#publishing on Amazon

[parisoonic]

[subjective-raven]

Hey everybody! I wrote a book! It comes out on September 17th 2024.

It’s a magical realism thriller anthology of four short stories and five poems! Each stand alone short story is set in a different season. Each story says something different about the human condition.

In “Dottie’s Final Day,” a reaper comes to Dottie Lyre in her garden. What does an elderly mother choose to do on her last day alive?

“The Door,” appears suddenly and disappears just as fast. What’s on the other side? Why won’t the door sit still? Jane’s going to find out.

Please share this with anyone you think might be interested! You can preorder the e-book on Amazon now for .99c and the paperback will be available SEPTEMBER 17th for $10.99! The price will go up a few dollars September 28th but I’ll also be getting a larger percentage of the sale.

I’ve been writing my entire life and this is my first published book so pleaseeee if you are reading this, this book is for anyone middle school to grave. It’s only like 142 pages and the cover is really pretty if you would rather just have a pretty trophy and leave me a review on Amazon like you read it and it was awesome then I also love you.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

2600’s amazing Hackers on Planet Earth con may go down under enshittification

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

It's been 40 years since Emmanuel Goldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. 2600 wasn't the first phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:

https://www.2600.com/

2600 has published hundreds of issues in which digital spelunkers report eagerly on the things they've discovered by peering intently at the things no one was supposed to even glance at (I'm proud to be one of those writers!). They've fought legal battles, including one that almost went to the Supreme Court:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

They created a global network of meetups where some of technology's most durable friendships and important collaborations were born. These continue to this day:

https://www.2600.com/meetings

And they've hosted a weekly radio show on NYC's WBAI, Off the Hook:

https://wbai.org/program.php?program=76

When WBAI management lost their minds and locked the station's most beloved hosts out of the studio, Off the Hook (naturally) led the rebellion, taking back the station for its audience, rescuing it from a managerial coup:

https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786

But best of all, 2600 gave us HOPE – both in the metaphorical sense of "hope for a better technological tomorrow" and in the literal sense, with its biannual Hackers On Planet Earth con:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_on_Planet_Earth

For decades HOPE had an incredible venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania (memorialized in the phreak anthem "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"), a crumbling pile in midtown Manhattan that was biannually transformed into a rollicking, multi-day festival of forbidden technology, improbable feats, and incredible presentations. I was privileged to keynote HOPE in 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1D7APjmVbk

But after the 2018 HOPE, the Hotel Pennsylvania was demolished to make way for the Penn15 (no, really) skyscraper, a vaporware mega-tower planned as a holding pen for luxury shopping and empty million-dollar condos sold to offshore war-criminals as safe-deposit boxes in the sky. The developer, Vornado (no, really) hasn't actually done all that – after demo'ing the Hotel Pennsylvania, they noped out, leave a large, unusable scar across midtown.

But HOPE wasn't lost. In 2022, the ever-resilient 2600 crew relocated to Queens, hosted by St John's University – a venue that was less glamorous that the Hotel Pennsylvania, but the event was still fantastic. Attendance fell from 2,000 to 1,000, but that was something they could work with, and reviews from attendees were stellar.

Good thing, too. 2600 is, first and foremost, a magazine publisher, and these have been hard years for magazines. First there was the mass die-off of indie bookstores and newsracks (I used to sell 2600 when I was a bookseller, and in the years after, I always took the presence of 2600 on a store's newsrack as an unimpeachable mark of quality).

Thankfully for 2600, their audience is (unsurprisingly) a tech-savvy one, so they were able to substitute digital subscriptions for physical ones:

https://www.2600.com/Magazine/DigitalEditions

Of course, many of those subscriptions came through Amazon's Kindle, because nerds were early Amazon adopters, and because the Kindle magazine publishing platform offered DRM-free distribution to subscribers along with a fair payout to publishers.

But then Amazon enshittified its magazine system. Having locked publishers to its platform, it rugged them and killed the monthly subscription fees that allowed publishers to plan for a steady output. Publishers were given a choice: leave Amazon (and all the readers locked inside its walled garden) or put your magazine into the Kindle Unlimited system:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/arp/B0BWPTCP4K?deviceType=A1FG5NAKX0MRJL

Kindle Unlimited is an all-you-can-eat program for Kindle, which pays publishers and writers based on a system that is both opaque and easily gamed, with the lion's share of the money going to "publishers" who focus on figuring out how to cheat the algorithm. Revenues for 2600 – and all the other magazines that Amazon had sucked in and sucked dry – fell off a cliff.

