Only a few decades ago when the internet was young and made more sense, the PR and advertising gurus who supposedly worked on behalf of authors emphasized two marketing strategies more than others: Get a website and participate in social media.

Obviously, I still have a website. I’ll admit it’s now a bit out of date. I’ve never sold my books (nor Bibles published in China like Trump) nor T-shirts with “In Libris Libertas!” displayed on them (heaven forbid MAGA T’s!). That’s just plain tacky (even in politics!). I update my website’s content as I see fit, only occasionally resorting to the wonderful expertise I’ve found at Monkey C Media, the company that originally designed my website.

But social media for this author? Not so much anymore. Allow me to explain why.

Social media isn’t what it used to be. Zuckerberg allowed Facebook to become the tool of trolls, conspiracy theorists, child exploiters, and many other nasty people, domestic and foreign. Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, ruining that social media site as well. I apologize to all my friends and followers at those two popular social media sites for leaving them (though they might not have realized I was gone!), but I just couldn’t tolerate what happened to and continues to occur at those sites.

The old warhorses Goodreads and LinkedIn have similar problems. I just haven’t got around to leaving them yet. The first, Goodreads, had some interesting discussion groups that became nasty echo chambers dominated by small-minded autocratic group leaders and their anti-author minions; it got worse when Bezos took over the site (i.e., made it yet another Amazon slave–Thomas Mercer suffered a similar fate, but it was once a respected publisher, not a social media site). Mr. Bezos ruins anything and everything (including his marriage and the Washington Post! In the publishing context, I have other reasons for despising Amazon as well. None of my recent books have appeared on Amazon for those reasons,)

The second “social media” site that’s no longer so social, LinkedIn, seemed a lot more useful at first, again for its discussion groups but also for its “connections” to people working in publishing. LinkedIn’s discussion groups have gone the way of Goodreads’; the connections are still there, but at this stage in my writing career, I need them less than I need more hair. And Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn didn’t help, of course. Gates is just another Bezos.

Of course, this website could also be considered social media. I have a contact page readers can use to reach out to me. (Recently a representative from a real English Brookstone family contacted me, for example! That was a pleasant surprise!) Readers can also comment on posts like this one. (Please follow the rules found on the “Join the Conversation” web page. These are designed to avoid the ever-present social-media trolls. If you have some honest observations, you’ll have no problems.)

If you consider that I also write novels and short fiction (I even give away some of these creations—see below) as well as a political blog, that’s enough social media for this busy old author. In other words, I’m not internet-adverse or computer illiterate; I just lack the time and patience to tolerate those who make social media such a hostile place. I participated in the computer revolution as a scientist long before becoming an author, even before today’s trolls were out of their nappies, often wondering as I read scientific preprints why their circulation wasn’t computerized via some kind of email-type dispersal system. (The worldwide web was created at CERN precisely for that reason!) I’ve paid my dues. Bezos, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg, and other “jolly green giants” of internet exploitation can all go to the social-media hell they’ve created! I won’t accompany them. (Okay, maybe I will. If the old boy upstairs doesn’t serve bacon and Colombian coffee at his boarding house, I’ll think about hanging with that horned guy. At least his fiery breath will make the bacon nice and crispy!)

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules found on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Free PDF downloads. My “discovery” of how easy it is to use Draft2Digital (D2D) to self-publish my books has made my publishing life easier, I still don’t have the time to publish everything I write, not even all the good stuff. And I’ve learned, unlike many who extensively use social media, to be self-critical about what I publish or give away for free: You’ll never see the “bad stuff” because I self-revise and self-censor. You’ll see the free stuff I offer in the list found on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page. A lot could be for sale using D2D, but my motivation for writing is not to make a lot of money. This free stuff includes two free novels, collections of short fiction, and my course “Writing Fiction,” where I’m brutally honest at times about the writing business (what several social media groups couldn’t tolerate), like in the post above. You can share any of these free PDFs with family and friends. All I ask from those who download them is to respect the copyright. Enjoy.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

What this Comedian Said Will Shock You: Bill Maher, author (2024). Just in time for the 2024 elections…wow! I needed this. An irreverent critique of everything going on, especially the political circus acts. It’s something that grabs you by the throat and makes you almost die laughing at the follies of human beings and their cultural milieu. (The ‘almost” will be considered below.)

We often take ourselves too seriously. Okay, life is serious. We’re now in a dash—no marathons now—for November, 2024 when we must decide if we still want some sort of democracy in America or some sort of awful fascist state where some fascist psychotic sociopath declares himself president-for-life and begins to mimic Stalin’s purges. (Neither Bill Maher nor I can know what kind of democracy either: There are so many things wrong with the current one, starting with the US Constitution!)

