Month: September 2026

Jake Barter, the Great Promoter

photog 2 Comments My Fiction, photog's Corner ,

So, I ran the promotion from September 9th to September 13th. And I gave away over 3,600 e-books over those five days.  So, there are 3,600+ readers who won’t be buying my book.  Sounds like a pretty terrible business model where you give away your product to the people who are most likely to enjoy it.  Are you mad, photog!

So, time has passed and I decided to see if there has been a meaningful up-tick in sales.  Here are the results:

Period

 # of Days Books Sold

KENP (pages)

AUG 27 to Sep 6

 10 4

873

Sep 15 to Sep 24

 10 27

2,905

Ratio of Sales (after/before)

6.75

 3.33

These are impressive changes and they seem to be accelerating.  And one of the things I didn’t expect is that most of these sales are not happening through the Amazon Ads that I have been running.  In addition, the number of ratings I’ve gotten on Amazon has increased dramatically.  So, I have to say that the experiment was a success.  Of course, I’ll have to rerun it again when I have the second book ready so that those who buy “The Sniper” have a chance to buy the sequel while they’re primed and ready.

But it hasn’t been all gravy.  I did get one really bad review by a reader.  He gave it two stars and entitled his review, “Pretty Terrible.”

Here is his review in its entirety:

“I could barely get through this one. I’m not sure how to describe the plot other than ridiculously bad. All the underground society nonsense was just dumb and the ending was laughable. There were also multiple typos and specific parts of the story that don’t add up at all. I’m totally confused by the good reviews.”

¡Ay, Chihuahua!

I’ll be honest.  That stung a bit.  But the customer is always right so I have to defer to his judgement that this book is not for him.  But luckily for me, four- and five-star ratings represent 83% of the total while one- and two-star ratings are only 6%.  That will have to be my consolation.

So here I am.  The book seems to be gaining traction and sales are increasing.  I’m especially happy about the Kindle Unlimited growth.  It’s been very steadily increasing (see chart) and this month will soon represent an average of at least a book a day.  So that’s becoming a significant source of sales.

But now more than ever I have to outline the story correctly and it’s a combination of too many ideas going in too many directions on the one hand and real doubts about the mix of action scenes versus everything else.  Information dumps, character interactions, political, social, economic and let’s call them “philosophical” plot items all have to compete for space with the more dynamic scenes that grab the most attention.

But things are progressing so I’m satisfied with the effort right now.  I’m sure I’ll run into some road blocks once I try to flesh in some of the more complicated scenes.  But there should be some effort in figuring out the balance between components.  So, there it is.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 24SEP2026 – Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

photog 2 Comments Guest Contributors, Tregonsee , , ,

This (bureaucracy) is Jerry Pournelles “Iron Law” at work (full description can be found here https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html) but in total it states

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization.

A corollary to this seems to be that the second class of people are, by their nature risk averse. They try to mitigate risk by setting constraints or boundaries on the system much like the early Jewish Rabbis setting explicitly tighter boundaries where the Law was more open to interpretation in an effort to avoid transgressing unintentionally. This is not to say rules are per se bad, having unclear or indeterminate rules can lead to friction and discord within a group. However, a subset of Pournelle’s second group seems to get gratification out of controlling others. They are the more critical problem in the mess. In designing a stable system of government these kinds of issues need to be acknowledged and dealt with. To some degree democratic process help to mitigate this as the population 1 folks will restrain the population 2 subset, assuming the balance is random and uniform. One of our weaknesses is that the the population 2 folks have been normalizing population 2 behavior. On top of that, the more controlling parts of population 2 have become VERY aggressive. This has messed with the balance, the populations are “trying” to rebalance but this terrifies the population 2 types as they are change averse so they are trying to subvert the democratic processes into autocratic ones with them in control. Honestly much of this was forseen by the Scottish enlightenment and the US founders and the original constitution did a fair job of mitigating the issues. The weakness may have come from the establishment of a permanent political class. This was certainly NOT envisioned by the founding fathers, and it tends to let power collect in a few groups.

25SEP2026 – Quote of the Day

photog 2 Comments Quote of the Day ,

Under the little crosses where they rise

The soldier rests. Now round him undismayed

The cannon thunders, and at night he lies

At peace beneath the eternal fusillade.

I love to think that if my blood should be

So privileged to sink where his has sunk,

I shall not pass from Earth entirely

But when the banquet rings, when healths are drunk,

Be mindful of the men they were, and raise

Your glasses to them in one silent toast.

Alan Seeger