#eBook Formatting Companies

[itesservices]

Discover common eBook formatting mistakes and learn how to avoid them for a seamless reading experience. This guide provides insights into proper formatting techniques, ensuring your eBook looks professional and is easy to navigate. Avoid pitfalls like inconsistent fonts, poor alignment, and incorrect margins to enhance reader engagement. Gain the knowledge to create a polished and well-structured eBook. eBook formatting tips are crucial for authors and publishers aiming for high-quality digital publications. 

[theologyy]

Review: “My Investing Journey and Learning” by Carmen Mundt

Qualifications: I’m a journalist reporting on business, economics, and defense who’s been in the industry for 7 years — the last 3 have been at, debatably, the #1 business publication in the world.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Thoughts: I cannot believe I spent 39 euros on this.

This 39 page ebook provides incredibly basic information that can all be found in this article.

First: while the ebook is about 40 pages, it probably has about 10 pages of actual information in it, interspersed with inspirational quotes from Sheryl Sandberg and Warren Buffet, with some pictures of Carmen in Monaco.

There’s about 1 page of “introduction” from Carmen that talks about her upbringing and journey to university in London. I won’t comment too much on her personal story, but an important thing to note is that she says she came from a “traditional Spanish household” where her father was the breadwinner and her mother had no access to family finances. After the 2008 crash, her family couldn’t afford to send her to college. She moved to London, applied for a student loan, and began studying finance at a university while working part time.

Carmen very, very briefly mentioned her regrets as to her mother’s inability to access higher education, work, and family financial planning; she says she’d never want to be in that position. While literally only one sentence, I think it makes it clear who the audience for this ebook is: someone who has absolutely, positively, no idea about money.

(She also very, very briefly mentions “big changes in her personal life” that made a full-time job in finance “not sustainable,” leading to her move to Monaco. This is her only reference to George.)

The rest of the book very simply explains how to make a budget, set financial goals, invest in the stock market, and mitigate risk. The information was kinda factually correct, and was written in a coherent manner. I think that’s the highest praise I can give it.

Here’s the thing: like other reviewers have called out, I am pretty certain that Carmen didn’t write anything besides the introduction. Whole sections (and indeed the entire format of the ebook) were clearly ripped from the Female Invest introductory courses. (I spent 3 hours clicking through each course so I could find direct wording comparisons to make this claim. I really wouldn’t recommend it.) I do think she edited these sections, and she interjected a few personal sentences; but I believe that’s where her involvement ended.

From an expert perspective, a lot of the information is so simplistic as to be almost incorrect. This isn’t a “first day of Econ 101” ebook — this is a “freshman year of high school home ec class” ebook. (Did anyone else’s home ec classes teach budgeting, or just me?)

Here’s an example. In a section on stocks, Carmen/Female Invest writes: “Investing in stocks allows you to support companies and causes you care about while still making a profit.”

On a basic level, this is correct. Purchasing a stock technically means you’re buying a little bit of a company, and I guess therefore supporting it. But unless a company is IPOing, you’re buying those stocks from another investor — which means your purchase has no effect on the company. So it’s a little disingenuous to claim you’re somehow helping the company. The ebook is rife with this kind of thing.

Carmen pushed in her advertising posts that the Female Invest courses were a key supplement to her book. So obviously, I had to do those too. And holy shit, they were so much worse than the ebook. Some parts were blatantly incorrect on basic information (they claim markets are open 24/7, when most are only open 9am-4:30pm on weekdays) and have some of the most patronizing metaphors I have ever read. (One of the most egregious was comparing your investment portfolio to a pizza because “stocks, bonds, and ETFs” make up different “sizes of slices to make a whole pie”. This isn’t even an accurate equivalent — maybe a calzone, pasta, and pizza make up a whole meal? I don’t even know.)

I would not recommend buying this ebook unless you, too, were barred from even thinking about a stock by your traditional father. Even then, consider free sources.

A Disclaimer on disclosures: So, after @ohblimeygeorge sent me a reddit post also reviewing Carmen’s book that mentioned ad disclosures, I decided to dive into the regulations. In the U.S., influential advertising is regulated by the FTC — in the EU, it’s regulated by the EU Commission, which I believe Carmen would qualify under since she is a Spanish citizen who lives in Monaco. First, I looked at this legal brief on content monetization business models, and concluded that that the ebook likely falls under “affiliate marketing” as Carmen likely receives a percentage of each ebook sold through her link.

(An additional disclaimer: obviously, I don’t know the details of the deal Carmen has with Female Invest, but I’d think it unlikely that she isn’t getting paid for their collaboration. She mentioned in an Instagram story under her Female Invest highlight that she “tried purchasing equity but they were already too big for what I could afford” but “did buy a bit of their crowdfunding.” Since she doesn’t have equity, i.e. doesn’t own a piece of the company, it’d be weird if she was doing this for free.)

Back on topic. I next looked at this legal brief on advertising disclosures. It states that affiliate marketing must be disclosed: “you need to make sure your audiences understand that it’s advertising.” Disclosures can include hashtags and “mentioning” advertising in the caption. Carmen has not disclosed advertising in any of her Female Invest posts, and appears to be violating this regulation. (Interestingly, her only posts that follow disclosure requirements are her Tommy posts.)

It’s apparently not uncommon. An EU Commission study showed 80% of influencers in the EU do not properly disclose ads.

So, there’s that too.

[professorlink]

Give Me Liberty! (7th Edition) - Seagull Edition - eBook eBook Details Authors: Eric Foner, Kathleen DuVal, Lisa McGirr File Size: 40 MB, 38 MB Format: PDF (converted), ePub (original) Length: 1344 Pages Publisher: ‎W. W. Norton & Company; Seagull 7th edition Publication Date: December 7, 2022 Language: ‎English ISBN-10: 132404120X, 1324041293 ISBN-13: 9781324041207, 9781324041290

[traegorn]

So when I do finish this book I am writing (speaking it into existence bc adhd is a BITCH) Like what's your experience with publishing? How much does it usually cost? What kinda income does one get? I don't really care about making money but it would be super neat to make something since I cannot work. How do taxes work on that also? Google is confusing me

So far i have an idea and half a first chapter with thrilling notes such as " add a cat" and "insert spell here"

So I self publish, so that's the world I know. If you want to find a traditional publisher, you'll need to query agents and do a bunch of other stuff. My only advice for traditional publishing is that when going that route, money should always flow towards the author. If they're asking you to pay for something, they aren't a traditional publisher and there's a good chance it's a grift.

So let's talk about what I do know.

(And this turned out to be long as hell, so I'm putting in a "keep reading")

When you self publish, you are effectively acting as the publisher. If you want someone to do edits? You'll have to hire an editor. If you want someone to do the book layouts? You'll have to hire someone to do it if you can't do it yourself. You need a cover? You get the idea.

Now I don't pay an editor, so I can't really give you a price range on how much they cost off the top of my head. I do know they can get expensive though.

I also do all my own interiors, but I have a graphic design background and have been doing print layouts for decades. If you want to hire someone to do the interiors, that can run you $100-500, so I recommend just... learning to do it yourself.

