Tag: current events
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.
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.
Further thoughts on the Florida school shooting
- The Broward County sheriff needs to resign or be fired immediately, and should also stand trial for criminal negligence. There’s something rotten in the state of Florida, and it all points back to this man.
- CNN has completely lost all credibility. As far as I’m concerned, they rank slightly above Alex Jones and slightly below the grocery store tabloids for journalistic integrity.
- The anti-gun activist shooting victims are political pawns. Nothing more, nothing less. Emotion does not give you credibility, and suffering does not give you authority.
- By the same, Donald Trump’s emotional reactions on Twitter have been disappointingly puerile.
- The only person who comes out looking good from all this is Dana Loesch.
- We obviously have a problem with mass shootings in this country. Instead of focusing on the gun issue to the exclusion of everything else, we should first try to fix all of the other contributing factors, such as mental illness, school security, psychotropic drugs, absent fathers, etc. Let’s focus on the areas where we can agree.
- The FBI has demonstrated criminal negligence in their failure to investigate the shooter, and what is even more disturbing, I don’t know that it isn’t politically motivated. If it is, it represents an existential threat to our republic.
- I don’t know that our nation has been this politically divided since the years leading up to the Civil War. The United States is deeply ill, and if we cannot come together—if we cannot find our e pluribus unum—I fear that this great nation will fall.
Undercover Antifa: This story needs to get out!
There’s a lot that I could say, but I think the video speaks for itself:
One question: when Antifa has their Charlottesville moment and somebody dies at their hands, how is the mainstream media going to cover it? What is the narrative going to be?
Good on team Crowder for exposing these domestic terrorists. Make no mistake, that’s exactly what they are.
To escape or to engage
A couple of weeks ago, I finally sat down and wrote a (semi-) formal business plan. It was an enlightening experience. I’ve kept it all organized in many different ways, but writing it all down in one place allows me to step back and take a wider look at what I do.
No business plan is complete without a mission statement. Here is mine:
To write and publish fiction that serves the truth, expands minds and hearts, and empowers my readers to be better men and women for reading my books.
To serve, expand, and empower. All of the books that have profoundly affected my life, from Ender’s Game and Lord of the Rings to The Neverending Story and A Wrinkle in Time, did those things.
“That’s very high and lofty, Joe, but what about just writing damn good stories that entertain people?” I don’t actually see a contradiction there. All of the best stories I’ve read that served, expanded, and empowered me were only able to do so because they entertained me first.
Entertainment is an important part of what I do. So is escapism. I have no idea how J.R.R Tolkien voted in the 1930s and 40s, nor do I care to know. I have a pretty good idea how Orson Scott Card voted in the 90s and 00s, but not from reading Ender’s Game. Sometimes I read authors for their politics (Ringo, Heinlein, Correia), but I didn’t read The Last Centurion to decide how I would vote in the last election; I read it because leading a stranded cavalry division across a post-apocalyptic Middle East sounded like a damn good story.
The surest way to kill a good story is to try to cram a message through it. The best stories never do this. They serve as a mirror that allows the reader to see themselves more clearly, whoever they may be. That’s what makes them timeless.
The world is becoming an increasingly scary and violent place. In the coming months, I expect that things will get a lot worse. This puts me in an interesting position. Should I try to write stories that engage with what’s happening in the world, or stories that provide an escape from it?
Or is there a contradiction between the two?
There’s a lot of outrage on social media from people who are trying to engage with the problems they see in the world. Unfortunately, the louder their outrage becomes, the more they seem to be part of the problem and not a solution to it. That’s part of why I deleted my Twitter account and radically scaled back my Facebook usage.
Does lashing out at injustice really make the world a better place? Adding outrage to outrage, pointing out everything that’s wrong? There’s a time and a place for that, sure. But there’s also a time and a place to disengage.
When times get hard, people need an emotional escape. That’s why they turn to things like sports, or movies, or books. But when this media instead tries to engage by bringing in politics or social justice or whatever, it deprives people of their escape. We see it all the time with the virtue signalling in Hollywood, or the issue dropping in TV and movies, or whatever the hell ESPN has become.
I don’t want to go that route. Not with my books, not with this blog—not with any aspect of my career. It’s tempting, sure, and I’ve flirted with it in the past, but it’s time to pull back. I may be convinced of my own views and opinions, but that’s not why I write. You don’t serve the truth by forcing it on other people. You don’t expand minds and hearts with moral outrage. You don’t empower people to become better by telling them that they’re wrong.
With the way the world is going, I think the best thing I can do is to focus less on trying to engage with it and more on providing an escape from it, through my books. Ultimately, I think that’s a better and more effective way to change the world.
Thoughts on the violence in Charlottesville
No one is right in any of this.
I tend to lean to the “right,” but it’s a completely different “right” than any of the protesters at this event. Constitutional conservatives and classical liberals are both increasingly endangered species in this country, and that’s a problem. Nothing in our Constitution supports Nazism and white nationalism.