Which brings me to the present moment. After 40 years, 2600 is still at it, having survived the bookstorepocalypse, the lunacy of public radio management, the literal demolition of their physical home by an evil real-estate developer, and Amazon's crooked accounting.

This is 2600, circa 2024, and 2024 a HOPE year:

https://www.hope.net/

Once again, HOPE has been scheduled for its new digs in Queens, July 12-14. Last week, HOPE sent out an email blast to their subscribers telling them the news. They expected to sell 500 tickets in the first 24 hours. They didn't even come close:

https://www.2600.com/content/hope-ticket-sales-update

It turns out that Google and the other major mail providers don't like emails with the word "hacker" in them. The cartel that decides which email gets delivered, and which messages go to spam, or get blocked altogether, mass-blocked the HOPE 2024 announcement. Email may be the last federated, open platform we have, but mass concentration has created a system where it's nearly impossible to get your email delivered unless you're willing to play by Gmail's rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

For Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of 2600 and tireless toiler for this community, the deafening silence following from that initial email volley was terrifying: "like some kind of a "Twilight Zone" episode where everyone has disappeared."

The enshittification that keeps 2600's emails from being delivered to the people who asked to receive them is even worse on social media. Social media companies routinely defraud their users by letting them subscribe to feeds, then turning around to the people and organizations that run those feeds and saying, "You've got x thousand subscribers on this platform, but we won't put your posts in their feeds unless you pay us to 'boost' your content":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

Enshittification has been coming at 2600 for decades. Like other forms of oddball media dedicated to challenging corporate power and government oppression, 2600 has always been a ten-years-ahead preview of the way the noose was gonna tighten on all of us. And now, they're on the ropes. HOPE can't sell tickets unless people know about HOPE, and neither email providers nor social media platforms have any interest in making that happen.

A handful of giant corporations now get to decide what we read, who we hear from, and whether and how we can get together in person to make friends, forge community, rabble-rouse and change the world. The idea that "it's not censorship unless the government does it" has always been wrong (not all censorship violates the First Amendment, and censorship can be real without being unconstitutional):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

What can you do about it? Well, for one thing, you can sign up for HOPE. It's gonna be great. They've got sub-$100 hotel rooms! In New York City!

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv

If you can't make it to HOPE, you can sign up for a virtual membership:

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv-virtual-attendee

You can submit a talk to HOPE:

https://www.hope.net/cfp.html

You can subscribe to 2600, in print or electronically (I signed up for the lifetime print subscription and it was a bargain – I devour every issue the day it arrives):

https://store.2600.com/collections/subscriptions-renewals

2600 is living a decade in the future of every other community you care about, weird hobby you enjoy, con you live for, and publication you read from cover to cover. If we can all pull together to save it, it'll be a beacon of hope (and HOPE).

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for 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.

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/2024/01/19/hope-less/#hack-the-planet

[festidae]

i am not a doll              i am not a doll                   i am not a doll                                  i am not a doll                                                         i am not a—

(text is taken from an interview with Hideaki Anno included in the 1997 book Parano.)

[justintheusofa]

Ever wonder what Dylan Thomas’ poetry sounds like? I’d really love it if you’d check out these poems inspired by his haunting voice beyond the grave. 🤓🥳🪦⌨️🖨️

[rebeccathenaturalist]

hey there! fellow naturalist (albeit less experienced!) here! in regards to the AI-generated ID guides, do you have any advice for helping the general public learn to recognize them? are there any giveaways other than incorrect information a layperson might not pick up on that we can tell people to watch out for?

Hi, @fischotterkunst! It's a messy topic, to be sure, but here's what I've been seeing of these AI-generated texts, at least on Amazon:

--If you sort your search for "foraging book" or "mushroom hunting" or whatever search string you use by "Newest Arrivals", you'll notice that there is a glut of books that have come out in the past few weeks. Yes, there are always new books, but this is at a higher than normal rate, which suggests AI is behind at least some of them. There ARE occasionally real authors' books that just happened to come out recently, so don't dismiss every single book that is a fresh release. Use the other criteria below.