Frankly, it's not terribly hard. I do mine in Apple Pages on my Mac for my paperbacks and Amazon has a free program for formatting eBooks (which you can export both as the Kindle format OR the more universal ePub format). With your print version, you just want to make sure you get your margins right, along with using a standard font like Times New Roman.

Like, literally just pick up a book and study the layout. Look at the front matter (copyright page, title page, etc) of a handful of books and mimic what you find there. I don't know why so many self published authors get that bit wrong. It's a book. Format it like a book.

Now the cover... this is where you'll probably end up spending something. I do my own covers for my comics, but hire out for my novels because I can't do the kind of covers expected of my genre. And you do want to match your genre, because you want a potential reader to know what they're getting into. I've seen so many self published books with terrible covers and it drives me nuts.

Cover design can run you anywhere from $35-$400 depending on who you choose to contract, and this is where I recommend you spend your money. On the cheap end you have companies like GetCovers. Now they primarily do covers made from edited stock photos, and I've honestly been pretty satisfied with their work... but you have to hold their hand and be very clear with what you want.

GetCovers is a part of Mibl Group, and it's pretty much all of their most inexperienced employees. The whole point of it is to get them the experience to work on bigger projects down the road. They have cheaper packages, but for their best work you'll probably only spend like $35-$45. If you're working in a genre that mainly uses stock images, that's who you want.

I often end up retouching the covers they do though, because I'm impatient. Like there are edits to The Witch and the Rose and Shadowcasting I made after they handed me the completed files. You're going to have to be very specific with what you want. The first version of the Bloody Damn Rite cover they did... was awful. But they did the revisions I asked for, and the version they delivered in the end was great.

Now if you want, like, original art or just more complicated, custom stuff? You're looking at at least $250 on the cheap end, but sometimes you end up in the ballpark of $700-$1000. Like on their regular site (just to use the same company as GetCovers for comparison), the Mibl group charges like $300 for a more complicated stock photo based cover (that requires more complicated edits) and at least $700 for covers that require digital painting, 3d modeling, etc.

There are a wide range of prices depending on what you're asking for. But, y'know, you're paying that once for a commercial piece of graphic design.

I'm cheap and can do some of the work myself, so I go for the $35 cover. I also figure out what fonts they used for the covers, so I can go buy my own commercial license for them and replicate a similar logo on my title page. You don't need to do that bit, I'm just finicky.

Actually publishing the book is easy. You'll want to use a self publishing platform like Kindle Direct Publishing or IngramSpark (or, if you're like me, both). I sell KDP books on Amazon, but all other distribution is through IngramSpark. You make more money on Amazon by using KDP, but even though they offer distribution, no book store will ever order through them. So I turn that option off, and then I take the same book and I make it available through IngramSpark.

On amazon I make a little more than $2 on a $3 ebook, and about $4.00 on a $12.99 paperback. When a bookstore buys an IngramSpark version, I make about $2.50 on a $14.99 book (if you wondered by my books cost more when not buying it through Amazon... that's why). Now if you buy yourself author copies, they cost way less -- in the end I think I can get them for like $5 a book? So when I sell them in person, my margins are much higher.

But, y'know, you have to actually sell them.

Because that's the hard part. When self publishing, you only have you to market it. I don't know how many books I'd be selling if I didn't have a pre-existing audience -- and even then it's not a huge amount. I've sold about 200 books this year? Which isn't nothing, and I appreciate every single person who's purchased one of my titles, but it's obviously not enough to quit my day job for, y'know?

That said, I've known people who do sell enough to make a steady living. So it's possible for sure.

But it's not going to happen overnight, and it won't be easy.

As for taxes, you'll need a 1099 and do stuff with the Schedule C. I always forget exactly what until I'm actually doing them, but it's not super hard, just annoying.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Solar is a market for (financial) lemons

There are only four more days left in my Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it's in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.

There's a (superficial) good case for turning markets loose on the problem of financing the rollout of an entirely new kind of energy provision across a large and heterogeneous nation. As capitalism's champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action. Merely dangle the incentive of profit before the market's teeming participants and they will align themselves towards it, like iron filings all snapping into formation towards a magnet.

But markets have a problem: they are prone to "reward hacking." This is a term from AI research: tell your AI that you want it to do something, and it will find the fastest and most efficient way of doing it, even if that method is one that actually destroys the reason you were pursuing the goal in the first place.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/engineering/failure-modes-in-machine-learning

For example: if you use an AI to come up with a Roomba that doesn't bang into furniture, you might tell that Roomba to avoid collisions. However, the Roomba is only designed to register collisions with its front-facing sensor. Turn the Roomba loose and it will quickly hit on the tactic of racing around the room in reverse, banging into all your furniture repeatedly, while never registering a single collision:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/when-ais-start-hacking.html

This is sometimes called the "alignment problem." High-speed, probabilistic systems that can't be fully predicted in advance can very quickly run off the rails. It's an idea that pre-dates AI, of course – think of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But AI produces these perverse outcomes at scale…and so does capitalism.

Many sf writers have observed the odd phenomenon of corporate AI executives spinning bad sci-fi scenarios about their AIs inadvertently destroying the human race by spinning off in some kind of paperclip-maximizing reward-hack that reduces the whole planet to grey goo in order to make more paperclips. This idea is very implausible (to say the least), but the fact that so many corporate leaders are obsessed with autonomous systems reward-hacking their way into catastrophe tells us something about corporate executives, even if it has no predictive value for understanding the future of technology.

Both Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross have theorized that the source of these anxieties isn't AI – it's corporations. Corporations are these equilibrium-seeking complex machines that can't be programmed, only prompted. CEOs know that they don't actually run their companies, and it haunts them, because while they can decompose a company into all its constituent elements – capital, labor, procedures – they can't get this model-train set to go around the loop:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Stross calls corporations "Slow AI," a pernicious artificial life-form that acts like a pedantic genie, always on the hunt for ways to destroy you while still strictly following your directions. Markets are an extremely reliable way to find the most awful alignment problems – but by the time they've surfaced them, they've also destroyed the thing you were hoping to improve with your market mechanism.

Which brings me back to solar, as practiced in America. In a long Time feature, Alana Semuels describes the waves of bankruptcies, revealed frauds, and even confiscation of homeowners' houses arising from a decade of financialized solar:

https://time.com/6565415/rooftop-solar-industry-collapse/

The problem starts with a pretty common finance puzzle: solar pays off big over its lifespan, saving the homeowner money and insulating them from price-shocks, emergency power outages, and other horrors. But solar requires a large upfront investment, which many homeowners can't afford to make. To resolve this, the finance industry extends credit to homeowners (lets them borrow money) and gets paid back out of the savings the homeowner realizes over the years to come.

But of course, this requires a lot of capital, and homeowners still might not see the wisdom of paying even some of the price of solar and taking on debt for a benefit they won't even realize until the whole debt is paid off. So the government moved in to tinker with the markets, injecting prompts into the slow AIs to see if it could coax the system into producing a faster solar rollout – say, one that didn't have to rely on waves of deadly power-outages during storms, heatwaves, fires, etc, to convince homeowners to get on board because they'd have experienced the pain of sitting through those disasters in the dark.

The government created subsidies – tax credits, direct cash, and mixes thereof – in the expectation that Wall Street would see all these credits and subsidies that everyday people were entitled to and go on the hunt for them. And they did! Armies of fast-talking sales-reps fanned out across America, ringing dooorbells and sticking fliers in mailboxes, and lying like hell about how your new solar roof was gonna work out for you.

These hustlers tricked old and vulnerable people into signing up for arrangements that saw them saddled with ballooning debt payments (after a honeymoon period at a super-low teaser rate), backstopped by liens on their houses, which meant that missing a payment could mean losing your home. They underprovisioned the solar that they installed, leaving homeowners with sky-high electrical bills on top of those debt payments.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it shares a lot of DNA with the subprime housing bubble, where fast-talking salesmen conned vulnerable people into taking out predatory mortgages with sky-high rates that kicked in after a honeymoon period, promising buyers that the rising value of housing would offset any losses from that high rate.

These fraudsters knew they were acquiring toxic assets, but it didn't matter, because they were bundling up those assets into "collateralized debt obligations" – exotic black-box "derivatives" that could be sold onto pension funds, retail investors, and other suckers.

This is likewise true of solar, where the tax-credits, subsidies and other income streams that these new solar installations offgassed were captured and turned into bonds that were sold into the financial markets, producing an insatiable demand for more rooftop solar installations, and that meant lots more fraud.

Which brings us to today, where homeowners across America are waking up to discover that their power bills have gone up thanks to their solar arrays, even as the giant, financialized solar firms that supplied them are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks to waves of defaults. Meanwhile, all those bonds that were created from solar installations are ticking timebombs, sitting on institutions' balance-sheets, waiting to go blooie once the defaults cross some unpredictable threshold.

Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth opportunities. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn't owned by the homeowner – it's owned by a solar company, which is to say, "a finance company that happens to sell solar":

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solarcity-maintains-34-residential-solar-market-share-in-1h-2015/406552/

And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks – sometimes more than 100%.

The solar companies would be in even worse trouble, but they also tricked all their victims into signing binding arbitration waivers that deny them the power to sue and force them to have their grievances heard by fake judges who are paid by the solar companies to decide whether the solar companies have done anything wrong. You will not be surprised to learn that the arbitrators are reluctant to find against their paymasters.

I had a sense that all this was going on even before I read Semuels' excellent article. We bought a solar installation from Treeium, a highly rated, giant Southern California solar installer. We got an incredibly hard sell from them to get our solar "for free" – that is, through these financial arrangements – but I'd just sold a book and I had cash on hand and I was adamant that we were just going to pay upfront. As soon as that was clear, Treeium's ardor palpably cooled. We ended up with a grossly defective, unsafe and underpowered solar installation that has cost more than $10,000 to bring into a functional state (using another vendor). I briefly considered suing Treeium (I had insisted on striking the binding arbitration waiver from the contract) but in the end, I decided life was too short.

The thing is, solar is amazing. We love running our house on sunshine. But markets have proven – again and again – to be an unreliable and even dangerous way to improve Americans' homes and make them more resilient. After all, Americans' homes are the largest asset they are apt to own, which makes them irresistible targets for scammers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

That's why the subprime scammers targets Americans' homes in the 2000s, and it's why the house-stealing fraudsters who blanket the country in "We Buy Ugly Homes" are targeting them now. Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/

America can and should electrify and solarize. There are serious logistical challenges related to sourcing the underlying materials and deploying the labor, but those challenges are grossly overrated by people who assume the only way we can approach them is though markets, those monkey's paw curses that always find a way to snatch profitable defeat from the jaws of useful victory.

To get a sense of how the engineering challenges of electrification could be met, read McArthur fellow Saul Griffith's excellent popular engineering text Electrify:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

And to really understand the transformative power of solar, don't miss Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works, where you'll learn that we could give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder) by capturing just 0.4% of the solar rays that reach Earth's surface:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

But we won't get there with markets. All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for "carbon offsets," which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

We can address the climate emergency, but not by prompting the slow AI and hoping it doesn't figure out a way to reward-hack its way to giant profits while doing nothing. Founder and chairman of Goodleap, Hayes Barnard, is one of the 400 richest people in the world – a fortune built on scammers who tricked old people into signing away their homes for nonfunctional solar):

https://www.forbes.com/profile/hayes-barnard/?sh=40d596362b28

If governments are willing to spend billions incentivizing rooftop solar, they can simply spend billions installing rooftop solar – no Slow AI required.

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28 - TOMORROW!) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image:

Future Atlas/www.futureatlas.com/blog (modified)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/87913776@N00/3996366952

--

CC BY 2.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

J Doll (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Sky_%28140451293%29.jpeg

CC BY 3.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[raisinchallah]

publishing companies are keeping us from the ideal digital book format the combined ebook audiobook where its a regular ebook you can look at pictures and graphs skip about with the index search it change font size etc but if u click anywhere in it you can choose to start up the audiobook wherever and the pages will scroll with the speed adjustable audiobook and u would experience peace and love on planet earth but libby and amazon do not wish us to be able to live like this

[maybemockingbird]

Surprise! The first book in my brand new paranormal romance novella series Nights in New Eden is available in both ebook and limited physical copy formats on my website! This 18+ sugar and spice-filled story is set in the world of my web novel series The Night Farm and I'm SO excited that it's here! You can grab your copy by heading to my website! I've got a restock of the physical editions coming later in the month, so don't fear if you miss out! (I just have a few IRL events to survive first so I need to make sure I have the stock, but if I sell out preorders for the restock will open up so you can secure your copy!)

Synopsis 🎄

Eli is a fallen angel living in the quaint town of New Eden, and every day is filled with magic and cheer while working in his bakery, The Sunny Day Café. Housing a near-obsessive love for the holidays, Eli eagerly awaits Christmas each and every year, going all out with the decorations and cookies. This Christmas is anything but sweet, however, as Eli’s tree is lacking presents and his little shop is empty for the second year in a row. To make matters worse, the furnace is on the fritz and a blizzard is on the way. Just when he didn’t think his Christmas could be any crappier, in walks Des, his handsome (literal) demon of an ex-boyfriend.

Des offers to fix up Eli’s furnace in exchange for a latte and some company, but as the storm picks up that drapes The Sunny Day Café in darkness, the exes soon find themselves snowed in! Unable to do much else than chat and huddle together for warmth, Eli and Des are forced to face the unresolved issues that drove a wedge between them years prior, and the chilly Christmas Eve may just turn into one hell of a night they’ll never forget.

[lilithsaintcrow]

"All these authors with different names and different series, with similar cover formats, styles, and the same audiobook narrator, who isn’t real?"

[kvroii]

KVROII - MANGAKA AND ILLUSTRATOR

Welcome to my blog! I'm Kvroii, a mangaka and author, and this is the blog where I share my art, info about my projects, and stuff I've been working on! Most times, I draw the original characters from my works.

🖋️ WORKS

Manga: Of Spark and Cats

Spark Iskra left the human world 13 years ago. Now returning to prevent the formation of strange worlds that give a shape to their hosts’ most painful feelings, she becomes entangled in the lives of those who are connected to them. What could a glass cat and a painting do to cause someone to disappear? And given the chance, could Spark resist the true nature of her own world if it meant keeping everyone safe, or would she return to the very thing she was trying to keep them safe from?

This magical girl GL shoujo manga is my debut manga, which was published on April 30th, 2023. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle eBook formats.

Also available to read for free on Pixiv!

Novels: Myrios Series (Poisoner's City, Poisoned Memories, Poison World)

The Myrios Series is a series of three books following protagonist Kori Omoide as she discovers the secrets of the company that runs the technologically advanced city of Myrios.

Poisoner's City

Kori Omoide owns a coffee shop in Myrios, a technologically advanced city created by a group named Ares. However, when a mysterious toxin spreads through this new city, killing thousands of people, the blame falls on a mysterious masked boy by the name of Phantom. Phantom knows things about Kori's past that even she can't recall, and she knows that Phantom isn't guilty. Kori goes undercover to work for Ares to clear Phantom's name, where she meets a boy created in one of their experiments. Torn between her desire to protect him, but desperate to find out all he knows about Ares and the toxin, she gets caught between her new job and the realization that the experiment boy could be the secret to curing the toxin, but also the very reason that Ares wished to keep it a secret for so long. Can Kori clear Phantom's name, and in doing so, will she be able to avoid getting poisoned? Or will she put her life in Myrios at risk just to uncover the truth about the toxin and the experiment boy?

Poisoned Memories

Shortly after Kori Omoide uncovers the secret of the toxin that plagued the advanced city of Myrios, tensions arise between herself and the new leader of Phantom’s former followers. Kori wishes to protect the experiment cyborg at the heart of the trouble, while the new leader seeks to condemn him for his role in the harm that came from his creation. When Kori confronts the unusually familiar leader, she’s left with false memories, and she must find a way to remove them before she loses herself to them. However, with the leader being a goddess from the strange homeland she knows little about, and that homeland bringing unusual changes to her body, can she fix her memories before it brings danger to herself or the experiment cyborg, or will she lose everything trying?

Poison World

When the disappearance of Phecda Shioto brings an unexpected visitor to Kori Omoide’s doorstep, she finally learns the truth behind the mysterious homeland that stripped her of her memories years before. Determined to travel to this land and bring him back, but knowing her banishment would bring complications if she was discovered, she plans to go to the land of Curiah as Marun Ookami, the persona she created when she first went undercover at Ares a year before. However, the discovery of a third cyborg brings revelations about a final project that could bring the threat of Ares closer than ever to the Floor Nine team that Marun worked for, and could destroy his chance to save Phecda. With only limited time before the next coronation that will take Phecda from her forever, can Kori contend with dangers in both a faraway land and far too close to home?

MYRIOS -Complete Illustrated Series-

A collection of all three Myrios Series novels with 75 original light novel style illustrations. Available in hardcover and ebook formats.

[physalian]

Reminder that IngramSpark is terrible

Even if you're one of the lucky authors who've never had any issues with this platform, that they have a chokehold on expanded distribution for indie authors is my problem. Ingram will nickle and dime you with a user interface that pales in comparison in efficency to KDP. Cannot comment on any other print-on-demand company but even little Kobo took me like, 40 minutes to go from making my account to having my ebook live on their website.

Fuck IngramSpark.

You want to/need to make any changes to your manuscript whatsoever after 60 days (even if you have had zero orders and/or have none being processed)? $25 a pop, oh and you get de-listed while the changes are being processed, which can take at least 72 hours. If you do have orders in the middle of being processed, your possibly critical changes won't go into effect until the last order during that time frame has been processed, leaving those readers with the older, worse version of your book.

Are you allowed to preview those changes to make sure it'll process correctly before paying that ridiculous fee? Nope! Not if you're uploading PDFs and not using their in-house formatting programs.

I've said it before: Amazon is shady as fuck. I'm not going to pretend they aren't.

But they know their shit and they do it with maximum efficiency. Lower print costs mean higher royalties and Amazon is one of the largest marketplaces you could hope to host your book on. The massive caveat being that Amazon will only sell on Amazon, unless you sign up for their expanded distribution which is... eh.

It will never not bother me that I had to price my book a whole dollar higher using Ingram, charging my readers more money, because to price Eternal Night what I have on Amazon ($17.99) would have had me owing Ingram money.

Books are expensive enough already, and you don't really buy direct from Ingram. It's more expensive to print with them (on shittier paper to boot), which means they charge the vendor more to buy it so they can profit, which means the vendor (the bookstore you're buying from) can charge you more at the register so they can profit. You want my paperback for cheap? I would rather send you a copy from my own home, footing the bill on both ends for shipping costs, than use Ingram, if only to keep these bastards from taking their cut and giving me my $0.16.

I am not in this business to make money. I want people to enjoy my book and if that means losing a couple dollars of profit not pricing a 111k word fantasy novel at $22, I'd rather someone be able to afford it and like it than give it a pass because it's too expensive.

Ingram thinks they're the best, because they're still the standard for any brick and mortar store you want to shelve your book, and have zero incentive to change and better themselves.

I wouldn't have to pay the $25 in the first place if they didn't fuck up the color matching on my cover, and that's why I haven't pushed my book with Ingram at all. My debut novel is available technically through any vendor you could hope to buy from, because Ingram works with nearly all of them. Their version of my book is just awful, and trying to get the paper quality fixed all this time has gotten me nowhere, so I gave up and switched focus to the cover, and here we are.

I would rather pay to ship my books myself from KDP and hand deliver them to any brick and mortar store than use Ingram.

Amazon will print what you give them exactly as it looks on your digital screen, regardless of the color mode. Ingram will not, will not tell you this, and will not let you see if there is problem before you pay an arm and a leg for an author copy + shipping to see the damages.

If nothing else, it's a massive waste of paper to have an author copy I can't do anything with, with an issue any other platform would have let me prevent. I have one, 1, author copy from KDP, and it has a big fat watermark on the cover, but it's the only personal copy I need for my own use and reference. At the very least, I could have given my Ingram author copy away to somebody, but the color matching on the cover is atrocious and I'm embarrassed to look at it. Same exact files to both platforms.

Nor is anything with Ingram instantaneous. Everything requires a manual check. Which is great, thanks, human eyes on something is awesome, but maybe don't charge me the $25 change fee until that change has been approved? Now I have to fix a bleed issue, after updating the color mode on an identical file I already gave them that had no issues, after a 48 hour delay, and hope that this time, the color matching is correct, because they still won't tell me. If it's not? Another $25.

I don't want Amazon to expand their monopoly, but I desperately need Ingram to fix their shit and get off their high horse so they can be a fair and proper competitor of value. There should be zero fees to fix things if the book hasn't even sold a single copy on your platform. I know it can be automated and work flawlessly, negating the need for that fee. KDP has done it, and imo, on paper quality alone, KDP has Ingram beat anyway.

Ingram, allegedly, works great if you have no issues. If you do have an issue, it's never a small, simple fix.

Sorry for the rant and sorry to anyone who has used Ingram and doesn't know what the fuck I'm ranting about. It has been a struggle with them and their website since day one.

Do better.

