My catalog: A 🧵. I've written a lot of books. I'm not prolific, just old. Crank out a book or two every year or two and eventually you have a wall of books. I mainly use X to talk about writing and books, so I thought I'd use this thread to explain all the crazy stuff I write:

I've now been in my most desirable top ten lists for nine days, which is surprisingly sticky for a freebie.

Saying goodbye to the beach. Turn right at the eldritch horror then onward to home.

If James Gunn wants the next Wonder Woman movie to make a billion dollars he needs to lean into the fact that Wonder Woman canonically uses a kangaroo for space travel. Also, her most trusted companion is a Nazi scientist bad girl who turned good after being, um, disciplined by the Amazons.

"The key thing is rationality is not the same as intelligence." This is a good insight. My experience has been that people who are good at rational thinking often wind up believing jaw-dropping absurdities. They are highly skilled at building up an impenetrable wall of logic supporting their beliefs, teetering upon a foundation of ambiguous or non-existent evidence. I'm count myself among the great mass of intelligent people who believe seven stupid things before breakfast, but do think that writing novels has rescued me from any number of mental traps. Since I constantly live inside the minds of people whose ideas contradict my own and try to flesh them out into characters with a coherent world view, it gives me empathy for how people can arrive at utterly incorrect understanding of fairly simple things, and helps me understand my own laughably flawed grasp of what is true and what is false within our shared reality.

The existence of the new Free Reads newsletter has me leaning toward ramping up freebies as a basic promo strategy again. It's how I built my readership during my peak online years, but it was complicated by BookBub's arcane acceptance decisions, where I might go 18 months between getting acceptances. Without running a BookBub, a freebie is borderline useless. if you can't give away 5000 copies at a minimum, you probably won't see meaningful results. Free Reads have gotten better than these results twice, and getting two in the same year is something that never happened to me as a Featured Deal. Even if most of the people who download my freebies to Kindle never read the book, I have a cover on screen when they scroll through their library. My name will feel familiar if they see it again. When I have a new release, Amazon will send them a "new from an author you've read" email. Freebies are no longer a novelty, and every year that passes is clogging kindles with books that aren't going to be read. But, it's probably got a better payoff than ads, and if you have a lot of books, or plan to write a lot of books, 5000 freebies might get you ten readers who go on to buy a dozen books each. It won't make you rich, but it keeps you active on Amazon as an author actually making sales instead of sinking to the bottom of the sea of unread books. I've got six of my thirty books that are probably good candidates for acceptance, so it's time to see just how many of these promos they'll take.

Hooyaw! Admittedly, 5820 of these are freebie Greatshadows, but it's always exciting to hit these thousand mark. The month is still early. Can I hit 7k? Haha, no, almost certainly not. The spike has spiked and the remainder of the month will get slower every day until downloads are in the single digits. I could boost this with one more newsletter promo, but at this point every $ I spend will produce diminishing returns.

Good morning!

October beach life.

I am, in fact, neither feeling restful or assured. "Unforeseen circumstances" is a perfectly reasonable generic excuse for a delay of a day or two. 45 days to deliver books that you actually print has moved beyond "unforeseen circumstances" into "we do what we want, peon, what are you going to do, shop elsewhere?"

Just got notified by Amazon that a restock order I placed on September 23 is being delayed and will now be delivered November 6. The stench of doom hangs heavy in the air. A future where I zoom through acdesert on a motorcycle with a sawed-off shotgun strapped to my thigh and a typewriter hanging off my back is becoming ever more probable, and, I gotta admit, I'm kinda looking forward to it.

Google Play and draft2digital dashboards have updated and gotten me another 2k downloads of Greatshadow. That brings me past 7,500 downloads, so I probably won't get to the 10k I did on Bitterwood earlier this year, but 8k is good enough I'm not panicking about needing to change my cover. I probably will change the covers just to give the whole series a refresh, but it's no longer something I need to worry about this year.

So you inherited an imperfect world on the precipice of ruin. How does that make you different from every human ever born in the history of the world? Sitting around thinking, "Oh, life would be better if the old people hadn't made everything suck" is thought everyone has when they are thirteen. After that, you should grow up and accept that you are the only person with the capacity to remake the world more to your liking. Or, you can give up and spend the rest of your life valuing your excuses more than your accomplishments.

I've been looking at the Free Reads newsletter picks as well as the top 20 freebies in my categories and can tell you that AI covers aren't keeping books from being selected for the promo or from getting into the top of the charts. It's pretty sobering, but the evidence is that readers probably can't tell the difference or, just as likely, couldn't care less, and book promoters just care if your check clears. But, it does seem like an opportunity for a BookBub competitor to carve out a niche with a curated list of zero AI books.