But we need to laugh a bit before we begin grieving over our dead democracy, especially at ourselves and our compatriots who are letting it die. If this book doesn’t accomplish that, you’re a brain-dead zombie. (Most MAGA maniacs are, of course, but plenty so-called liberals living in their echo chambers are too.)

Because a serious book review is supposed to contain critiques (verbal equivalents of a sharp elbow in the ribs), let me begin attacking Bill with this one: Your title is very misleading! What Maher states here isn’t all that shocking; I agree with at least 87.765 percent plus or minus 3.923 percent margin-of-error of what he says and have probably said more shocking things in my political blog at pubprogressive.com. (Why are the Big Five publishing conglomerates and TV networks afraid of calling Donald Jackass Trump, J. Done-Nothing Vance, and their cronies fascists? That’s what they are!)

Of course, I don’t say it comically; I’m deadly serious. What extremists (fascists come from both the left and the right, moving around that grand circle that’s humanity’s political spectrum to that one single point called fascism) have done to this country (let’s call it “ripping the country apart”) is beyond the pale because its source is the destructive evil lurking there in the dark ready to attack any good people who might be left in the body politic. (Extremists hog the internet with their blathering. Normal people can’t get a word in edgewise, which is why I’m no longer on Facebook or X. In those cases, of course, the extremists also run those websites.)

That leads to another critique: Bill Maher is a bit simple-minded because he can’t imagine any of this country’s problems leading to another civil war. (I think he does mention the possibility of a Nazi-like putsch somewhere, though.) Would he be ready to fight for what’s right and good? I can’t answer that even for myself, but it’s a quandary he should have mentioned…except that it’s not very funny, is it?! (But maybe it’s a better and more practical use for all those damn guns?)

It’s easy to go after Narcissus le Grand and his MAGA maniacs, from the far-right wingnuts who support them, i.e., those evangelicals (unlike Maher, I refuse to capitalize that), Catholics (capitalized only because “catholic” can have a more general meaning—look it up), to white supremacists and a few crazed blacks and hispanics. It’s hard to look the other way at far-left extremists and recognize that they’re also approaching fascism as well, often supporting questionable causes (Hamas in Gaza, i.e. terrorists; eco-terrorists, i.e. tree-huggers who destroy trees; injuring or killing cops, i.e., anyone—everyone seems to hate cops now; believing in communism, with a small c or a big one, is the solution to everything; etc., etc.). Maher wraps all that up in his generic attacks on the nation’s youth (who all too often deserve those attacks of course!), when it’s not about immaturity (unless you want to call old Bernie Sanders “immature”?). The extremes of both political parties push their other more reasonable members toward the middle (maybe a good thing?), but that still allows the extremes to do a lot of damage on their way to fascism, so much so that it will likely destroy our country unless it’s halted.

Okay, I’ve proved myself wrong: What this comedian says is damn shocking because he tries to turn a serious debate into comedy. That should shock anyone who values our democracy. In fact, Mr. Maher is showing his age, not quite the comedians’ Biden yet, but his words seem an awful lot like my father’s. And my father lived in a better time when our family’s Eisenhower Republicans and Truman Democrats could get together for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter and not physically pommel each other. (Maybe go home a bit angry with the relatives, though.)

There are interesting little datapoints sprinkled throughout this book that are significantly serious, though. For example, the tragedy of some Trump MAGA maniacs: Consider Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force vet who needlessly died for Trump on January 6, 2021, believing that if he won, he might help her with the usurious loan she’d stupidly signed up for to save her business. (And Trump said no one died on January 6! She was your follower, you “f&^%ing moron”!) Another tragedy that obviously couldn’t make the publishing schedule for Bill’s book is found in the fireman who attended that recent Pennsylvania rally with his family and took a bullet for Trump while trying to protect his family. Trump doesn’t have to kill anyone on Fifth Avenue in New York City; he manages to do it at his rallies!

These cases and others are doubly tragic because the supporters of that “f%$#ing moron” (an ex-SecState Tillerson quote, by the way, in case you think I made that up) can’t seem to recognize that Narcissus le Grand only cares about himself; he’s a psychotic sociopath. That’s the diagnosis from an ad hoc committee of respectable mental health professionals published years ago. With his advanced age and impending dementia—he’s now the oldest presidential candidate ever!—he’s become even worse!

