Category: My Fiction

Here are my own stories. Science fiction and fantasy mostly but other things may be added too.

Riding High on a Horse in a Star-Spangled Rodeo

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So, I’m making the plunge.  I’ve joined BookFunnel and I’ll be running a giveaway for e-copies of the “The Sniper” starting pretty soon.  The trick now will be to get as much visibility for the giveaway as I can.  So, I’ll publicize it here (of course) and I’ll put up a post on X and I’ll tell everybody I can think of that likes this kind of story.  My plan, such as it is, is to use the giveaway to garner as many reviews as I can and try to get the book more attention.  And after that I’ll put it up on Kindle Unlimited to tempt the general public that tests out its fiction one page at a time.

Will it work?  Well, I certainly hope it will but I’ll find out for sure whether I can interest the world at large.  I was listening to the Critical Drinker interview Andy Weir about the success of two of his books being turned into movies.  But I was just as interested in his story about self-publishing.  His “The Martian” was self-published on Amazon and struggled to find an audience in the beginning.  So, it’s kind of that one in a million-success story that inspires the other 999,999 writers out there toiling away in obscurity.  So just to clear the air ahead of time, for the movie version of “The Sniper,” I want Adam Baldwin to play Bogey and Gary Oldman to play Cutter.  Nick Searcy would make a good Chastain.  As for Connors, I haven’t made up my mind.  And the other parts are also up for grabs but definitely no Hollywood weirdos; that’s for sure.  I think Christopher Walken would make a good President Miller.  He’s always able to provide a memorably psychopathic character when required.  Of course I’m hoping to get myself a bit part.  Sort of like how Stan Lee always got a cameo in the Marvel superhero movies.  Maybe I can be one of the clerks at the airport in Baghdad.  I think I could really handle the part with style and finesse.  Sort of a latter-day Olivier.

But I will say it is a little discouraging to see just how much grunt work there is in navigating the world of self-publishing.  The experts don’t really seem to know that much more than the people wandering around in the dark like me.  Sure, they have a sense of things like keywords and how to attach to other books that are already popular but it doesn’t seem like they can tap into any magic formula for shining a spotlight on a new book.  It reminds me of that Glenn Campbell song “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Where hustle’s the name of the game and nice guys get washed away by the snow and the rain.”  Of course, that’s a little dramatic because I’m doing this from the comfort of my dining room where it’s relatively warm and dry.  But metaphorically I’m pounding that digital pavement so I can sing the blues along with Mr. Campbell.

The American Path

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I was thinking about some of the comments on yesterday’s post “Persistence of Memory.”  It was about detachment, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.”

And I replied, “You are correct about the path. We’ve atomized our existence. We’ve monetized our lives to such an extent that we almost don’t exist except as consumers. We’re just cogs in the machine. It’s inhuman.”  And that stuck in my mind.

And today I got a call from a friend whom I knew from high school.  He lives in Hawaii and only comes home to Brooklyn once a year at Christmas.  And we talked about meeting up next Christmas.  Now I haven’t seen him in thirty years.  I wonder if he would even recognize me.  And we’ve managed to speak on the phone every Christmas but we haven’t interacted other than that.  Well, I sent him a copy of my book and he called me up today and it was like a time machine.  He was laughing and saying how he always thought one day I’d write a science fiction story.  He was very complimentary and said he really liked the story and of course that was very gratifying.  But in the back of my mind, I was thinking what a strange world we live in.  Here was one of my best friends in the world and I hadn’t seen him for almost half a lifetime.

And so that conversation reinforced the statement, “… it’s the consequence of the rootless existence that has evolved to be the American path.”  Our way of life is somewhat related to the nomadic existence of herders.  They move to follow the grazing grounds of their herds.  There is no one home.  But our way is even worse.  Because the herders live in tribes or at least extended families that move together from place to place.  But we separate into at most nuclear families and often just single individuals, moving from job to job and city to city without anyone permanently included in their “tribe.”

I’m pretty sure that none of this is sustainable.  And maybe that’s why corporate America is backing a policy of wholesale immigration to provide a steady supply of new workers that Americans are no longer providing from their own descendants.  After all, how do you produce a family when all you are is a nomad living from job to job without a family to prop you up and give you help when things get tough or you need the resources to get married or buy a house or pay for expenses associated with children?

