[Note from Steve: On this day of remembrance, it’s difficult for me to post just about anything related to the business of publishing books. NYC is the the book-publishing capital of the world, but it’s also where the worst terrorist attack on complete innocents occurred on this day back in 2001 about when I was thinking seriously of retiring from my day-job to write full-time. We lost a dear family member on that terrible day (his eulogy is found in my first published novel, Full Medical); we also lost several friends and colleagues. Terrorists are sick, subhuman fanatics, but let’s remember all their innocent victims today. Read on, if you think it will help you get through the day. Writing what follows was therapeutic for me, so please bear with me.]

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Every so often, I google “Steven M Moore” to see how well that search engine has kept up with this blog and my publishing efforts. It’s often enlightening. (For example, these blog articles often are listed, but never those from my political blog. Maybe that’s not surprising? Some social media sites claim to be apolitical, which now often means, “Don’t promote anything that appears like a political statement.” Or, it can also mean, “We don’t promote anything that’s progressive because we Silicon Valley VIPs are apolitical fascists!” Take your pick.)

In this process of rediscovering my internet presence, I’ve concluded that when I started my publishing career back in 2006 (with Full Medical)—that was also when I started this website—I should have created a pen name. (You might have realized that I finally got one, but it’s only used for my YA writing.) There are too many Steve Moores around; even too many Steven M. Moores.

People often quote Smith as the most common surname (Jack Smith is now a notable one!), but Moore is right up there. So’s the first name Steve or Steven (compared to Stephen). So you’ll find Steven Moores who are critics, economists, felons, pediatricians, politicians, and fiction and non-fiction writers. On the internet, I compete with all of them. As far as book promotion goes, that means you can sometimes peruse ten pages of Google output and still find references to me and my oeuvre (more blog posts now than books, unfortunately).

After publishing forty-plus books, it’s a bit too late for me to change! In fact, the time to choose a pen name was before I published the sci-fi thriller Full Medical. Maybe that mistake is the main cause of my anemic sales figures? I don’t believe so. I think it’s more because people won’t find any of my stories by googling “sci-fi,” “thrillers,” or “mysteries.” Google probably also pays more attention to books published by the old mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables (i.e., by those old, formulaic authors writing for the big publishing conglomerates, what those publishers consider “sure bets” in the publishing horse race).

No, I can’t blame the lack of a pen name for my low sales figures. That lack may contribute, but there are many other factors, including competition, of course. Now, with more books being published than ever before—self-published, small press, and Big Five conglomerates’ books—and fewer people reading books—computer games, streaming video, and social media numbing the minds of people and pacifying them–publishing has become even more competitive. For readers, that’s a win: Many more books at lower prices (at least from self-publishers and small presses). For writers? Too many of us have to be satisfied with authoring books only because we love storytelling. Lack of a pen name is only a small hurdle out of many an author must jump over, to be honest.

Yet a catchy pen name like Mark Twain might have helped me. Has any MFA student written a thesis about whether it helped Samuel Clemens? (I sort of did that in the eighth grade, but it was just a year-ending writing assignment in civics…and my information came from our public library, not Google!)

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[No ad today. See my note above.]

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.

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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!

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.

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