Unfortunately, Bill, those cases of lemmings among the MAGA maniacal hordes following their fuehrer over the cliffs aren’t comical—they’re an American tragedy in many ways. Treating them as comedy is easy; diagnosing and combatting the reasons why they’ve become mentally ill in that way is complicated and serious work that comedians like you and fiction writers like me can’t possibly do alone. Our society is sick and dying, and it needs some real professional help from many good people to find a cure if it’s going to survive.

And a final (and perhaps more light-hearted?) critique: What’s wrong with Bill’s sense of irony? He writes: “…when a big-game hunter gets trampled by an elephant and then eaten by a lion [it] is ‘hilarious.’” Wrong! It’s simple justice! (And why didn’t it happen to Don Jr.?)

I read this lengthy collection of comedy gigs in parallel with other more serious books. That’s called multitasking by some; I call it comedic relief from the more serious stuff. It’s not healthy to take life too seriously, but it’s also not healthy for us or the country to go laughing to our graves as American fascists set out to destroy this country and the world. We’ll see who has the last laugh, Bill. I’ve already prepared my “I told you so” speech, Mr. Maher. It’s a short one, and I quote a young acquaintance of mine: We’re so screwed!

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules listed on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. To prove I’m not such a serious fellow and that I can write comedy (or be bold enough to attempt it?), this sci-fi rom-com hopefully has given a few smiles to my readers and will do the same for those who missed it and peruse it now. It treats some serious themes, but it’s mostly tongue-in-cheek. And, by the way, it does time travel right, i.e., without paradoxes. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold. (You might even find it on Amazon among all the overly expensive crap the Big Five publishing conglomerates like to sell…like the above.)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

You have to give that big Bezos bot and all his little bots credit: They’re very inventive about creating clever and multiple ways to scam readers, writers, and other customers. Are you surprised that Prime keeps going up and up? Are you surprised that they don’t stand by merchandise sold online?

For readers and writers, Vella is the new kid there on the Amazon block ready to fleece you. Maybe some people think they qualify as avid readers if they peruse Vella’s serialized prose, but no true avid reader would do that. Sure, you can get the first three chapters free, but then you need to buy tokens (Bezos’s version of FTX’s bitcoins?) to get the remainder of the novel. Your stash of tokens represents a zero-interest loan to Bezos until you cash them in, of course. The book’s author (c’est moi, par exemple) gets half the proceeds of the tokens you spend on their book; Amazon keeps the other half. The author still has to write a complete novel that people participating in this scam may or may not finish. Amazon as usual gets a lot for doing very little.

Even worse for readers, it’s impossible to get the Vella link off their Kindles! And that link now takes the place of the one for the Kindle store’s book section! In other words, you must go to the full Amazon site with all its nightmarish swamp of retail clutter to look for your next read, a damn waste of time! Pox on their house!

And Vella creates the same problem for authors as many of Amazon’s other “author services” have created: Exclusivity is required to use it. An author’s book has to be exclusive on Vella and not appear for sale anywhere else. That means a reader who wants to read it can only find the book in Amazon’s Vella list and not at any other online retailer. In other words, Vella is indeed a monopolistic service offered by this greedy retailer to scam readers and writers.

I will treat Amazon’s Vella the same way I treat all of Amazon’s nefarious “author services” that provide nothing positive for readers and writers: Boycott it! None of my recent novels are even on Amazon because I want to distribute them to as many online sites as possible, reaching out to readers everywhere. Amazon is no longer an online retailer readers and writers can trust.

But I’ve digressed. Does anyone want to get into a book and then have to purchase and spend some tokens to continue reading the next installment? How does that even work? If a novel has fifty chapters and I want to read beyond the first three, will I have forty-eight different ebook files? This whole concept doesn’t make sense! And you can bet that the publishers of books authored by Stephen King, David Baldacci, and other famous formulaic mares and stallions ready and waiting for the glue factory in the Big Five’s stables will ignore Vella to protect both their readers and big-name authors!

There are no positives for Vella and a whole bunch of negatives for both readers and writers. I don’t recommend it at all! Amazon continues to be the enemy of consumers with Vella.

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Evil Agenda. Some of my readers might remember that I serialized this second novel in the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” and later published the full novel, but not on Vella! In other words, I invented Vella before the big Bezos bot and all his evil little bots ever thought of it! I didn’t see a great response to my serialization, and it might have reduced readership of the complete novel. In other words, my version of Vella was a flop as far as I’m concerned.

This novel still has a lot of good points, though, mostly because it’s a logical bridge to the third novel and shows how diabolical the villain Vladimir Kalinin really is. One mutant joins a clone and friends to do battle with old Vladimir in various parts of the world.

Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon, because it was published before my boycott). Of course, you might want to peruse the first and third novels as well, Full Medical and No Amber Waves of Grain. (Gee, I wonder how Vella handles series. The retail site’s bots don’t do too well matching books in a series either. Is it possible that the people at B&N are smarter than Bezos? Maybe Bezos is just an AI who hates humans? Where’s the Terminator when you need him?)

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Baldacci, Connelly, and other old mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables ready for the glue factory have teamed up with Authors Guild to sue the distributors/inventors of this “AI program.” Let me begin with two important points here: First, that program is so far from being HAL that I can’t bring myself to call it AI. Second, all it does is surf the internet, a lot faster than a human, to be sure, “reads” all that it encounters (including those authors’ formalistic drivel), and then produces a story in the novelistic style of one of these authors. I can only give a shrug of indifference because I’ve stopped reading their works! (Many more entertaining and original stories are available!)

That said, is the use of ChatGPT legally or morally correct? First, the legal establishment is still slogging through 20^th-century internet and programming evils, trying to catch up and control them. It can’t keep up: Most techies, legal or otherwise, are far more clever than any judge, jury, lawyer, or politician. (We know from recent events that the latter are especially stupid! And most techies are young and dumb enough to realize that ChatGPT can’t compare with HAL! The name AI isn’t an appropriate description of this software.)

Morally, and for authors and publishers, this debate is akin to the one about book piracy, especially ebook piracy. The latter is more common than authors and publishers like to admit, especially for ebooks because they’re just electronic files. That’s all ChatGPT does: Digest electronic files, manipulate their content, and produce ones in a similar style. If a result looks like Baldacci wrote it, is that any different than some book pirate taking one of his ebooks, turning it back into a Word file, stripping off David’s name and other ID markers, and republishing it? There are websites who sell these knockoffs. (I know because they even sell mine…under my own name.) In other words, ChatGPT is just another way to scam authors and publishers, so morality shouldn’t play any different role with ChatGPT than it does for book piracy, which is more rampant.

Of course, these “famous authors” have more to lose, and the Guild represents them and their greedy publishers a lot better than authors who self-publish (they’re never represented!) or those published by small presses (maybe the presses but not their authors?).

This problem with modern law enforcement is more general: Some activity can be banned easily enough (book piracy, including ChatGPT’s, for example), but the rules are irrelevant because the enforcement part is mostly missing. When that activity is ubiquitous, there just aren’t enough cops on the block. Not even Connelly’s cop hero Harry Bosch can do a damn thing about it!

***

Comments are always welcome! (Please follow the rules found on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This novel is a bridge between the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone,” and “Steve Morgan” series of novels, and the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” series; i.e., it’s part of my “Future History” series that covers thousands of years of alternate history. DHS Agent Ashley Scott witnesses a murder. Investigating it leads her to a conspiracy with multiple insidious and surprising threads that keep her and readers guessing. Retirees might become extremely worried as well, especially if they’re privy to government secrets! Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (even on Amazon).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

The general public often misunderstands the progress of science, at best buying into the standard explanation that a theory is constructed to explain a lot of data and then tested over time as more data accumulates to prove the theory right or wrong, ad infinitum. That’s the so-called “scientific method,” and any child in a basic science course might hear or read that much without really experiencing it or understand what it means.

I suppose that explanation is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn’t consider the role of imagination, even among scientists—children are brainwashed to believe that advances just flow from cold, experimental facts, if that. The reality is that a theory originates because one or more imaginative people look at data and say, “How do I explain this?”, and then go about imagining an explanation. (Some people polish that up by calling it “creative thinking,” but imagination is the better word!) Same for new data especially if it contradicts aspects of an old theory.

We should perhaps consider sci-fi as an important way to use imagination as an effective tool to stimulate all creative thinking, a filter for determining what might be possible, which is why so many scientists (or ex-scientists who are still thinking like scientists) read (and even write) good sci-fi. Extrapolation of current science, often far into the future, is what makes that tool so effective. (I’m excluding fantasy and space-opera authors here, especially screenwriters, who rarely worry about contradicting even current science: “Full stop, Mr. Sulu!” or “Warp 9, Mr. Sulu!” are examples of their foolishness; ninja-like warriors fighting with light sabers are others; time-travel romances and cannibalistic ETs; etc., etc. In fact, most of what Margaret Atwood called “speculative fiction” is excluded!) The sci-fi author has to be prepared to win a few and lose a few, though. (Phasers were very much like today’s smart phones; but the transporter is beyond the impossible, albeit necessary for screenwriting purposes in Star Trek.)