[kyokosasagawa]

PRIDE MONTH: notable links for pride month!

https://storybundle.com/pride - storybundle is having a pride bundle! get 4 lgbtq books for 5 dollars, or 13 for 20 https://ninestarpress.com/ - a LGBTQ indie publishing company is having a sale for the month of June! https://ninestarpress.com/ - a database of trans authors, or trans characters! https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1d5r6ik/kickoff_to_pride_month_engage_in_vibrant/ - reddit's /r/fantasy subreddit is having an entire month of discussions related to LGBTQ content! https://thelesbianreview.com/ - a site dedicated to reviewing books involving sapphic characters! https://lgbtqreads.com/ - site dedicated to LGBTQ reads http://www.anathemamag.com/ - a ebook magazine for stories by LGBTQ POC people! https://www.glittership.com/buy/ - an LGBTQ specfic anthology that also comes in podcast format!

and, the holy grail:

https://libreture.com/bookshops/ - a list of places to find drm-free epubs, including lgbtq stores, because you should be allowed to own your books forever and on whatever devices you so please.

[itesservices]

Achieve the recognition your eBook deserves with expert eBook formatting services. Professional formatting enhances readability, ensures compatibility across devices, and boosts overall presentation. Whether you're an author or a publisher, meticulously formatted eBooks can significantly improve reader engagement and satisfaction. Discover how these services can help your work stand out in a competitive digital market. Read our blog to explore the benefits and see how your eBook can gain the spotlight it truly deserves. 

[fantasyfantasygames]

Dollars to Donuts

Dollars to Donuts, Curlicue Games, 2018

Dollars to Donuts (D2D) takes place inside a donut shop where bakers and servers rush to get donuts to patrons. It could easily have been one of those "better as a board game" setups, but there's more going on here than just a simple game mechanic and some talking.

I say "donut shop", but the way it's described the location really sounds more like a diner. The art backs that up. It's black-and-white photos of a 50s-style diner, including bakers, waitresses (and a waiter), and various folks sitting at the bar with their donuts and coffee. The photos are very nicely done. They're definitely not actual period photos. I can tell because there are multiple non-white people in them. Might be stock art, might be original. Either way, they work.

One of the rare features of D2D is "troupe"-style play. The game most people think about for troupe play is Ars Magica. It's not required, but Ars assumes that each player will have three characters: one mage, one companion (a favored, highly skilled non-mage), and one "grog" (warrior or servant). You can thus play scenarios at multiple different levels of power. Normally you all play a particular level of character at once to keep things balanced, but if everyone's ok with it you could have a mixed group.

In D2D, everyone has three characters: a baker, a server, and a patron. You're expected to switch between them fluidly as the game plays out, basically responding with the right character when someone calls their name. I can imagine this getting very chaotic and potentially stressful. However, if you have the right group of improv-friendly players, I can also imagine it really getting across the hectic feel of a busy diner.

The three character types have different game stats. Bakers have three attributes: Quality, Speed, and Efficiency. Servers have three gauges instead - you spend points from them as the game goes along. Those are Kindness, Agility, and Poise. Patrons have two negative attributes - Worry and Trouble - and one negative gauge - Hunger. They also have Issues, each of which is tied to either Worry or Trouble. If you play multiple sessions of the game, the patrons come in with a new set of Issues every time. Any continuity in their situation is entirely up to the play group. Play mostly revolves around resolving the patrons' issues without having their Hunger score go too far into the negative.

The dice mechanic is a simple d6+attribute, with two target numbers. Roll high and things go well, low and they go badly, and in the middle there's either no change or some of each. Points in gauges get spent to adjust the die roll upwards or downwards. There's also a timer involved (one per player, actually) and a few minigame-type setups for person-specific tasks.

D2D is in a weird space that's part one-shot LARP and part board game. I think that pushing it more solidly one way or the other could have resulted in Curlicue Games having a better final product. They threaded the needle, but the thread is a little bare for having gone through. My strongest suggestion, if this were to stay as an RPG, would be to make it explicitly GM-less, instead of just giving the GM practically nothing to do. Really, it just needs to lean in a particular direction.

Dollars to Donuts is available in Kindle format via Amazon's impenetrable AI-filled maze of schlock ebooks. I sent a suggestion that they might want to make it available in PDF, but they'll probably also want to fix up the book's trade dress so that certain major donut companies don't sue them.

[rabbitcruiser]

Read An Ebook Day 

Get lost in the world of a book, whether new or an old favorite, without the hassle of lugging it around, holding it up, or damaging it. That’s right, read an eBook!

Years ago there was a giant push to encourage reading among youth and adults alike, and that push has entered the modern age with International read an eBook day.

No more are we tied to reading books in the old format with two covers and hundreds of pages, no more do hundreds of trees have to die each year to bring literature to people from every walk of life.

With the invention of the eBook, we have reached the point where the wonder of reading is available to anyone with the computer or portable electronic device.

It’s become a huge industry, with devices like Kindle, Nooks, and apps available on many types of devices like cell phones and tablets.

Learn about Read An eBook Day

Read An eBook Day is a day that encourages you to do exactly that. eBooks can easily be accessed within a few seconds. You don’t need to head to your local book store or a library. By the time it takes you to finish reading this page, you could have your eBook chosen and you could be getting stuck right into it! But don’t dash off just yet!

eBooks give you the ability to take the authors and stories you love with you anywhere and enjoy them at any time. Whether you are 30,000 feet in the air or you are curled up on your sofa, you can tuck into a great book.

If you have never tried reading an eBook before, this is definitely the perfect day for you to read your very first one. If you are a big eBook fan already, not only is Read An eBook Day a great day for you to start a new book, but you can also use this day to raise awareness and encourage other people to start reading eBooks as well. You can post messages on social media so that your friends, family members, and followers know that it is Read An eBook Day and the importance of participating.

History of Read an eBook day

The first major celebration of International read an eBook day was in 2014, and was put together by a major eBook distributor OverDrive. This company provides eBooks through many major locations but is best known for being the biggest provider of eBooks to libraries all over the country.

Its eBooks are supplied by thousands of publishers, including the best known of Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Harlequin, Pursues, Wiley, and others. Chances are if you’ve read an eBook from a library, it was supplied by OverDrive.

How to celebrate Read an eBook day

The most obvious way to celebrate is by, you guessed it, reading an eBook. But you can go so much further than that, take a bike ride with your tablet out to your favorite place and sit in the park, on the docks, in the forest, or wherever your favorite reading hideaway is and enjoy the lightweight convenience of reading your book on an electronic device.

That’s just one of the joys of an eBook, you can carry dozens or even hundreds of them around on a single compact electronic mobile device, which ways less than even the smallest of paperbacks.

Get together with your friends and talk about your favorite eBooks and where you discovered them, and even talk about what your first eBook was. In today’s modern world it’s even possible that your first book outside of school and the library was read in an electronic format.

Reading an eBook allows you options totally unlike those of reading a normal book, wherewith a physical book you’d have to bring a light and a magnifying glass if the print was too small, with the mobile device you can just increase the font size and brighten the background.

You can even read an eBook in circumstances you couldn’t read a normal book like tucked away under your blankets in the dark, no flashlight required. Internation read an eBook day is a tribute to the growing future of electronics in our lives, and they’re now serving as the foundation of supplying educational, technical, and even entertainment-oriented books in every day and every format.

Even the instruction manuals that come with many of our new devices are PDF eBooks, and most video games no longer provide a physical book, it’s all online.

Another way to celebrate Read An eBook Day is to finally publish your own eBook so that other people can read it on this day! eBook publishing can appear somewhat of a mystery for those new to online publishing. There are lots of subtle complexities to making your novel launch a success, and professional book publishers are the main way to ensure that none of these procedures is missed. It can be easy to overlook the strategies and layout elements that must be implemented to make your work a best seller.

Finishing your novel is not the end of the story – literally. It’s only the start of a book’s journey from manuscript to book store. Have you decided on a book cover? Have you thought about your marketing schedule? Are you aware of your audience? These are the sort of things to consider on this day to help you take your content from hobbyist to professional, from your office drawer to the highest part of the eBook best-sellers list.

If you’re an aspiring author looking for a little guidance, why not take a creative writing course on Read An eBook Day? This will help you with all facets of composing a fictional work; you’ll soon learn how to master your plot and develop your characters with various tutorials. How about the final draft of your book?

You may be surprised to understand how few publications online have had professional editing skills applied to them. Having your literature carefully proofread and adapted by a team of expert editors is an amazing way to make your work stand out of the crowds. These are all the sorts of steps you can take on this date, depending on where you are right now in the process.

Source

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Chapter One of “Picks and Shovels” (Part 1)

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

My next novel is Picks and Shovels, out next month. It's tells the origin story of Martin Hench, my hard-charging, scambusting, high-tech forensic accountant, in a 1980s battle over the soul of a PC company:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

I'm currently running a Kickstarter to pre-sell the book in every format: hardcover, DRM-free ebook, and an independently produced, fabulous DRM-free audiobook read by Wil Wheaton, who just nailed the delivery:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification

Picks and Shovels opens with a long prologue that recounts Marty's misadventures as a failing computer science student at MIT, his love-affair with computers, and his first disastrous startup venture. It ends with him decamping to Silicon Valley with his roommate Art, a brilliant programmer, to seek their fortune.

Chapter one opens with Marty's first job, working for a weird PC company (there were so many weird PC companies back then!). I've posted Wil's audio reading of chapter one as a teaser for the Kickstarter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGXz1mkAd2Q

(Here it is as an MP3 at the Internet Archive:)

https://ia600607.us.archive.org/5/items/picks-and-shovels-promo/audio.mp3

The audio is great, but I thought I'd also serialize the text of Chapter One here, in five or six chunks. If you enjoy this and want to pre-order the book, please consider backing the Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification

Chapter One

Fidelity Computing was the most colorful PC company in Silicon Valley.

A Catholic priest, a Mormon bishop, and an Orthodox rabbi walk into a technology gold rush and start a computer company. The fact that it sounded like the setup for a nerdy joke about the mid-1980s was fantastic for their bottom line. Everyone who heard their story loved it.

As juicy as the story of Fidelity Computing was, they flew under most people’s radar for years, even as they built a wildly profitable technology empire through direct sales through faith groups. The first time most of us heard of them was in 1983, when Byte ran its cover story on Fidelity Computing, unearthing a parallel universe of technology that had grown up while no one was looking.

At first, I thought maybe they were doing something similar to Apple’s new Macintosh: like Apple, they made PCs (the Wise PC), an operating system (Wise DOS), and a whole line of monitors, disk drives, printers, and software.

Like the Mac, none of these things worked with anything else—you needed to buy everything from floppy disks to printer cables specially from them, because nothing anyone else made would work with their system.

And like the Mac, they sold mostly through word of mouth. The big difference was that Mac users were proud to call themselves a cult, while Fidelity Computing’s customers were literally a religion.

Long after Fidelity had been called to the Great Beyond, its most loyal customers gave it an afterlife, nursing their computers along, until the parts and supplies ran out. They’d have kept going even then, if there’d been any way to unlock their machines and use the same stuff the rest of the computing world relied on. But that wasn’t something Fidelity Computing would permit, even from beyond the grave.

I was summoned to Fidelity headquarters—in unfashionable Colma, far from the white-hot start-ups of Palo Alto, Mountain View, and, of course, Cupertino—by a friend of Art’s. Art had a lot more friends than me. I was a skipping stone, working as the part-time bookkeeper/accountant/CFO for half a dozen companies and never spending more than one or two days in the same office.

Art was hardly more stable than me—he switched start-ups all the time, working for as little as two months (and never for more than a year) before moving on. His bosses knew what they were getting: you hired Art Hellman to blaze into your company, take stock of your product plan, root out and correct all of its weak points, build core code libraries, and then move on. He was good enough and sufficiently in demand to command the right to behave this way, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. My view was, it was an extended celebration of his liberation from the legal villainy of Nick Cassidy III: having narrowly escaped a cage, he was determined never to be locked up again.

Art’s “engagements”—as he called them—earned him the respect and camaraderie of half the programmers and hardware engineers in the Valley. This, in spite of the fact that he was a public and ardent member of the Lavender Panthers, wore the badge on his lapel, went to the marches, and brought his boyfriend to all the places where his straight colleagues brought their girlfriends.

He’d come out to me less than a week after I arrived by the simple expedient of introducing the guy he was watching TV with in our living room as Lewis, his boyfriend. Lewis was a Chinese guy about our age, and his wardrobe—plain white tee, tight blue jeans, loafers—matched the new look Art had adopted since leaving Boston. Lewis had a neat, short haircut that matched Art’s new haircut, too.

To call the Art I’d known in Cambridge a slob would be an insult to the natty, fashion-conscious modern slob. He’d favored old band T-shirts with fraying armpit seams, too-big jeans that were either always sliding off his skinny hips or pulled up halfway to his nipples. In the summer, his sneakers had holes in the toes. In the winter, his boots were road-salt-crusted crystalline eruptions. His red curls were too chaotic for a white-boy ’fro and were more of a heap, and he often went days without shaving.

There were members of the Newbury Street Irregulars who were bigger slobs than Art, but they smelled. Art washed, but otherwise, he looked like a homeless person (or a hacker). His transformation to a neatly dressed, clean-shaven fellow with a twenty-five-dollar haircut that he actually used some sort of hairspray on was remarkable. I’d assumed it was about his new life as a grown-up living far from home and doing a real job. It turned out that wasn’t the reason at all.

“Oh,” I said. “That makes a lot of sense.” I shook Lewis’s hand. He laughed. I checked Art. He was playing it cool, but I could tell he was nervous. I remembered Lucille and how she listened, and what it felt like to be heard. I thought about Art, and the things he’d never been able to tell me.

There’d been a woman in the Irregulars who there were rumors about, and there were a pair of guys one floor down in Art’s building who held hands in the elevator, but as far as I knew up until that moment, I hadn’t really ever been introduced to a homosexual person. I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I did know how I wanted to feel about it.

So Art didn’t just get to know all kinds of geeks from his whistle-stop tour of Silicon Valley’s hottest new tech ventures. He was also plugged into this other network of people from the Lavender Panthers, and their boyfriends and girlfriends, and the people he knew from bars and clubs. He and Lewis lasted for a couple of months, and then there were a string of weekends where there was a new guy at the breakfast table, and then he settled down again for a while with Artemis, and then he hit a long dry spell.

I commiserated. I’d been having a dry spell for nearly the whole two years I’d been in California. The closest I came to romance was exchanging a letter with Lucille every couple of weeks—she was a fine pen pal, but that wasn’t really a substitute for a living, breathing woman in my life.

