Month: April 2026

A Milestone and a Low Point

photog Life in Dunwich, Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,

So today I reached the two hundred book milestone.  One hundred fifty-three e-books and forty-seven paperback copies.  Camera Girl and I celebrated with a bowl of ice cream each.  And today I also got my first one-star review.  The reader was upset because he didn’t know it was a science fiction story.  And I can understand his anger.  When I selected the categories for the book the first one, I listed was science fiction.  But Amazon rejected this as a false description and deleted this category for the book.  And so, Amazon is responsible for the single one-star review I’ve received so far.  Well, the world is a complicated place and I guess nothing human is ever free from unexpected consequences.

But, all in all, it’s been an interesting experience.  It seems Amazon has created an opportunity for anyone to create a book and it even makes it possible to try and find an audience for that book in the enormous marketplace they have created on their platform.  And to the extent that I’ve found some readers I can appreciate how this is an improvement over what there was before.  And in my particular case it changes the situation from an impossibility to a difficult one.  And by that, I mean I could never have found a publisher (other than a vanity press) that would accept my story because of the right-leaning slant of my story.  After all I pretty clearly demonize Antifa in this story and that would never get past the editors and sensitivity readers employed by the “Big Five” publishing houses (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan).  So, I think the present set-up is an improvement for someone like me.  But that doesn’t mean finding an audience is easy.  It’s not.  It’s tricky and slow and expensive and the skill-set has absolutely nothing to do with being a writer.

The next big milestone will be when I put it on Kindle Unlimited.  But since this requires the story to be on Amazon exclusively for three months I’m waiting until I finish putting the story up on Royal Road.  I’ve been uploading it in sections (mostly a chapter a day) and I’ve got six more chapters to go, so I want to finish that first.  I want to see what feedback I get once I’ve allowed the readers there to finish the story and evaluate it.  After that I’ll take the story down from BookFunnel and Royal Road and see what happens with Kindle Unlimited.  KU lowers the cost to start the book to essentially zero and I’m hoping that will allow a larger cross-section of the general reading population to give the book a try.

And I believe this population of readers will be significantly younger than the one I’ve been reaching up till now.  Now maybe this isn’t my target audience but I think it’s important to test that hypothesis.  If Kindle Unlimited doesn’t move the needle, then I know what I’ve seen so far is a good indication of what I should expect.  So, let’s see what happens.

The SPLC bankrolls the KKK

photog Current Events, Trump , , , ,

This week the Justice Department has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud for paying white supremacist groups very large sums of money to play boogeyman for the Left.  Now, these weren’t undercover FBI agents they were real nazis and Klansmen who were among the leaders of these organizations.  And it was understood that they earned this money for providing the SPLC and other leftist organizations with talking points against conservatives and the Right in general.  And this has been going on for decades.  All the biggest outrages, like the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottsville, were included in the events that garnered funds from the SPLC for KKK and nazi groups.

Well, it’s official.  All the conspiracy theories that have been floating out there for years about false flag/color revolution operations by the Left and the Deep State were true.  If the SPLC was doing this just imagine what else is out there.  I imagine if the FBI could find the destroyed records, they would have proof that their own agents have done plenty of the same things for years.

But it is nice to see that while we still control the federal government some of the most outrageous frauds against the right will be exposed and punished.  The SPLC has one of the worst reputations for mischaracterizing conservative organizations as hate groups.  Last year they put Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA on their hate list and I’m sure that was one of the contributing factors in Kirk’s assassination.

I think it would be wonderful if the SPLC can be bankrupted and its leaders prosecuted both civilly and criminally to the fullest extent of the law.  People like this do untold damage and contribute to the degrading of freedom of speech and freedom of association.

It should be interesting as this develops to see what famous “nazis” turn out to have been on the payroll of the SPLC.  I’m sure many of us remember some of the more flamboyant “leaders” of far right from years gone by, that always seemed to cause more damage than progress for conservatives.  There may be a lot of answers to why every time a conservative moment arose some particularly idiotic leader seemed to surface and discredit the movement with a moronic statement or stunt.

This was something that I remember the ZMan used to speculate about.  For the most part he thought these people were just useful idiots who wanted the attention and gladly acted out the part of boogeyman de jour.  I’m sure this news would not have shocked him but it probably would have explained a number of specific characters and incidences from recent history that conveniently allowed the Left to use their Right-Wing White Supremacy narrative to demonize conservatives in all their favorite left-wing media sources.

Well, good work Kash Patel and the rest of Donald Trump’s Justice Department for exposing this organization for the fraudulent hate group they actually are.  I hope they get torpedoed this year and not later.

Ay, There’s the Rub

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Reviews ,

Lately there has been an enormous storm of controversy about AI being used in fiction writing.  Recently it came out that a self-published story that became quite popular was subsequently picked up by a major publishing house and re-issued with the full weight and authority of this powerhouse including professional editing and a new cover.  But then someone looked closely at the self-published edition and saw that not only was it significantly different from the professionally published edition but that the original was obviously a product of AI.  Now, that caused a firestorm and the publisher withdrew the book permanently.

But a cloud of questions swirl around the affair.  Surely the editors who revised the self-published edition must have recognized that they were dealing with a product of AI writing.  Why would they have purchased this title.  It’s assumed the reason was because the book had already found a ready audience and so the motive was monetary.  But there are other factors.  The authoress Mia Ballard is African American and Native American.  In other words, in the world of intersectional identity bingo she was a three-fer!  And so, she was exactly the kind of person that Hachette wanted for their imprint.  But there still remained the fact that she got a bot to write her story.  And that someone blew the whistle on her.  Of course, she claimed that it was an editor who added the AI sections and what she had written was her own.  Oh boy, that’s gonna be a bunch of lawsuits (or it’s just talk that won’t go anywhere).

Of course, the editors are defending themselves by saying that AI detection programs are far from infallible and so they aren’t to blame.  But supposedly the content was pretty obviously terribly written.  Of course, that really makes it interesting that the self-published book was such a hit on Goodreads with over four thousand reviews.  And that would once again jibe with the idea that the “bio” of the writer was one of the big reasons the book was so popular.

The whole scandal seems to show just what a mess the publishing industry has gotten itself into with identity politics becoming the most important factor by which authors and storylines are selected by big publishing houses for their imprimatur.  I guess the same problem is playing out with books that Hollywood is suffering from with their heavy-handed woke propaganda pictures.  People are staying away in droves and the monetary losses have finally gotten so severe that they’ve been forced to drop most of the woke plot elements just to lure paying customers back to the theaters.

Well, now that I’ve had a taste of what it’s like to self-publish a book I can say that a large part of the satisfaction in writing a book has to be because the author enjoys his creation.  Other than the one in a million phenom that finds the sweet spot in the self-publishing universe everyone else is talking to a small audience and in my opinion the only real failure is if you know that your book isn’t good enough for you yourself to read it for pleasure.

But how soon before AI slop is better than Shakespeare?  Ay, there’s the rub.