I began writing the “Chaos Chronicles” trilogy, my version of Asimov’s Foundation  trilogy, long before my first novel Full Medical was published. (All three novels of that trilogy are bundled now—see below.) Unlike my hero Asimov, who basically swept FTL-travel and ETs under the rug (the first simply is accomplished by “jumps through hyperspace” and is never explained beyond that; the lack of the second is eventually explained in the extended Foundation series as a trick performed by the time-travelers in End of Eternity, but time travel is never explained), as a physicist I worked harder on my extrapolations than Asimov the biochemist wanted to do, at least for the FTL-travel and certainly for ETs. (The ETs might eventually be explained by congressional inquiries actually studying UFO phenomena! One should probably ignore the “mummified ETs” in Peru that excite the Mexican government, and certainly all the tales of abduction and seduction UFO nuts prattle about.)

A few weeks ago in this blog, I wrote an obit for an old professor of mine, James Hartle. (No, he wasn’t any more an ET than I am, but he sure was a hell of lot more intelligent.) Some of his work was with Hawking, and that motivated me when writing my sci-fi trilogy to consider what’s now called the multiverse, the idea that our Universe is only one among many quantum states of an infinite collection of universes. (Much later, this was the basis for my novel A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse, a sci-fi rom-com.) I also knew something about zero-point energy. In standard quantum electrodynamics, that’s what allows a froth of virtual photons to give spin to the electron, for example, and the idea has been extended to the entire zoo of elementary particles, including the mysterious Higgs particle, that are, after all, just quantum states themselves (perhaps of only one particle?). In other words, there could be virtual universes as well.

(more…)

Are you thinking about upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11? Did you purchase a new computer, and you’re now forced to use Windows 11? In either case, you could have problems!

I put myself in the latter situation recently. I’ve stuck with Windows, version after version, because I hate Apple’s egotistical attitude of not making it easy to play with devices from other equipment providers—Apple likes to pretend that its products are the only ones in the technological universe! But now the almost equally infamous Microsoft has rewarded my loyalty by hassling me with yet another crappy, untested version of Windows. Mind you, there are some new things I like…when they work!

Did you think Win 10 was bad with its interminable updates? Microsoft vowed that it would be the last Windows version, and there would only be updates. But every week? Sometimes even more often? Of course, what they did was release a buggy beta-version of Win 10 and let users debug it. They’ve done the same thing with Win 11! If you buy a new computer, you’ll get the latest version of Win 11, and it still has lots of bugs that will bite you. And many of them are caused by the OS not playing well with other products, just like with Win 10. When that happens, every help desk at all involved with Microsoft, from the computer manufacturer, in my case HP; makers of printers; external keyboards and drives; and Microsoft itself, point their fingers at everyone else! (For most of these online help desk, there aren’t any live people to help anymore!)

After hours and hours of googling in my search for fixes, I’m finally at the point where I can use Office 365 products (as problematic as they are!)—create an email, document, slide, or spreadsheet—and feel that my computer files are more or less secure. I’d already lost hair in the normal aging process, but tearing out more in frustration with hardware and software problems doesn’t help.

What was worse is that being familiar with Win 10 didn’t help much either. At least I knew how to unlink that useless OneDrive. Why anyone would want to use Microsoft’s cloud after the Russians hacked them is beyond me. I’ve always only used my own remote external drives as backups. I’m not changing from sanity to insanity now.

Printing was a bear too—an angry grizzly that just wouldn’t be tamed. I bought a new HP laptop. Wouldn’t you think it would work with an HP 2035 printer? Nope. Neither HP nor Microsoft helped with that either. Of course, that printer was defective from the very beginning—it never could print PDFs properly—but it was more or less working with Win 10. It didn’t with Win 11. It turns out you’ll find lots of people complaining about printing problems with Win 11, so it’s hard for me to tell who’s at fault, HP or Microsoft—and, of course, they can’t tell you either (especially HP that made the printer). In any case, I solved my problem in a drastic fashion by purchasing a cheap Brother B&W laser printer that cost me about 25% of what I doled out for that junky HP 2035. That little Brother works far better than the HP 2035 ever did! It even prints PDFs!

There were times during this whole painful process when I thought about taking my new machine down to the recycling dump and returning to a typewriter…if I could find one outside a museum (maybe in Tom Hanks’ mansion?). I also at times yearned for my old Radio Shack Color Computer, my first ever personal computer. It didn’t have a bloated and cumbersome Office 365, but its word processing and spread sheet were simple to use and very functional. I could even write machine code for that! New machines are so complicated that no one person understands a particular model.

