue of their power and success, have a responsibility to reshape the world in a progressive way, even if that’s not what their users want.

We can see the second part of this hubris in Zuckerberg’s recent testimony to congress. His admission that Facebook bears responsibility for the content on its platform has got to be giving his lawyers multiple aneurysms right now.

The first part is evident in the way Amazon structured Kindle Unlimited. The whole program is rife with perverse incentives, from the zero-sum payment structure of the KDP global fund to KENPC and the All-Star bonuses. Book stuffing, click-farming, and other KU scams are both predictable and forseeable. Instead of restructuring the program, though, or hiring a team to clean it up, Amazon has either denied that any problem exists, or created algorithms to play whack-a-mole with the scammers, often striking legitimate authors in the process.

The dirty little secret is that KU wasn’t created to benefit authors or readers, however, but to benefit Amazon by preventing a rival ebook subscription service from eating into their market share. Hence the exclusivity requirement for KU authors. By tying up the majority of the indie publishing community with exclusivity, Amazon denies the competition the content it needs to get off the ground. Never mind that KU isn’t that great for readers and is downright horrible for authors.

But why all the drama right now? Because this train wreck is headed for a massive cliff: an antitrust suit against Amazon. Between President Trump’s tweets about Jeff Bezos and the “Amazon Washington Post,” and the mainstream media’s neverending crusade against the president, the political winds are shifting in ways that must appear very foreboding in Seattle.

Amazon is cleaning house, and a lot of dolphins are getting netted as a result. One bad apple spoils the whole barrel, and the scammers have been squatting in Amazon’s house for years. But the real train wreck is just getting started, and when it goes over the cliff with the rest of this mixed metaphor, that’s when the fireworks will begin.

As an indie author, now is a good time to be as flexible as possible.

Why I’m moving out of Provo for good at the soonest opportunity

  • Neverending road construction.
  • Corrupt local officials who take kickbacks from the neverending road construction.
  • Massive public transit projects that seek to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist.
  • Incompetant construction contractors who can’t get the job right the first time, and have to redo it five times in as many years.
  • Parking Nazis who ticket local residents for parking on the street, even when their car has a parking permit.
  • Incompetant bureaucrats in city hall who fail to renew parking permits.
  • Insanely bad drivers.
  • Selective enforcement of the law by local police.
  • Attempts by the local police to enforce laws that don’t actually exist, especially regarding front lawn gardens.
  • A hidden tax placed in everyone’s utility bill to pay for Google Fiber, when it turned out the city had lost the blueprints Google needed to install the fiber network, and thus had to pay more than $1 million to map it out.
  • The Google Fiber deal in general. Very bad deal for the city.
  • The fact that most of the rental properties are owned by two or three families, who jack up prices in order to rip off students.
  • Corrupt city officials who grant building permits that violate residential zoning laws in exchange for kickbacks, after ignoring public outcry from local residents.

There are more reasons, I’m sure, but these are the ones I have direct experience with.

April update

Sorry to go dark for so long. I’ve been sick off and on for the last two months, first with a sinus infection, then with a lung infection, and lately with a persistent stomach flu. Thankfully, I’ve been functional through all of it, but not at 100%, which is why I’ve neglected the blog.

I have been writing, though. I’m currently about a third of the way through Victors in Liberty, and should finish it within the next few weeks. I’m also revising it as I go along, so as to have a publishable final draft. We’re still on track for a July release date.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been crunching a lot of book sales numbers and formulating a better business plan. The goal is to make the writing profitable enough to pay myself more than sweatshop wages. I think I’ve figured out a way to get there before the end of this year.

I also recently discovered Jordan Peterson, and have been listening to many of his lectures while doing mindless chop-wood carry-water tasks. He’s an incredible guy. One of the last few sane and reasonable people in the world with a large enough platform to counteract the constant assault of insanity that passes for today’s news cycle.

I’ve also published a double novel bundle for Bringing Stella Home and Heart of the Nebula. I originally published it exclusively on Kobo, to get around Amazon’s price matching policy so I could run useful promotions with KWL. But the Kobo promotions use coupon codes now, which means there’s no reason not to make this title available everywhere.

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I’m also experimenting a lot with my email list, trying out a new style for my newsletter and cycling through promotions more regularly. Makes a lot more work, since Amazon won’t make a book free unless you price match it first, but hey it’s not as bad as digging ditches.

Lots of other stuff going on behind the scenes, which I’d rather not get into just yet. When there’s significant movement, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I am so ready to finish the Sons of the Starfarers series. It’s been difficult to write at times, but I’m excited with how the last book is turning out and think it will provide an excellent ending to a story that has turned out better than I expected it to. Really looking forward to get it out there.

That’s just about it for now. Don’t worry about me: life is good and I’m still writing.