Radical Islamic terrorism is evil, and needs to be called by its name. So does White supremacist terrorism and neo-Nazism. So does Black supremacism ala Black Lives Matter. So does neo-fascism and radical anarchism ala Antifa. All of it is evil. All of it needs to be named and recognized as such.
We live in a world where words and hate speech and so-called “micro-aggressions” are called violence, but where real violence is legitimized if it’s in the service of political ends. This needs to stop. The first step to stopping it is to call evil by its name. No one in Charlottesville this weekend was on the side of truth or righteousness. They were both fighting for two sides of the same evil coin.
Sarah Hoyt thinks this is our Fort Sumpter moment. I disagree. It may be our Harper’s Ferry moment, but I thought that the Oregon standoff was one of those, and apparently it wasn’t. Perhaps it’s just another wake up call, like the Washington DC baseball shooter who miraculously failed to kill any of his targets.
Regardless of what kind of moment Charlottesville was for this country, we need to wake up and take a step back from the brink.
I’m actually quite optimistic about this. None of those bozos represent the vast majority of us. We’re better than that. We’re the country that saved the world twice, from Nazism and from Communism. Yes, we don’t have a perfect track record, but Churchill was right: you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after we’ve tried everything else.
There’s a lot of scary stuff happening in the world right now, but I’m actually not too alarmed. We’ve been through worse. We’ll pull through this, “we” being those who are prepared. If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.
Take care of yourself, dear reader. And thanks, as always, for reading.
An open letter to Google
To whom it may concern,
My name is Joseph Vasicek, and I have been a regular user of your company’s products since 2006 when I set up my first Gmail account. Until the events of the past week, I was also a satisfied user.
The recent firing of James Damore over the controversial internal memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” has profoundly shattered my trust in your company. I have read the memo and find it eminently moderate and well-reasoned. It is not an “anti-diversity screed,” as many in the traditional news media are calling it, and their characterization of the memo–as well as your own characterization, given by your vice president of diversity, Danielle Brown–is manifestly false to anyone who has actually read it.
Your handling of the controversy has been nothing short of Orwellian. I find this especially disturbing for the fact that your company controls almost every gateway to the internet that I use on a daily basis.
My phone is an Android device that is deeply integrated with your products. My personal and business email accounts are with your Gmail service. I use your search engine on a daily, almost hourly basis, and routinely default to the first three sites listed in the search results. Whenever I’m lost or traveling to an unfamiliar place, I use your maps and navigation service to guide me. Until this memo controversy, Chrome was my default browser. While I lived in Utah Valley, I even used your fiber network too connect to the internet.
It is abundantly clear to me now that I have been far too complacent in allowing myself to become wholly dependant on your company for almost every facet of my online connection to the world.
I cannot, at this time, fully divest myself from Google in the way that I have already divested myself from Facebook and Twitter. However, I can make gradual changes to lessen my dependence on your company’s products in the coming months and years. This principle will guide my future purchasing decisions, as well as the online products I use and the personal data I share.
In the world of tech, if you use a product or service without paying for it, then you are the product, wittingly or otherwise. This was not a problem for me when I still trusted your company. But you have profoundly violated that trust.
I won’t say that it is impossible for you to win back that trust. It would take an extraordinary act, but you are an extraordinary company. At the least, it would require an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of my concerns, and a reversal of the fascistic Orwellian turn that your company has taken. It would require, for example, changing the search results page for “Abraham Lincoln” to reflect that he was our first Republican president, not just a member of the National Union Party (which was simply the Republican Party, rebranded for the 1864 elections when Lincoln was the sitting president. He was elected in 1860 as a Republican, and calling him anything else is deliberately misleading.)
Without an extraordinary effort to win back the trust of the millions of Americans like me whose trust you have betrayed, in the coming months and years, you will see much less of me as I reduce my dependence on your products.
Sincerely,
Joe Vasicek
This is the world we now live in
Coming soon to a collapsing economy near you!
Thoughts on the #Alexandria shooting
This attack was a warning.
It could have been much worse. There could be more than a dozen dead congressmen right now. We could be in a national crisis as severe as 9/11, or more.
This was a premeditated and carefully planned act of domestic terrorism. It is clear that the attacker was politically motivated. Millions of Americans share his extreme views. Thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, believe that his actions were justified.
It is only by the grace of God that the attack was thwarted. As Congressman Loudermilk said, “God was there.”
I believe in a God who is intimately concerned with the details of our individual lives. I believe that His hand guides the events that shape us, and that He takes a particular interest in the course of the United States.
He has given us our individual agency, the freedom to choose between good and evil. That is a gift that He will never take away. No matter how violent we are toward one another, no matter how much anger and hatred fills our hearts, He will not violate our agency nor revoke that Liberty wherewith He has made us free, but will leave us to our devices until we return on our knees to Him.