And this gave me an idea for my next book after “The Sniper.”  It should have to do with the smartest and richest guy in the world trying to fix “the American path.”  If someone powerful enough wanted to restore our country to viability, what would he think to do?  Maybe he’d redefine the partnership between communities and corporations.  Would it be a feudal system or a socialism?  Or neither.  I haven’t figured out what my “utopia” will be based on.  Maybe I’ll wave “artificial intelligence” around as my deus ex machina.  But I do want to think about it a little.  How do you go about fixing the world?

Various Public Relations

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So, Tuesday I have a meeting with my marketer to see how I can achieve more of my goals for the launch.  The book seems to be sustaining sales but I’m not satisfied with the visibility with respect to reviews and general profile.  As I’ve mentioned I’m going to find out just how large a giveaway I can expect to perform.  Now, I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all.  After all, as a tactic giving something away for free seems to be defeating the purpose of sales.  But my whole reason for writing this book, is to get other people to read it too.  And if you’re competing with literally millions of other books and some of them have multi-billion-dollar companies marketing them then it may take extreme methods to break out of obscurity and catch the public’s eye.  And then again, I may just be kidding myself.  But I think I’m very close to making a decision on the path forward.

And there’s not much time left before I’ll be overtaken by other responsibilities and projects.  First Selectman Cthulhu has selected me as his personal spokesman with responsibilities for communicating his agenda to both the human population of Dunwich and also the trans-dimensional realm of the Great Old Ones.  That’s right I’ll be updating his LinkedIn and TikTok pages.  Currently he’s asked me to edit out the use of words like crush, dismember, maim and devour in his recent communications.  He’s up for re-election and he needs to finesse his image quite a bit.  I’ve suggested he watch several of the recent Godzilla movies and figure out how to mimic the joie de vivre of that radioactive reptile who has managed to cultivate a laid back and avuncular style in the last few years.  I told him he might want to think about a facelift.  But then he reminded me that technically he really doesn’t have a face.  It’s more of a foot with eyes, mouth and tentacles.  Well, a rose by any other name.

On the home front, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard have returned to dismal puddle and seemed very satisfied with whatever slop has run into the swamp.  Also, a pair of wood ducks have also appeared but I notice they are much more skittish than the mallards.  Well, it takes all kinds.  So far, we haven’t seen any ducklings.  Time will tell.

And I’ve cut down all of the raspberry canes and put about five pounds of 10-10-10 fertilizer on the bed in anticipation of a bumper crop this year.  I’m hoping it will expand significantly beyond the current patch and eventually triple into the whole garden.  This is a matter of turning necessity into a virtue since nothing else seems to flourish besides raspberries in that soggy area.

The southern ice sheet has retreated back to the massive driveway pile which is now only three feet high.  At the current rate of retreat, I calculate it will disappear completely by Memorial Day.  At which point the last of it will end up in my drink cooler for that barbecue event.

Well, things are moving apace.  Excelsior!

OCF E-Book Giveaway of “The Sniper”

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Today I sold my 150th copy of “The Sniper” on Amazon and I’m looking to get more reviews and ratings.  So to increase the availability of the book I’m looking to send complimentary (free) e-book copies to folks here on the website who want one.

Just e-mail me here and I’ll send one back to that e-mail address.  Feel free to be honest with your review.  It’s better to get honest criticism than fake praise.

08MAR2026 – This’N’That

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Today I spent a chunk of time with a roof rake pulling snow off the lower roofs.  These roofs have heavy plastic cleats glued to the metal to keep the snow from sliding into the gutters but there was so much snow that the weight cracked the glue and so these enormously heavy blocks of ice and snow were falling down onto the upper and lower driveways and blocking the routes we use to reach the road.  So, I forced the issue and pulled down all (most) of the snow with the rake and then spent a few hours moving the snow away with a shovel and wheelbarrow.  I was planning to use the snowblower to move the snow but all those plastic cleats would be bad for the rotating parts and it would have taken me so long to separate them out using a garden rake that I said, “to hell with it” and just used the wheelbarrow and shovel.  Well, they say work develops character and Camera Girl says I’m a character so it must be working.

I’ve had some interesting conversations on X with another author and he seemed genuinely interested in how my characters would advance in a sequel so I told him I should send him the e-book and then he could see the challenges I’m going to face deciding how I’ll clean up the mess I’ve created in the first book.  Also, I’m hoping to get a review out of him.  Of course, he’s not a genre fiction author so it may not be his cup of tea so I may not get a highly positive review but honest feedback is valuable so I’m interested.