Art threw himself into his volunteer work, and he was only half joking when he said he did it to meet a better class of boys than you got at a club. Sometimes, there’d be a committee meeting in our living room and I’d hear about the congressional committee hearing on the “gay plague” and the new wave of especially vicious attacks. It was pretty much the only time I heard about that stuff—no one I worked with ever brought it up, unless it was to make a terrible joke.

It was Murf, one of the guys from those meetings, who told me that Fidelity Computing was looking for an accountant for a special project. He had stayed after the meeting and he and Art made a pot of coffee and sat down in front of Art’s Apple clone, a Franklin Ace 1200 that he’d scored six months ahead of its official release. After opening the lid to show Murf the interior, Art fired it up and put it through its paces.

I hovered over his shoulder, watching. I’d had a couple of chances to play with the 1200, and I wanted one more than anything in the world except for a girlfriend.

“Marty,” Art said, “Murf was telling me about a job I thought you might be good for.”

The Ace 1200 would have a list price of $2,200. I pulled up a chair.

Fidelity Computing’s business offices were attached to their warehouse, right next to their factory. It took up half of a business park in Colma, and I had to circle it twice to find a parking spot. I was five minutes late and flustered when I presented myself to the receptionist, a blond woman with a ten – years – out – of – date haircut and a modest cardigan over a sensible white shirt buttoned to the collar, ring on her finger.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Marty Hench. I—uh—I’ve got a meeting with the Reverend Sirs.” That was what the executive assistant I’d spoken to on the phone had called them. It sounded weird when he said it. It sounded weirder when I said it.

The receptionist gave me a smile that only went as far as her lips. “Please have a seat,” she said. There were only three chairs in the little reception area, vinyl office chairs with worn wooden armrests. There weren’t any magazines, just glossy catalogs featuring the latest Fidelity Computing systems, accessories, consumables, and software. I browsed one, marveling at the parallel universe of computers in the strange, mauve color that denoted all Fidelity equipment, including the boxes, packaging, and, now that I was attuned to it, the accents and carpet in the small lobby. A side door opened and a young, efficient man in a kippah and wire-rim glasses called for me: “Mr. Hench?” I closed the catalog and returned it to the pile and stood. As I went to shake his hand, I realized that something had been nagging me about the catalog—there were no prices.

“I’m Shlomo,” the man said. “We spoke on the phone. Thank you for coming down. The Reverend Sirs are ready to see you now.”

He wore plain black slacks, hard black shiny shoes, and a white shirt with prayer-shawl tassels poking out of its tails. I followed him through a vast room filled with chest-high Steelcase cubicles finished in yellowing, chipped wood veneer, every scratch pitilessly lit by harsh overhead fluorescents. Most of the workers at the cubicles were women with headsets, speaking in hushed tones. The tops of their heads marked the interfaith delineators: a block of Orthodox headscarves, then a block of nuns’ black and white scarves (I learned to call them “veils” later), then the Mormons’ carefully coiffed, mostly blond dos.

“This way,” Shlomo said, passing through another door and into executive row. The mauve carpets were newer, the nap all swept in one direction. The walls were lined with framed certificates of appreciation, letters from religious and public officials (apparently, the church and state were not separate within the walls of Fidelity Computing), photos of groups of progressively larger groups of people ranked before progressively larger offices—the company history.

We walked all the way to the end of the hall, past closed doors with nameplates, to a corner conference room with a glass wall down one side, showing a partial view of a truck-loading dock behind half-closed vertical blinds. Seated at intervals around a large conference table were the Reverend Sirs themselves, each with his own yellow pad, pencil, and coffee cup.

Shlomo announced me: “Reverend Sirs, this is Marty Hench. Mr. Hench, these are Rabbi Yisrael Finkel, Bishop Leonard Clarke, and Father Marek Tarnowski.” He backed out of the door, leaving me standing, unsure if I should circle the table shaking hands, or take a seat, or—

“Please, sit,” Rabbi Finkel said. He was fiftyish, round-faced and bear-shaped with graying sidelocks and beard and a black suit and tie. His eyes were sharp behind horn-rimmed glasses. He gestured to a chair at the foot of the table.

I sat, then rose a little to undo the button of my sport coat. I hadn’t worn it since my second job interview, when I realized it was making the interviewers uncomfortable. It certainly made me uncomfortable. I fished out the little steno pad and stick pen I’d brought with me.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Hench.” The rabbi had an orator’s voice, that big chest of his serving as a resonating chamber like a double bass.

“Of course,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me. It’s a fascinating company you have here.”

Bishop Clarke smiled at that. He was the best dressed of the three, in a well-cut business suit, his hair short, neat, side-parted. His smile was very white, and very wide. He was the youngest of the three—in his late thirties, I’d guess. “Thank you,” he said. “We know we’re very different from the other computer companies, and we like it that way. We like to think that we see something in computers—a potential—that other people have missed.”

Father Tarnowski scowled. He was cadaverously tall and thin, with the usual dog collar and jacket, and a heavy gold class ring. His half-rim glasses flashed. He was the oldest, maybe sixty, and had a sour look that I took for habitual. “He doesn’t want the press packet, Leonard,” he said. “Let’s get to the point.” He had a broad Chicago accent like a tough-guy gangster in The Untouchables.

Bishop Clarke’s smile blinked off and on for an instant and I was overcome with the sudden knowledge that these two men did not like each other at all, and that there was some kind of long-running argument simmering beneath the surface. “Thank you, Marek, of course. Mr. Hench’s time is valuable.” Father Tarnowski snorted softly at that and the bishop pretended he didn’t hear it, but I saw Rabbi Finkel grimace at his yellow pad.

“What can I help you Reverend Sirs with today?” Reverend Sirs came more easily now, didn’t feel ridiculous at all. The three of them gave the impression of being a quarter inch away from going for each other’s throats, and the formality was a way to keep tensions at a distance.

“We need a certain kind of accountant,” the rabbi said. He’d dated the top of his yellow pad and then circled the date. “A kind of accountant who understands the computer business. Who understands computers, on a technical level. It’s hard to find an accountant like that, believe it or not, even in Silicon Valley.” I didn’t point out that Colma wasn’t in Silicon Valley.

“Well,” I said, carefully. “I think I fit that bill. I’ve only got an associate’s degree in accounting, but I’m a kind of floating CFO for half a dozen companies and I’ve been doing night classes at UCSF Extension to get my bachelor’s. I did a year at MIT and built my own computer a few years back. I program pretty well in BASIC and Pascal and I’ve got a little C, and I’m a pretty darned good debugger, if I do say so myself.”

Bishop Clarke gave a small but audible sigh of relief. “You do indeed sound perfect, and I’m told that Shlomo spoke to your references and they were very enthusiastic about your diligence and . . . discretion.”

I’d given Shlomo a list of four clients I’d done extensive work with, but I hadn’t had “discretion” in mind when I selected them. It’s true that doing a company’s accounts made me privy to some sensitive information—like when two employees with the same job were getting paid very different salaries—but I got the feeling that wasn’t the kind of “discretion” the bishop had in mind.