--They will invariably be self-published or from some publisher with zero online presence. Not a problem by itself; my own chapbooks are self-published on Amazon KDP. But they come out every three months, not every three days, because I am researching, writing, and editing them all myself, rather than churning out content with AI.

--The titles and subtitles are often very long and stuffed with keywords. They are obviously optimized for search engines rather than being descriptive of the book and they have a rather clunky fashion.

--Look for obvious typos and other errors; for example, in the image above we have "WILD MUSHROOM COOKBOOK FOR BEGINNER: The complete guide on mushroom foraging and cooking with delicious recipes to enjoy your favorite". It should be "for beginners", and the subtitle just...ends prematurely. Favorite what? Favorite mushrooms? Favorite cartoon characters? Favorite color? Also, while there are lot of variations on name spellings, "Magaret" instead of "Margaret" stands out as a possible fake in combination with other clues. (All her other books also have this spelling, though.)

--This is a BIG one: Who's the author? Check their bio. In the above image you'll see that "Jason Cones", the author of "The Wild Edible Plants Forager's Handbook: A Beginner's Guide to Safe Foraging, Including How to Identify Edible Plants, Learn About Their Medicinal Properties, and Prepare Them for Cooking", has a very generic picture and bio that has pretty obviously been generated by AI. If you search for him online, the only page for an author named Jason Cones is the Amazon author page--no website, no social media, no interviews, nada. Even a brand new author will at least have something other than their Amazon page, and they'll mention experience, credentials, other biographical info.

--Look at the author's other books. Magaret seems to focus on cookbooks of very specific sorts, but again they've all come out in a very short time. They also tend to often be on really super-specific niche subjects--this, again, is not a red flag in and of itself, but it's a common pattern with AI "authors". Jason Cones, on the other hand, has written over two dozen books not just about foraging but anger management techniques, acupressure, and weed gummies, and all of his titles have come out since last December.

--If all the books have the same cover but slight differences in title, it's also a big red flag. There are reputable publishers of regional foraging guides like Timber Press, but their books are written by multiple authors and have come out over a long stretch of years (plus they're a well-known publisher with a solid track record, online presence, etc.) Also notice the typos in the title and subtitle; everyone says "Mushroom Foraging", not "Mushrooms Foraging", and "Keep Track Your Mushroom Sightings" is missing "of".

--Compare the descriptions of multiples of these new books and you start seeing patterns. If you look at the images above, you'll notice that both Lorna K. Thompson's "Foraging Recipe Cookbook" and Kevin Page's "The Ultimate Foraging Guide for Seniors" have a very similar formulaic description. They start with a brief story about a person in a town or village who discovers some foraging secrets and then transforms his life, and then a list of things you're supposedly going to find in this seemingly miraculous book. This basically reads like "Hey, ChatGPT, tell me a story of a person who improved their life with foraging in two hundred words or less!" Also, the ends got cut off of my screen shot, but they both end with "GET YOUR COPY TODAY!"

I have not purchased any of these books to verify how awful the content is, but what little content I can see in the previews is uniformly formulaic and, again, reads like someone asked an AI to write content on a topic with some specific keywords thrown in. Needless to say, I do NOT recommend any of these books.

Also, I feel really bad for any actual authors who released their books in the past few months. They're likely getting drowned out by this AI junk, though hopefully they're getting enough attention for their work through their publishers, social media, etc. to get some sales. Support your real-life authors, and boycott AI!

Finally, PLEASE reblog this! It's really, really important that people know what to look for, and the more posts we have floating around with this info, the less likely it is someone's going to get poisoned by following what these books have to say.

[tgsparks]

SELF PUBLISHED AND SMALL PRESS AUTHORS: CHECK YOUR AMAZON PAGES

Recently I found out that my book was just gone. Completely wiped from Amazon. My author page said I never published anything. I got word from my publisher that this was a glitch with Amazon and they were working on fixing it. That was three days ago, and my book is not back up.

According to my publisher, small presses (between 200 to 1000 books) randomly had several titles “dropped” from Amazon.

My worry is that this may have also affected self published books that are only sold through Amazon. Please go check and make sure your work is still up. Even if just to make sure.