This attack was a warning. We would do well to heed it.
Several months ago, I came to the conclusion that the United States is between three and fifteen years away from an existential crisis as great as the Civil War. Will this crisis turn into a second civil war? I believe there’s a significant chance that it will. Certainly we are on that path right now.
Wake up, America! You talk of wars in far off countries, but you know not the hearts of men in your own land. Even now, the voices of evil speak louder in your ears than that which will shake the Earth. Treasure up wisdom, and remember: if you are prepared, you shall not fear.
A political rant
There is no meaningful difference between Clinton and Trump.
Both are narcissists.
Both are habitual liars.
Both are corrupt.
Both have a tendency to blame others for their failures instead of taking responsibility for their own actions.
Both treat the people underneath them poorly or with outright contempt.
Both think they are above the law, and seek to use the law to put down those who stand in their way.
Both are masters of saying what their audience wants to hear without saying anything of actual substance.
Both have flip-flopped 180 degrees on major national issues.
Both want to accelerate the same fiscal irresponsibility that got us into the Great Recession and prolonged it for so long.
Both are perfectly willing to order the military to do things that violate their sacred oath to defend the Constitution.
Both believe in an authoritarian government that violates constitutional principles and the basic rule of law.
I cannot, in good conscience, vote for either of them.
My greatest political fear is that our Republic is about to be overthrown and transformed into an Empire. We have a system of checks and balances to prevent that from taking place, but that system has been steadily eroded ever since the New Deal (or arguably the Civil War).
Eight years of economic stagnation have created a tremendous amount of restlessness. Looking at global trends, it seems that things are going to get worse before they get better. Historically, this type of chronic restlessness tends to lead to war, as leaders seek to either deflect it toward an outside enemy or channel it for their ruthless ambitions.
And both Clinton and Trump are nothing if not ruthless.
Everything old is new again. The authoritarian ideologies of the 20th century have resurrected and taken on new forms. Every day, I hear echoes of the deadly drumbeats on social media and the news.
Fascism is back. Communism is back. The 21st century equivalent of bookburning is taking place on campuses across the nation. The class warfare that started with the Occupy movement has taken on some decidedly racial undertones. If we’re following history’s playbook, a strong leader will soon emerge, promising security and prosperity at the cost of liberty.
Both Clinton and Trump promise to be that strong leader.
There’s a long tradition of doomsday predictions among political commentators in this country. At the risk of sounding paranoid, I’d like to chime in with some of my own. After all, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that everyone isn’t out to get you.
First, the gobal economy is about to suffer a massive downturn. China, Russia, the Eurozone crisis—it’s all headed toward collapse. The US will come out on top, but only because we won’t fall as hard as everyone else. We’re still going to take a fall.
Healthcare in this country will continue to be broken and unaffordable for the next four years. Best case scenario, Obamacare collapses and the gridlock in Washington prevents us from replacing it with anything else. Worst case scenario, socialized medicine stiffles innovation, costs and inefficiences skyrocket, and committees are formed to decide who lives and who dies, just like every other nationalized healthcare system.
The originalists on the Supreme Court will be replaced with activist judges who will dismantle the checks and balances of the Constitution, causing it to hang by a thread. Frankly, this is the thing that scares me the most. It’s already starting to happen with the controversy surrounding Scalia’s replacement, and he won’t be the only Supreme Court justice who passes in the next four years. This will be the ultimate legacy of whoever wins the presidency in 2016.
The world is about to get a lot less safe for Americans abroad. It’s already a lot more unsafe after eight years of Obama, but it’s about to get worse. The chaos in the Middle East will spread. Terrorist attacks will accelerate, both abroad and at home. The wars and rumors of wars will increase.
There are a number of unlikely but plausible scenarios I’ve been mulling over. The most frightening of these involves a second American civil war, in the form of an insurgency, and the true nightmare begins when the UN sends a peacekeeping mission into this country much like Lebanon or the Balkans. Like I said, I don’t consider it likely. But it’s just plausible enough that it would make an excellent novel—the kind that later generations laud as being written before its time.
In short, I predict another four years of economic stagnation, fiscal irresponsibility in Washington, cronyism, corruption, and collapse. If America becomes “great” again, it will only be the Empire at the expense of the Republic.
So what am I doing about it?
Stocking up on food storage. Growing a garden. Learning how to be a responsible gun owner. Striving to be as independent and self-sufficient as possible.
And you can bet that all of this is influencing my writing. There’s a war of ideas that’s raging right now, one that may influence the ultimate outcome of our era more than any elected official. As a writer, I see it as my responsibility to play a role in that battle, not through message fiction per say but through stories that reflect truth. I have no idea if any of my stories will be as influential as 1984 or Les Miserables, but I intend to write them as if they could be.
It appears we’ve been cursed to live in interesting times. Let us rise to the occasion and write timeless and interesting stories.