“I’m pretty good at minding my own business,” I said, and then, “even when I’m being paid to mind someone else’s.” I liked that line, and made a mental note about it. Maybe someday I’d put it on my letterhead. Martin Hench: Confidential CPA.

The bishop favored me with a chuckle. The rabbi nodded thoughtfully. The priest scowled.

“That’s very good,” the bishop said. “What we’d like to discuss today is of a very sensitive nature, and I’m sure you’ll understand if we would like more than your good word to rely on.” He lifted his yellow pad, revealing a single page, grainily photocopied, and slid it over the table to me. “That’s our standard nondisclosure agreement,” he said. He slid a pen along to go with it.

I didn’t say anything. I’d signed a few NDAs, but only after I’d taken a contract. This was something different. I squinted at the page, which was a second- or third-generation copy and blurry in places. I started to read it. The bishop made a disgusted noise. I pretended I didn’t hear him.

I crossed out a few clauses and carefully lettered in an amendment. I initialed the changes and slid the paper back across the table to the bishop, and found the smile was gone from his face. All three of them were now giving me stern looks, wrath-of-God looks, the kind of looks that would make a twenty-one-year-old kid like me very nervous indeed. I felt the nerves rise and firmly pushed them down.

“Mr. Hench,” the bishop said, his tone low and serious, “is there some kind of problem?”

It pissed me off. I’d driven all the way to for-chrissakes Colma and these three weirdo God-botherers had ambushed me with their everything – and – the – kitchen – sink contract. I had plenty of work, and I didn’t need theirs, especially not if this was the way they wanted to deal. This had suddenly become a negotiation, and my old man had always told me the best negotiating position was a willingness to get up from the table. I was going to win this negotiation, one way or another.

“No problem,” I said.

“And yet you appear to have made alterations to our standard agreement.”

“I did,” I said. That’s not a problem for me, I didn’t say.

He gave me more of that stern eyeball-ray stuff. I let my negotiating leverage repel it. “Mr. Hench, our standard agreement can only be altered after review by our general counsel.”

“That sounds like a prudent policy,” I said, and met his stare.

He clucked his tongue. “I can get a fresh one,” he said. “This one is no good.”

I cocked my head. “I think it’d be better to get your general counsel, wouldn’t it?”

The three of them glared at me. I found I was enjoying myself. What’s more, I thought Rabbi Finkel might be suppressing a little smile, though the beard made it hard to tell.

“Let me see it,” he said, holding his hand out.

Bishop Clarke gave a minute shake of his head. The rabbi half rose, reached across the table, and slid it over to himself, holding it at arm’s length and adjusting his glasses. He picked up his pen and initialed next to my changes.

“Those should be fine,” he said, and slid it back to me. “Sign, please.”

“Yisrael,” Bishop Clarke said, an edge in his voice, “changes to the standard agreements need to be reviewed—”

“By our general counsel,” the rabbi finished, waving a dismissive gesture at him. “I know, I know. But these are fine. We should probably make the same changes to all our agreements. Meanwhile, we’ve all now had a demonstration that Mr. Hench is the kind of person who takes his promises seriously. Would you rather have someone who doesn’t read and signs his life away, or someone who makes sure he knows what he’s signing and agrees with it?”

Bishop Clarke’s smile came back, strained at the corners. “That’s an excellent point, Rabbi. Thank you for helping me understand your reasoning.” He collected the now-signed contract from me and tucked it back under his yellow pad.

“Now,” he said, “we can get down to the reason we asked you here today.”

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/09/the-reverend-sirs/#fidelity-computing/

[secularbakedgoods]

Meme fraud

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Committing a crime is easy. Committing a crime and getting away with it — that's hard.

One of the big stories on the internet last week was the Chase bank "viral TikTok trend." Long story short:

There was a short-lived bug in the Chase banking system that allowed users to deposit a cheque, then immediately withdraw the full amount of that cheque (normally, the funds would be held until the cheque cleared).

This bug became public knowledge. Social media posts popped up which encouraged people to write cheques for large amounts to themselves, then withdraw or transfer the funds from the account to give themselves "free" money.

This is called cheque fraud, and in America it's sometimes prosecuted as a federal crime.

Multiple people posted TikTok videos of themselves withdrawing huge amounts of cash from Chase ATMs and celebrating.

These fraudulent cheques inevitably bounced, leaving those who attempted to exploit the "free money glitch" thousands of dollars in the hole.

Again multiple people posted TikTok videos, this time crying over their negative account balances and impending criminal charges.

The prevailing narrative surrounding this whole thing is one of stupidity. There's no shortage of posts and TikTok videos mocking those who tried to exploit the "glitch" as idiots for not realizing what they were doing was illegal, or for believing there's such a thing as "free money."

And I'm not sure this is a matter of not knowing what cheque fraud is, or that it's a crime. I think a lot of people, even if they don't fully understand how or why, recognize that many great American fortunes are built on fraud.

An "entrepreneur" in Silicon Valley can put together a pitch deck for a startup based on a vague idea, pull in millions in investment, pay himself a ludicrous salary out of those funds for years, then fold the company with nothing to show for it — and as far as any legal authority is concerned, so long as the startup can claim they had one or two engineers doing something, all those lost millions were just the cost of doing business.

For that guy, there absolutely is such a thing as "free money." So it's possible to look at him and think to yourself, "Well, why not me?"

And your mistake there would be not realizing that the rules for the entrepreneur class are not the rules for the working class. A Silicon Valley founder who scams a bank out of millions is the Man in the Arena. A guy who works at Wal-Mart and scams a bank out of a few thousand is going to jail.

A criminal is not a special kind of person, or even a specific set of actions. A criminal is a context. And the failure of those who participated in the Chase cheque fraud scam may have been a failure to recognize context.

New Short Story: "Move Fast and Break Things"

My short story "Move Fast and Break Things", which originally appeared in the Grendel Press anthology The Devil Who Loves Me, is now available as a standalone work! You can get it as an ebook or read it on Medium; if you're one of my Ko-fi supporters, you can also read it on Ko-fi.

This Week's Links

Dead birds get new life: New Mexico researchers develop taxidermy bird drones

Taxidermy bird drones - currently being tested in a purpose-built cage at the university - can be used to understand better the formation and flight patterns of flocks. That in turn can be applied to the aviation industry, said Hassanalian.

P(Dumb)

The narrative that artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating toward "AGI" that will eventually outwit humanity’s efforts to contain it, has gone unchecked by one important segment of the population: the people who write the laws, and the people who whisper into the ears of those people. What they’re whispering is stuff like "P(Doom)": your personal confidence level (usually rendered as a percentage) that a rogue artificial intelligence — ​and not anything else — ​will annihilate humanity. A lot of things have to happen first for this to even be a possibility, let alone something you can assign a probability to.

Bill Gates, Big Agriculture and the fight for the future of Africa’s farmland

"We used to grow diverse crops," said Mary Sakala, a Zambian farmer and chairperson of the Rural Women’s Assembly, which commissioned the report. "But now governments and agribusiness have pushed farmers into monoculture that depends on inputs. Their programmes have made us all vulnerable."

—

If we're going to start resurrecting crimes from the 1930s, I'd like to see some rich people get ripped off in a huge elaborate confidence game. I think we've earned this, as a society.

-K