[kenziewritesstuff]

Supernatural Horror Novel: The Exodus Killer

Religious Trauma + Autistic Fascination with Numbers and Death = A Book about a Serial Killer playing God.

Warning! Content Includes:

Mysterious dead mom who is totally dead

Depressed, ADHD-ish Main Character

Plague of Blood and Hail and Darkness...oh my!

Mom is still dead, right?

Angsty brotherly relationship

Add a tablespoon more blood

Pfft mom's not dead, she's right over there

*Gestures to nothing*

"I'm fine...what voices?"

Detectives!

Dead mom...probably...I think

Available on Amazon as Paperback or Ebook

[copperbadge]

I'm finally getting around to editing my fanfic for actual publishing. Any warnings for Kindle Direct Publishing?

Aside from, you know, "It's Amazon and they'll fuck you out of every penny they can on principle," I can't really speak to it -- I've never used Kindle Direct. My only real experience with pub/sales through Amazon is the fact that when I allowed them to sell my books via Lulu, they artificially inflated my prices because they take such a massive cut of your profits. I have a little more discussion of how that works at this post (look for the paragraph just after "wait, what?").

Now, that said, Amazon is a much, much larger platform for your work than Lulu and unless you are marketing from a platform where you already have a readership (like my blog) then Amazon will probably get more eyeballs on your work. Especially if you are marketing primarily to people who aren't familiar with you, they'd much rather buy from somewhere known, like Kindle, than from a random website they've never encountered like Lulu.

You might peruse @thebibliosphere for more useful information than I can give -- Joy has a lot more experience with Amazon's various fuckeries and has spoken to them pretty extensively. I don't know what the tag is offhand but Joy's tumblr is fun reading anyway, so if you browse around you will also get entertained :D

Readers, if you have info to share, please feel free! Remember to comment or reblog, as I don't repost asks sent in response to other asks.

[muffinlance]

The Fox's Tongue and Kirin's Bone audiobook is on sale!

$4.99 until Sunday, September 10th, no recurring Audible subscription required. Voiced by the award-winning Gary Furlong.

Humanity is dying, hunted to extinction by creatures of legend. One boy was born to save them all.

That boy just got knifed in the back. He looked a bit too much like Aaron, you see.

Now it’s Aaron’s job to step up, lest his Death correct that little mix-up. But Aaron’s skills as a street rat run more towards stealing and stabbing than towards saving. And the more he learns of what brought dear dead Markus to that fatal alleyway, the more he has to wonder just what the world’s savior was really up to the night the wrong boy died.

Cover art by the most excellent @art-emisz

FYI: Signed paperbacks and hardcovers will be coming back on sale in October so I can ship them ahead of the holidays; if you want an email when the pre-order launches, add yourself to my mailing list (it's at the bottom). Zero spam ever, only book news.

[thebibliosphere]

If you haven't seen it yet, Amazon is stopping returns of ebooks that are more than 10% read thanks to the pushback. (Statement about it is linked on the Society of Authors twitter) Thanks for being willing to discuss money in the book industry and the ways Amazon finds to screw over authors.

I just saw it via the Author’s Guild! This is such good news!

Link for anyone who wants it:

🎉🎉🎉🎉

[kanerallels]

I'm trying to figure out some self publishing stuff and. hmm. perhaps this was the wrong time of the month to attempt this

[hussyknee]

Guys, Z-library is back up, but it desperately needs our help.

Z-Library is one of the largest online libraries in the world. We aim to make literature accessible to everyone. Today, Z-Library contains over 12,140,413 books and 84,837,000 articles Z-Library has many servers all over the world. Our stored data now totals more than 220 TB! Every month, millions of people use Z-Library for their purposes — and that means we are on the right track. But it will be difficult to achieve our goals without your help.

As you may know, almost all public domains of the library were blocked in November 2022 by order of the US Secret Service. The inner infrastructure of the project suffered some substantial damage too. Today, we are still under unprecedented pressure. At the moment, Z-Library is going through the hardest times in all the 14 years of its existence. The library might work with interruptions, and we ask you to be patient. Be sure – we are doing everything possible to provide free access to knowledge for millions of people across the globe, and we expect you to help us with that and to support us.

But despite all the difficulties, the library continues to function and develop. We have recently introduced several important features: the new recommendations section, comments to booklists, the new web-site menu, personal domains and Telegram Bot, and more.

Your active support gives strength to our Team and inspires to work. Each donated dollar is not only money for us, but it is also the confidence that you really need our project!

On 15 March 2023, as in March and September of each year, we launched additional fundraising to project maintenance and development. We will be extremely thankful for every dollar that will be donated. Furthermore, UNLIMITED downloads (for 1 month) are available for ALL contributors who will donate during the fundraising period. The fundraising will run until 1 April 2023

Millions of people use Z-Library every month for their purposes — this shows us that we are on the correct track. But it will be difficult to achieve our goals without your help.

Please consider making a donation.

I know there's a lot of discourse around book piracy right now, but you know who absolutely cannot afford to buy your books in dollars, afford the shipping fees, or don't have access/ travelling distance to the kind of fully stocked libraries you have in the West? The Global South. Our factories make your Kindles, your phones, your textbooks, and then we can't afford to buy them from your corps that sell them at around 300% grate price, and half the books are not even available for our region. Our universities don't get your funding or recognition, and when we do sell our personal possessions to get the money and work our asses off to get admittance to Western universities, y'all use us as grunts, exploit us and pass our work off as your own. Worse still, you buy out our local publishing houses and shut them down.

You cannot imagine the extent of global apartheid and colonial economic order that capitalism runs on. Amazon cheats you out of royalties? We can't even afford to buy your books. A dollar can buy someone a full dinner here. These sites – Z-lib, Internet Archive, Libgen, Open Library, Sci-Hub, PDF Drive, LibriVox – they are essential to granting the global majority our human right to knowledge, education and access. Z-Lib is by far the best one of them all.

You will first need to sign up to Z-Lib and access it through the private domain link they send you. It's a simple process, and every little bit counts. You're a leftist that believes in equal access for all? Then literally, put your money where your mouth is.

[nerdishfeels]

My Mum is A Self-Published Author!

Hey guys! So, my mum has always wanted to write a cookbook filled with our homemade recipes. It’s been in the works for a bit, but now, we’ve finally self-published her kindle book, Mumzilicious!

It would honestly mean the world to me if you could show some support for her book.

These recipes are perfect for you if you want:

Quick and easy recipes for delicious Pakistani cuisine.

Healthy dishes that are not too spicy or oily.

To learn how to cook and need somewhere to start.

To treat yourself to mouth-watering home-cooked meals.

You can get your copy below. If you have any questions, let me know!

Links:

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CW19JX4M

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CW19JX4M

Please signal boost this too, so everyone can get their copy! ❤️

[stephtuckerauthor]

I've just released my first novel and the first in a trilogy! The Bonds That Bind Us is a story of trauma, healing, found family, and growth. It is a literary fiction with a gay romance plot, and is currently FREE ON KINDLE FOR EVERYONE!

[succulentsiren]

Interview with Succulent Siren♠️

Where did the idea for the book ‘Powerful Secrets of the Divine Feminine’ come from?

The idea for this book began with my journey of discovering and exploring my spirituality.

Spirituality for me was like entering a wonderland where all the dogma no longer held value.

I was, and still am learning liberating and empowering knowledge about myself.

Once I began to apply this knowledge, I began to attract more money, I became more confident, I manifested a successful blog, I found my voice, I had more successful outcomes in my personal life and so much more.

What teachings advanced your life the most?

I gained the most treasures by learning to apply what I learned about Feminine Energy.

Many women are disconnected from their Feminine Energy but if they we’re connected, they’d be able to attract so much more abundance.

So I want to share this knowledge to enlighten other people, especially women and girls, of their true power.

What message do you have for girls and women?

Like the majority of girls, I was also taught to be a ‘nice girl’ but I learned as I got older, that the ‘nice girl’ path didn’t have my best interests at heart. It was a setup for me to get walked all over by others and I refuse to live a life of misery or submission.

So instead of teaching girls to shrink, I want to remind them of their power.

I had to learn how to release my mind from shame and take my power back and there’s no better feeling than owning who you are and living free.

I know i’m meant to get what I want and live my dream life and I know that there’s so much more abundance to come.

I am totally obsessed with bettering myself and living in my highest potential and I strive to influence others to do the same.

Grab A Copy of the Book Here