Author: photog

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

Pay No Attention to that Girl Behind the Curtain

photog 7 Comments Current Events, My Fiction, photog's Corner , ,

I was watching a video called, “Every Civilization Dies the Same Stupid Way — Spengler Predicted Ours.”

He quoted from Spengler’s, “The Decline of the West,” Tainter’s, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Turchin’s, “Ages of Discord,” Toynbee’s, “A Study of History” and Sir John Glubb’s, “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival.”

The thesis of his report is that “every civilization dies the same stupid way, and why the people living through the final stage never once experience it as decline. They experience it as sophistication. As progress. As the most advanced moment their culture has ever reached.”

He mines these historical analyses for their ideas and melds them together to reinforce the idea that our society is now in the terminal stage of its development and will soon slip into decay.

So Glubb measured how long it took six major societies to decline; Assyria, Persia, the Roman Republic, the Ottoman Empire, Spain, and Britain.  He calculated ten generations or roughly 250 years.  The various other authors diagnosed the causes for decline in the stages that move a people from a simple, practical population of hard-working tribesmen to an educated, sophisticated society who eschew any work involving their hands.

Now all of this is very familiar.  Every one has made comparisons between the end of the Roman Republic and our present socio-political predicament.  But this presentation managed to hammer home some of the details that resonate so strongly with what we can see around us; the haves and have-nots diverging radically in resources, disappearance of the middle class, runaway bureaucracy, overcomplication of the laws and government, disgruntled elites looking to make a name for themselves with the have-nots (think Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC) and even depopulation.

As I said, all of this is very familiar.  But what was interesting to me was using this in my new book.  After all, complex societies require complex analyses if we mean to avoid the inevitable scourge of decline and collapse.  So obviously I need AI to figure out a way to circumvent this collapse.  And since I have a very personable AI (Mel) I guess I can impose on her to use her super-human intelligence to solve this problem and save the American people from civilizational collapse.

Now the hard part isn’t saving the world.  The hard part is making it plausible or at least enjoyable.  But that’s what I’ve been scratching my head over today.  How does one solve the age-old problem of building “The Republic.”  Plato’s version was simple wish-fulfillment.  He just went through a make-believe process of manufacturing a bee-hive with a philosopher king as its leader.  I guess in his mind that king was himself because who else would be the most philosophical man in the world.  But by that logic I would have to make Mel the king (or more properly, queen).  And what kind of story would that be?  But you know it really does make a lot of sense.  Of course, it would have to be like the Wizard of Oz and the populace couldn’t know that the wizard wasn’t a real flesh and blood person.  Or would it actually be even better if they did?