Tomorrow, third grandson is coming over to spend time with us and absorb mass quantities of spaghetti and meatballs followed by mint chocolate chip ice cream.  He’s starting high school next year so I’ll have to try and up my game.  I wonder what form of entertainment he’ll favor.  I know this year his whole family has been on a hockey kick.  While hockey is far from my favorite form of entertainment, I feel I must try to adapt myself to the grandkids as best I can.  After all they’re the future and I’m practically extinct.

I got in touch with my marketer and said I wanted to discuss strategies to maximize numbers of readers by minimizing cost to the reader (up to and including giveaways).  She said I should make a point to collect e-mail addresses to allow for follow up advertising for sequels.  I will study her message and formulate some specific questions to facilitate getting answers at the meeting.  I’ve found marketing a book is an onerous task that’s far from fun.  At this point I want a strategy that sustains itself with minimal demands on my time.  But I may not get the answers I’m hoping for.

Alright, that’s enough for now.  I’m trying to stay away from the news of wars and scandals and elections and other tawdry concerns.  The world is certainly a messy place.

03MAR2026 – Sales Update and Begathon

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Update:

Yesterday’s total was 18 books and my book ranking has also improved markedly.  Overall rank now close to 20,000 and categories in the top 100s!  Look out Tom Clancy (or whoever the new alive guy is).

Well, things are looking up.  So far today, I’ve sold ten copies and pretty soon I’ll reach a hundred sales.  Cool!

And I broke through the 40,000 overall rank in Kindle Store and the 200’s in some major categories (see below)

And so now that some momentum is building up I’d like to make one last plea (on bended knee mind you) for anyone who liked the book to put a good review up on Amazon.  You can use any name you like and you don’t even need to have bought the book.  Just tell the world why you liked it and help me become independently wealthy ( or at least cheer up a poor hard-working author.

Thank you for your attention.

Jake Barter

More Marketing Stuff

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So, I spent some time yesterday and today sending a few complimentary copies of the book to reviewers and adjusting the Amazon Ads to concentrate on the “targets” that have produced sales.  So far it looks like the ads that work best are where Amazon selects viewers that have done a search for another product that is either “similar” to my book or “complementary” to it and place my ad somewhere on that search result page.  How Amazon gauges similarity and complementarity is of course the black box.

These targets that they decide on work better than matching my book to searches that contain keywords that my book has been matched with like “techno-thriller” or “vigilante justice” or “suspense thriller.”  These also work but at a lower rate.  So, what seems to be the case is that Amazon seems to know what they’re doing better than anybody else.  And I guess that makes sense.  The algorithm is the wizard behind the curtain but apparently, he’s not some medicine show tramp whose balloon was blown off course.  He’s the real deal.

So now that I’m running the marketing show I’m excited again and waiting for that magic moment when the algorithm decides that I’m ready for prime time and blankets the Amazon universe with free advertisements for my magnum opus.  And every time you open up an email from Amazon, my book will stare back at you in all its black and white splendor.  And once the ten millionth copy is sold, President Trump will invite me to the Oval Office and present me with the Trump/Kennedy Center Medal for the Most Beautiful Literature.  And I’ll autograph a copy of the book for him.  It’ll read, “To DJT, from one native New Yorker, to another.  You, kooky nut, you.  Don’t ever change.  Jake Barter”

But I digress (or hallucinate).  Of late I’ve read just how much AI novel writing has become sort of a catastrophe.  Apparently, there is a sizable segment of the book reading audience that is perfectly satisfied with AI slop.  And I don’t think this is shocking.  Think of what now passes for entertainment on broadcast television.  It’s already down to the level of mindless machine output.  I guess the question will be whether there will be a reaction to this, with a flight to quality occurring.  Even leaving my own personal writing out of this, I’d hate to think that literature will completely disappear from the face of the Earth in favor of subhuman cargo-cult knock-offs.

Well, I guess there can be all kinds of entertainment products out there.  After all, a big part of marketing is identifying a niche that isn’t being serviced optimally.  But it does make me wonder what that niche is for me.  Disgruntled right-wing old guys?  Well, why not.  Talk about a despised minority.  We’re positively reviled by everyone out there.  But I am hoping for a larger audience.  I have a small test audience of women who won the Goodreads giveaway.  I’m hoping for some feedback from them pretty soon.  I’ll compare them to the few women that have already read the book in my circle of friends.  It might be interesting

One Month In

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So today was the last day of my marketer’s book launch service.  And as of now we sold sixty books.  Thirty-four were e-books and twenty-six were paperbacks.  And today I noticed that one sale (an e-book) was sold in Germany.  Well, well.