“Why did I buy a new computer and bring all this aggravation down on myself?” you ask. The answer is simple: I went through three keyboards with the old laptop, the one that came with it and two USB ones—keys dying and labels wearing off, for the most part. (I write a lot!) Imagine using an external keyboard with a laptop: You have to reach farther to type! At my age, I don’t need carpal-tunnel anything. My new machine is supposed to get me through a few more novels at least before I say goodbye to this world. Now I’m not so sure it won’t die before I do, though. Stay tuned.

***

Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules indicated on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)

Origins: The Denisovan Trilogy, Book One. While A. B. Carolan agonizes over the next two books in the trilogy at his favorite Donegal pub, you can enjoy reading this sci-fi mystery for young adults (and adults who are young-at-heart!). Young Kayla Jones has dreams she can’t understand. Her future seems determined as the brilliant STEM student looks forward to a research career, but her past gets in the way. As if the chaos afflicting the world and leading to her adopted father’s death isn’t enough, assassins begin to pursue her. With some friends who come to her aid, she’s on her way to discover a conspiracy that can be traced to prehistoric battles waged by hominins bent on conquest of a primitive Earth. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not on Amazon). And don’t forget that Carolan’s first three novels are now on sale this month at Smashwords.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

They are rarely provided by governments now as huge conglomerates spread their tendrils around the world to strangle all competition. I’ve just considered Facebook, that online behemoth that has damaged everything from our youth to our democracies, yet is allowed to compete with other online services by swallowing them up in its evil maws. That’s one place that pisses this reader and author off. Another is found in the publishing industry.

The Big Six publishers were reduced to the Big Five when Random House gobbled up Penguin. Now Penguin Random House wants to swallow Simon and Schuster. Where are the antitrust and anti-monopoly protections?

There are two problems here for a reader like me. First, the huge publishing conglomerates emphasize hardbound, print books over ebooks because that’s where they can scam the reading public most efficiently. I hate print and avoid it wherever possible. You have to wait forever to get an ebook version for the rare good book published by one of these conglomerates, for one thing; and that rare, good book is rarely kept on my bookshelf because they’re doorstoppers that take up to much space and make the shelves sag.  I only read hard-bound books when relatives or friends give them to me, or they’re the only published version available when I write a review (those are often free, but the price tags are usually around $30—I can buy up to ten ebooks for that price, although not from the Big Five).

The latter indicates the extent of how the book-publishing conglomerates flaunt the antitrust and anti-monopoly laws. Let’s consider the last four of my reviews of hardbound books: Klobuchar’s Antitrust, Leonnig’s Zero Fail, McMahon’s A Good Kill, and Woodward and Costa’s Peril. All were free (or I wouldn’t have read them), and all are involved with one of those nefarious Big Five conglomerates, Penguin Random House, in one way or the other. This beast publishes about 15,000 books per year. Let’s ignore for the moment that most of those books, including three of the four I mention, would mostly be lost to average readers who don’t keep up on the new books. (I do, whether I read them or not.)

Klobuchar’s, published by Borzoi, which in turn is part of Alfred A. Knopf, now owned by Penguin Random House, illustrates the problem. This monster publisher is huge! Ironically, and for obvious reasons, Klobuchar mentions how big publishing conglomerates are eating up smaller publishers, an example of what she rails against in her book, making me wonder if she’s truly serious about protecting consumers against trusts and monopolies. Apparently her fat contract received because she’s a celebrity politician muted her critique; or worse, her publisher, kept her from saying too much. A bribe leading to muzzling? I wouldn’t put it past Penguin Random House.

Leonnig’s Zero Fail is the only book published by Random House in my list and not one of Penguin Random House’s imprints (unless you now call Random House an imprint of Penguin Random House?). McMahon’s A Good Kill, the only fiction in the list (it’s a thriller), is published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, one of the old publishers that, you guessed it, is now part of Penguin Random House. Finally, Woodward and Costa’s Peril is published by Simon and Schuster, another old publisher that will be consumed by Penguin Random House, unless the latter’s voracious appetite is stopped.

I don’t know if all this isn’t some giant conspiracy by the big publishing conglomerates to maintain control over the book industry. They fear self-publishing and small presses alike. They eat up the latter if they’re successful, a la Facebook. They can’t do anything much about self-publishing. Self-published authors are the ones I read most because that’s where the good books are usually found! Twenty-five to one would be my estimate. And those are the books I keep (as ebooks on my Kindle or laptop).

Of course, the Big Five aren’t the only ones playing these monopolistic games. Amazon wants to play in that space too, beating them to the punch by gobbling up Thomas Mercer, for example, which is as snooty and against self-published books as any Big Five conglomerate. Things can only get worse, and readers will continue to suffer all this monopolistic activity.

The Biden administration has sued to stop Penguin Random House from swallowing Simon and Schuster. I hope they succeed, but I fear it’s too late, that we’re beyond the tipping point, as is the case for many multinational corporate enterprises. I will continue to fight these monopolistic trends as much as I can. I might have parted with my own two small presses, but I hope they can remain independent. I doubt they will be able to do so, though.

***

Comments are always welcome.

Death on the Danube. While you shouldn’t consider this the last novel in a trilogy (as the publisher of the first two books in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series wanted—there are two more novels in the series, making it into a “pentalogy”), it represents an inflection point in Esther’s long life. In the first two novels, Esther and Bastiann are older lovers, both a bit hesitant about a twilight marriage; but they’re married in this story and on their honeymoon, a riverboat cruise down that famous river. They can’t escape their past as accomplished sleuths, though, because Interpol agent Bastiann must lead a murder investigation onboard the riverboat. For a visual preview, see the trailer. Available wherever quality ebooks are sold, and there’s also a print version.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Mark “Sugar-Mountain” Zuckerberg, thinking he’s some kind of god in control of the internet, continues to annoy me, to say the least. From the moment I created my Facebook author page (the URL is https://www.facebook.com/authorStevenMMoore for those interested), I knew he and most of his minions at Facebook were greedy SOBs. Every post on my author page is followed by advice to reach out to more Facebook users by creating an ad! And anyone accessing that page is hit by ads as well (not mine). They (and Google as well) make all their money that way. Sorry, Mark, I won’t let you exploit me! I know you will bury my posts about my books, if only with other ads, and make my readers furious, because I won’t play your games. I don’t give a damn now. (Well, I do about my readers, but Zuckerberg can go to hell.)

I created that page because many pundits and a few author friends recommended it. Same for using the social media aspects of Facebook. All social media is similar to more insidious versions of PR and marketing whose gurus want to take authors’ money. Most of the those gurus  pay homage to the Amazon god by exclusively playing Bezos’s game (Penny Sansevieri’s AME is a prime example.) While social media has the positive of allowing me to keep in contact with some internet friends, it’s useless for book marketing. (So is Amazon. The only thing their bots did for me was to confuse two books in “The Last Humans” series, If B&N can keep them straight, why can’t Amazon? (That’s why the links in the ad below go to B&N. You won’t see many links to Amazon here anymore.)

I’ve thought many times about completely cancelling Facebook (even for my social media). Old-fashioned email seems effective enough to maintain contact with relatives and friends, fellow authors included (spam from everyone else is treated accordingly). Election meddling aside (Facebook will take anyone’s money, including Putin’s), the whole Facebook edifice is just built on sand, volcanic black sand steaming with corporate greed. No, not sand, but quicksand. One sinks into it and disappears, burning as if you just passed across the river Styx. It’s much torturous than drowning.

And what’s this about that name change to “Meta”? Sugar-Mountain says it’s short for “Metaverse.” Now I know old Mark has no real interest in physics—he probably flunked all of high school science—so I don’t buy his reasons for the name. (I’m just happy I used the string theory term “Multiverse” instead of “Metaverse” in the title for my sci-fi rom-com, A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse). What he really means is VR, short for “virtual reality.” As much as I think Harari is a charlatan (a history prof popping off about past and future science who has no business doing so, and makes tons of mistakes doing it), he has warned us enough about VR and AI. Facebook’s current algorithms are AI—they study users and then target them with ads (which I ignore, of course)—and Meta indicates a future where Sugar-Mountain plans to turn everyone on planet Earth into a VR avatar, a conspiracy to create a worse world than the one in Neuromancer.

That famous and brave whistle-blower (I won’t mention her name, not wanting her to be attacked by crazies) has exposed a lot of Facebook’s shenanigans that I’d only suspected by observation and without solid proof that would hold up in court. The transgressions, in my opinion, are sufficient to close down Facebook and ban it for good, whatever it’s called. They’ll never learn and are too arrogant to change, especially Sugar-Mountain and his close confidents. (I’d never “lean on” one, for example; she’s luring us into that hot quicksand.)

I’ll play along with the internet’s Goebbels for a while longer until I’m so sick of Mark and his cronies that I can’t stand to use Facebook anymore. You might want to consider using my email steve@stevenmmoore.com now, though, because you never know when Facebook puts me over the edge. Or they ban me. In any case, my days there are numbered.

***

Comments are welcome.

The Last Humans: A New Dawn. For a short time, the first novel in this series was the bestselling Black Opal Books’ novel on Barnes & Noble. This second novel continues Penny Castro’s adventures in a post-apocalyptic world. What remains of the US government forces Penny and her husband Alex to participate in a revenge campaign against the country that caused the apocalyptic pandemic…by kidnapping their young children! Just as thrilling as the first novel but independently readable, this Draft2Digital ebook is available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not at Amazon, Black Opal Books, or Smashwords).

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

Tim Cook was in court not long ago defending Apple against Epic Games, the company that made Fortnite. I’m rooting for Epic. Just to be clear, I’m not a gamer; I hate computer games, because the stories they tell, if they exist, are anemic. I hate Apple a lot more, though! (Almost as much as Amazon.) Just recently we discovered that Apple gave in to Trump’s DOJ subpoenas and released phone records of corporations, reporters, and at least two congressmen who Trump considered his enemies. I assume the company is not completely fascist like some German ones in the 1930s, but they’re certainly not fighting fascism!

From its birth (a bit like Rosemary’s baby’s), the company has bamboozled consumers, making products that are so propriety that they generally worked with only other Apple products. In my old day-job, managers, who stupidly loved playing with their new toys purchased from the tech giant, would struggle to make slides produced on Apple machines compatible with other machines, or vice versa, even though people were supposedly using the same software (usually Microsoft’s, so Bill Gates’s company is also culpable). Even syncing and sharing emails and data from an Apple device was torture for other device users (yes, I remember the iPhones-to-Blackberry problem—Apple won that battle…unfairly). And Apple didn’t give a rat’s ass. They still don’t, because, like Bezos’s Amazon, they think they’re the center of the tech universe!

The legendary arrogance of the corporation isn’t its only sin, of course. How dare they try to monopolize the gaming and music industries? They’ve tried to monopolize the ebook industry too (there’s some weird comfort in that they compete with that evil retailer, Amazon). They farmed out most of their manufacturing to China in order to pay workers less and make more profit, to the detriment of US workers, and they signed deals with that fascist-capitalistic state that would never be permitted in the US. And they’ve invented an anti-tracking app to combat tech spying (I doubt it blocks their own tracking!)—that’s one of the biggest tracking culprits claiming they can police themselves. C’mon!

(more…)

We all know how Facebook contributed, unknowingly or otherwise, to elect Trump and support BREXIT. If not intentionally, then their business model needs serious fixing; if intentionally, someone needs to go to jail! Other social media sites, email services, and web browsers are also guilty of sharing our personal information with anyone who will pay them money.

How does this affect authors? Why should we be concerned? Because nowadays social media and email are valuable tools in many ways, we would like to know that it can be trusted to keep our readers’ information safe. It’s now obvious we can’t do that.

Verizon owns both AOL and Yahoo now. Google’s Gmail is required by many cellphone providers. All three, like Facebook and Twitter, have privacy policies that allow them to steal information from those emails and sell it. The big boys are up to their necks in data mining. It’s not just the data-mining firms anymore.

Microsoft hasn’t done anything particularly wrong (I don’t know about Bing if it still exists, or their mail packages), but they are terribly annoying. It used to be that I could pick and choose what updates I wanted in Win 8.1 or Win 10. Now I can’t. Even worse, Microsoft now takes over my computer, downloads, and installs crap that I never use.  My choices are “Update and Shutdown” or “Update and Restart”—when that takes valuable time away from my writing, you can imagine how I curse Bill Gates and his band of thieves. I should also mention that they’ve decided not to support certain versions of Office so they can charge me for a new one. That’s not just abuse—it’s highway robbery!

Add to all that the Dark Web where I’ve seen pirated versions of ebooks, including my own, offered for free, and one has to wonder if the internet is an author’s friend. But it doesn’t stop there. Net neutrality is dead. Congress killed it. Authors’ businesses are small potatoes compared to mega-corporations. Don’t you think that internet service providers will coddle the users who will pay more? I already experience daily several periods of slowdowns or drop-outs as Comcast panders to their big money clients. They’d rather have gamers and streaming video watchers hogging the bandwidth than tend to an author’s needs. Nobody reads anymore, right? Literacy and reading be damned.

The only thing an author can do is to speak out against this abuse from tech companies. They’ll probably try to make sure the word won’t get out, of course, but the word is already out. And we can always attack them in our fiction. In libris libertas…and let’s have a saner and safer internet!

***

Did you miss The Secret Lab? This sci-fi mystery for young adults features four tweens in the future living on the International Space Station who try to discover the origins of a mathematical mutant cat. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all their affiliated ebook retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo etc) and in a print version on Amazon.  And don’t miss the next A. B. Carolan YA sci-fi mystery The Secret of the Urns—coming soon!

In libris libertas!