Owing to the fact that book sales have not topped one million copies, as of yet, I’ve decided to turn the whole thing into a network marketing exercise.  I intend to find ten people and have each of them buy ten copies and then each force ten people to each buy ten copies and then so on and so forth until by level ten we have ten billion copies sold!  By the way that math may be off a little but you get the idea.  After all if it worked for Amway and Communism how can it possibly fail?  Why didn’t I think of this earlier?  All I have to do is buy a white board and some dry erase products and maybe combine this with a Tupperware item or two and before you know it I’ll be a huge success.

All in all, it’s been very educational.  I guess the takeaway is that price-point and ads on Amazon are what sell books.  As soon as I dropped the price of the e-book from $5.99 to $2.99 there was an immediate surge in sales.  Since I have very few reviews, I’ve decided to drop the price of the e-book to $0.99 and try to get a bunch of sales right away in the hopes that it will generate some reviews.  Of course, that’s just my idea but it seems to make sense to me.

The marketer has additional services to extend the launch but I’ve decided to try it myself.  Now that I’m running the campaign on my own, I’ll depend on Amazon’s automatic key word selection to attract the attention of the techno-thriller/vigilante justice readers out there.  It should be very interesting to see how this change affects sales.

I will say that becoming a “best selling author” is harder than I imagined.  I assumed that with my incredible writing skills the publishers and the reading public would beat a path to my door and shower me with riches.  So far, no path.  So far, more like a trickle of riches.  But I am undismayed.  My acquaintances who’ve read the book report enjoying it a lot.  Now of course they may be just saying nice things because they like me.  But I will say it is very nice to receive accolades even from friends.  If instead they had told me, it was awful I think I’d be pretty discouraged.  So currently I’m buoyed by the minor success I’ve enjoyed and hopeful that with further exposure the book will find an audience (possibly in Germany!).

So, let’s just see how the next stage in this odyssey goes.  As always feel free to add a review to Amazon and hopefully the word will get out that a new classic has appeared on the horizon for discerning readers.

16FEB2026 Marketing Update

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I was going to review another science fiction movie tonight (Her (2013) but about fifteen minutes into the movie I couldn’t get over my dislike for the protagonist (Theodore played by Joaquin Phoenix) so I turned it off.  Once again that “best of” list doesn’t really match up perfectly with my taste.  So far, I’ve had three bombs; Repo Man, Dark Star and now Her.  On the positive side I liked Dark City, Wrath of Khan and Dredd.  And soon I’ll watch Dune which I’ve already seen and liked.  So, this guy is batting slightly better than .500.  To be fair there were other movies on the list that I also like but have already seen.  But the point is I’ll have to make my own version of “The List.”

So, there’s about another ten days or so left in my marketing contract for my book and I have learned a lot about how Amazon Ads work and also what they can and can’t do.  You’re basically buying visibility on Amazon.  The ratio is about one person in a thousand who sees your ad will click on it.  And about one person in ten (approximately) will buy the book.  But you pay money for every click (something like a dollar a click) and so you actually lose money on the sales you make.  It’s quite bizarre.

The next stage in the campaign includes giving away five books on Goodreads to people who signed up and dropping the price on the e-books for two days to $2.99.  And then there will be ads on Bookbub and hopefully this will provide the recognition in the algorithm to boost the books visibility.  And of course there will be some reviews that hopefully entice buyers.  Well, the fate of a self-published author is a lonely one.  But I wanted to write a book and now I know how that looks.

On the positive side I have gotten pretty favorable feedback from some of the readers whose opinions I highly value and that is actually the biggest pleasure of the whole process.  Several people have demanded that I produce a sequel immediately.  Which is kind of a problem.  But I have several different stories that I’ve been toying with and one of them will take the lead and become book two.  It is interesting to me how differently men and women approach the story.  Some of the women wanted to know how Bogey does with the waitress from the end of the book.  Well, everyone has their own way of reading a story I suppose.

Anyone who’s purchased the book and would like to put a review up on Amazon I’d encourage you to do it right away to help me with the push for sales during the upcoming sale.  I’m told that verified purchaser reviews are actually one of the most important marketing factors.

Well, there’s my update.  I’ve been disavowed of my dream of best seller status (sniff).  But I hope that with the rest of the program to come it will spark enough interest to produce a burst of sales.  Excelsior!

Goodreads Book Giveaway February 7 – 19 of “The Sniper”

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Huzzah!  The chance to win a free paperback copy of this desperately sought after literary jewel.  Did I say jewel?  Nay!  Miracle!!!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Sniper by Jake Barter

The Sniper

by Jake Barter

Giveaway ends February 19, 2026.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway