It’s always interesting to speak with Stefan Molyneux; this time we were talking about business, work, and success. In my opinion, the important thing to accept about success is understanding that it’s not you. Sure, you have to work hard and do your part, but you are not the only factor. You are FAR from the only factor. There are a number of factors involved, and of them all, timing is almost certainly the most important. Sometimes you can recognize, but more often, it’s just a matter of luck.
Some say that luck is made, but I think it is more akin to something that you have to be already working to exploit for the moment it arrives. I think of it like a surfer and a big wave. If you haven’t taken the time to learn to surf, bought a surfboard, then swum out to sea, you’re not going to catch it. If you’re on land and you see it, it’s already too late.
Our big point of disagreement was about volunteers. I think they are crucial, so long as you’re willing to be ruthless about weeding out those who don’t make the grade for many, many different reasons. Stefan is dubious about them, but I can state for a fact that neither Castalia nor Infogalactic nor Gab would have gotten anywhere without a reliable core of dedicated, hard-working volunteers.
Scott Cole of the Castalia House blog interviews Castalia author John C. Wright about his recently completed trilogy, (and first quarter of his MOTH & COBWEB duodecology) The Green Knight’s Squire, which consists of the following three books:
Scott Cole: After reading both books my thought is the series is influenced by The Once and Future King and shares similarities with the Book of Revelations (i.e. descriptions of some of the beasts, especially at the first elf tournament), Shakespeare, Narnian anthropomorphism, and Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch along with a multiple mythological references.
John C Wright: You are a little off, but not too far. Any similarity with Lukyanenko’s NIGHT WATCH is pure coincidence. Shakespeare I certainly steal from, but I don’t recall stealing anything from Narnia, aside from a mood. I am not a fan of T.S. White; I take my Arthuriana from Mallory and the Mabinogion and Tennyson’s IDYLLS OF THE KING. Alan Gardner’s WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN is also an inspiration.
Since the book is called SWAN KNIGHT’S SON’S SQUIRE, expect to see the events of THE SWAN KNIGHT’S SON played out. Also, I decided to borrow the bad guys from G.K. Chesterton’s THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, and to make Gil a member of the Last Crusade.
SC:What was the inspiration for the Moth and Cobweb series?
JCW: Once upon a time I asked my editor, Vox Day, what I could write that would reach a wider audience. He suggested writing something aimed at the juvenile market, and said that talking animals were always popular. He also admired my short story ‘A Parliament of Beast and Birds’ which appeared in the anthology BOOK OF FEASTS AND SEASONS.
The mystery of where writers get their ideas is a perennial one, but the truth is that we have no more ideas than anyone else. The difference is that, unlike muggles, we write our ideas down and use them. Every writer I have ever met keeps a notebook in purse or pocket or in his smartphone where he jots down ideas.
So, I threw the idea of a talking animal into the pot and looked through my notebook of unused ideas to find what else might go into the stew. Usually a writer needs three ideas to get the ball rolling.
I had the germ of an idea that had been in the back of my mind for some years, a juvenile originally set in a mythical place called Uncanny Valley, Nevada, where four seniors in high school, cousins, each had to do an apprenticeship or internship over the summer with one or another of their mad uncles. Instead of the normal jobs, because some of their uncles were from beyond the fields we know, the kids end up being a squire to a knight, the sidekick to a superhero, a sorcerer’s apprentice, or something of the sort.
A second idea came not from my notebook but from my wife’s Harry Potter inspired role playing game. Like all the games we run, we made up our own rules. In her role playing game, she decided that in addition to buying character stats like strength or scholarship, dexterity and intelligence, you could also buy social stats like fortune, friends, fame, and family. So, for example, an orphan with a vast bank account would have a zero in family and high marks in fortune, whereas a poor boy from a large and supportive family would have the opposite.
One innovation in her rule system, which I had not seen used elsewhere, was that each player had a star he could use to mark one stat and only one he had purchased, and this carried a secret benefit revealed in the course of the game. So, for example, putting a star in scholarship gave the character total recall. Putting the star in family meant you were a member of the largest and most supportive extended family imaginable, the children of the seneschal of Titania, the Moths. This did not give you any magic powers, but it meant that you had uncles and cousins both in the human world and beyond, including royalty, famous scientists, mermaids, and so on. Indeed, my wife had umpired more than one game with these rules, so it became sort of a running joke that I always played a member of the Moth family. My first character was named Dusty Moth, and he was a cowboy from Utah, and an amateur alchemist, who had the blood of elves in his background.
The third idea came from the song ERLKOENIG or the medieval tale of TAM LIN, where a boy is being sold by the elfs to hell. I had noticed that elfs and fairy creatures from the days before Tolkien and Gary Gygax, and indeed from before Shakespeare’s MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, were actually quite spooky and frightening, not the pretty and twee tween girls of Disney’s Tinkerbell cartoons.
I noticed traces of the sulfurous scent of the inferno clinging even to such recent and childish works as DARBY O’GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE, a favorite film of mine, based on an older series of books, where the Leprechauns are terrified by the powers of a parish priest, whose blessings and exorcisms can shrivel them. Even in the lighthearted Disney version, as in the original books, the elfs are angelic beings who neither aided Satan during his rebellion, nor fought on the side of Heaven, and so were cast out of paradise, but not all the way to Hell.
It’s a really good interview. Read the rest of it there. And the books are really good as well. If you ever enjoyed Susan Cooper or Lloyd Alexander, you will almost certainly enjoy John C. Wright’s MOTH & COBWEB series.
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal first “broke” in the far-right blogosphere. The accusation they made was that these gangs were being allowed to operate undisturbed because everyone was too afraid of “appearing racist” to properly investigate them . . . and nobody listened to the far-right bloggers who were breaking this story because they were afraid of “appearing racist” if they gave any credibility to those far-right sources, too. Never mind that it seemed paranoid to rely on bloggers to report truths like these when the allegations were so wide-reaching, involving a literal conspiracy within the police force.
And yet, years after no one was willing to take them seriously, the far-right blogosphere turned out to be right.
Well over a thousand (mostly) white young girls were being abused by (mostly) Pakistani gangs.
And the authorities were covering it up.
We are now, once again, in the stage of an evolving scandal that Mehrdad Amanpour described his experience with above. Just to be clear, I’m not going to commit myself to the idea that this is going to be as huge as Rotherham was. We should be careful: we don’t know what would or wouldn’t be confirmed with a proper investigation. The question here is not whether we’ve gotten to the bottom of this online. The question is whether there is enough here to justify thinking there should be a proper investigation.
And the parallel with Rotherham is that the relatively small number of people asking for that are mostly the loathsome kinds of people who run “racist far-right websites.” So, since the claims are inherently conspiratorial, and the mainstream doesn’t want to be associated with those people who are talking about it, it is once again all too easy to just dismiss the claims out of hand as paranoia run wild.
Again, the evolution of the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal was an extremely painful lesson that the mainstream can be wrong and the “paranoid racist far-right” can be right. And that lesson was far too expensive to simply let go to waste.
The name of this scandal is Pizzagate.
It is always a mistake to dismiss facts because one does not approve of the messenger. It is, in fact, a formal failure of logic known as the Genetic Fallacy. The sun does not become the not-sun simply because the Alt-Right calls it the sun anymore than a man becomes a woman because an SJW calls him a her; that is a form of magical thinking and it is intrinsically illogical.
The fact is that we don’t know what lies beneath the smoke of Pizzagate. There may or may not be hellfire there. But one need not subscribe to all of the 16 Points to scent a distinct odor of sulfur. In any event, this is a useful summary for mainstream readers who are understandably reluctant to venture forth into the dank swamps of the chans.
It’s intriguing to see that the fake “attack” on Comet Ping Pong appears to be convincing Hillary Clinton voters to look further into Pizzagate.
Do you believe that society should draw the line at all when it comes to limitations on hate speech?
No. Hate speech laws are wrong. The question – not a question, but THE question – is ‘who gets to define hate?” That’s not to say there’s no such thing as hate speech – clearly there is. Hate speech laws repress, and I mean that in the psycho-analytical sense. They drive [hate speech] underground. It’s not a good idea, because things get ugly when you drive them underground. They don’t disappear, they just fester, and they’re not subject to correction. I made these videos, and they have been subject to a tremendous amount of correction over the last six weeks. I don’t just mean from my public response, but also partly from the university’s response, partly from a group of friends who have been reviewing my videos and criticizing them to death. This is why free speech is so important. You can struggle to formulate some argument, but when you throw it out into the public, there’s a collective attempt to modify and improve that. So with the hate speech issue – say someone’s a Holocaust denier, because that’s the standard routine – we want those people out there in the public so you can tell them why they’re historically ignorant, and why their views are unfounded and dangerous. If you drive them underground, it’s not like they stop talking to each other, they just don’t talk to anyone who disagrees with them. That’s a really bad idea and that’s what’s happening in the United States right now. Half of the country doesn’t talk to the other half. Do you know what you call people you don’t talk to? Enemies.
If you have enemies, you have war.
If you stop talking to people, you either submit to them, or you go to war with them. Those are your options and those aren’t good options. It’s better to have a talk. If you put restrictions on speech, then you can’t actually talk about the difficult things that need to be talked about. I have about 20,000 hours of clinical practice and all I do for 20 hours a week is talk to people about difficult things – the worst things that are going on in their lives. These are hard conversations all the time. The conversations that are the most curative are simultaneously the ones that are most difficult and most dangerous. Most normal people will not have those conversations. That’s why so many marriages dissolve. People don’t like to have those conversations. Part of that too, is because – let’s say you have a little tiff with your wife, and you know there’s more to it than the little thing that’s bothering her, and you ask ‘what are you REALLY upset about’? Try peeling that back. You might find she’s upset about something her grandfather did to her grandmother two generations ago that hasn’t yet been resolved within the family, and that’s the determining element of her attitude at the present moment. If you unpack it though, then you don’t have to live it over and over again.
There’s also this idea that you shouldn’t say things that hurt people’s feelings – that’s the philosophy of the compassionate left. It’s so childish it’s beyond comprehension. What did Nietzsche say: ‘you can judge a man’s spirit by the amount of truth he can tolerate.’ I tell my students this too, you can tell when you’re being educated because you’re horrified. So if its pleasant and safe, it’s like you’re not learning anything. People learn things the hard way.
People learn things the hard way because MPAI. The reason why the mainstream media and the Left hate the Alt-Right so much is that unlike the conservatives and moderates, they understand that we will never submit to them. And the reason they fear us is that they know we will utilize every tactic they use against us. Especially because every time they deny us a platform, we simply build a replacement, and moreover, one that is actually superior to the original platform.
I don’t have a problem with hate speech laws. After all, there are so many kinds of hate speech that need to be banned.
Sarah Hoyt, we are pleased to report is alive, while her fellow Mad Genius wonders what, exactly, the SF-SJWs expect the Sad Puppies to do about me, and by extension, the Rabid Puppies:
Essentially as result of inactivity the Puppies left the field to Vox and “Raptor Butt invasion.” Which was funny for a while, but after a while you realize that it’s puppy butt that’s being invaded.
OMFG. I don’t know whether to beat my head against the wall or the OP’s. That statement is not that much removed from that of the other side telling SPs they had to denounce Vox or it proved we were all cut from the same cloth. One thing those of us closely involved with the Sad Puppy movement learned in 2015 is that there is nothing anyone can do to rein in Vox. We would have had Raptor Butt no matter what. Vox will do what he wants, when he wants and he doesn’t give a flying fuck who he bumps against in the process.
That’s why it’s important to pursue anti-fragility if you are not inclined to submit to being thought-policed. It gives one that freedom to think, speak, and act as one sees fit. That doesn’t mean I’m free of all constraint, of course, it’s only that I am answerable to my supporters rather than megacorporations who could not care less about me and ideological enemies who seek to destroy my career and many of the things I value as well as many of the things in which I believe.
As for Rabid Puppies, I don’t know exactly what we’ll do yet next year; with the Hugo rules changes and the establishment of the Dragon Awards, new strategies are required. It’s always wise to reassess the situation when it changes, and the ongoing growth of Castalia House also means that we have to reconsider and prioritize our objectives. But regardless, we’ll always have “Space Raptor Butt Invasion”, and we’ll always sport these with pride.
It’s always easy to tell when a group of people have given themselves over to untruth. Their philosophy, their theology, and their politics all rapidly become observably incoherent. Evangelicals, and many of the evangelical organizations, are now following the example of other Christian denominations in walking the broad and easy path towards Hell, and they are doing so on the basis of their mealy-mouthed Sunday School Churchianity.
As the election retreats like a hurricane heading back out to sea, first responders are assessing the damage left in its wake. One casualty is the reputation of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism was closely associated with the campaign of Donald J. Trump, and more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for the president-elect. This, despite large numbers of African-American, Latino, Asian, young and female evangelicals who were fiercely opposed to the racism, sexism and xenophobia of Mr. Trump’s campaign and the hypocrisy of a candidate who built a casino empire while flouting morality.
As a result, much of the good that went by the name “evangelicalism” has been clouded over; now a new movement is needed to replace it.
When it comes to religious identity in America, the fastest-growing group is the “nones.” Nearly a quarter of all Americans, and over 35 percent of millennials, report no religious affiliation. Nones, many of whom grew up within evangelicalism, often still affirm faith in God. They left the church because they gave up on evangelical leadership. Nothing sums up their objections more clearly than evangelicals’ embrace of Mr. Trump. Didn’t Jesus say, “Blessed are the meek” and “Love your enemies”?
Throughout the campaign, there was dissent even within the ranks of evangelicalism’s most conservative institutions. While the old guard, like the Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, were ardent Trump supporters, the best-selling evangelical author Max Lucado and the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore were both early critics. At Liberty University, the largest evangelical college in the country, thousands of students signed a petition denouncing the support of its president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for Mr. Trump and insisting that they were more interested in being Christian than in being Republican.
Andy Crouch, the executive editor of Christianity Today, criticized both candidates, writing that enthusiasm for Mr. Trump “gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord.” He added, “They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us.”
As white male evangelists, we have no problem admitting that the future does not lie with us. It lies with groups like the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, led by Gabriel Salguero, or the Moral Monday movement, led by William Barber II, who has challenged the news media on its narrow portrayal of evangelicals. For decades, we have worked within evangelicalism to lift up the voices of these “other evangelicals.”
But we cannot continue to allow sisters and brothers who are leading God’s movement to be considered “other.” We are not confident that evangelicalism is a community in which younger, nonwhite voices can flourish. And we are not willing to let our faith be the collateral damage of evangelicalism.
We want to be clear: We are not suggesting a new kind of Christianity that simply backs the Democratic Party. Jesus is neither a Democrat nor a Republican — even if, as William Sloane Coffin Jr. once said, his heart leans left. Many faithful Christians did not vote for Hillary Clinton because of their commitment to a consistent pro-life agenda. True faith can never pledge allegiance to anything less than Jesus.
But Jesus-centered faith needs a new name. Christians have retired outdated labels before. During the late 19th century, when scientific rationalism fueled the questioning of Scripture, “fundamentalism” arose as an intelligent defense of Christianity. By the 1930s, however, fundamentalism was seen as anti-intellectual and judgmental. It was then that the term “evangelicalism” was put forward by Christianity Today’s first editor, Carl F. H. Henry, as a new banner under which a broad coalition of Jesus followers could unite.
But beginning with the culture wars of the 1980s, the religious right made a concerted effort to align evangelicalism with the Republican Party. By the mid-’90s, the word had lost its positive connotations with many Americans. They came to see Christians — and evangelicals in particular — as anti-women, anti-gay, anti-environment and anti-immigrant and as the champions of guns and war.
Mr. Trump did not create these contradictions, but his victory has pulled the roof off the building we once called home. It’s time to build a new home.
The amusing thing about their philosophical ineptitude is that they don’t realize they are making an overt case for Christian theocracy, the reality of which would of course horrify them because they have absolutely no intention of abiding by anything genuinely Christian at all; this is nothing more than shallow pandering to the worldly zeitgeist using a few inappropriately applied Bible verses as justification.
Moreover, it demonstrates that at least when it comes to Churchianity, race trumps religion in the hierarchy of identity politics. As usual, the Alt-Right perspective is the only one that makes any sense of this incoherent and degraded evangelicism.
Here is a useful metric for Christians: if the New York Times Carlos Slim’s blog is affording you space for your views and generally striking a positive tone about them, you are absolutely wrong and whatever you are pushing is antithetical to genuine Christianity. No one – no one – is ever going to be inspired to follow Jesus Christ as a result of your pandering to the approval of the global elite. It is literally anti-evangelist evangelicism and its new home is godless churchianism.
A letter from Penzey’s Spices reveals they are fully SJW-converged. Also, that they are amusingly delusional. The amusing thing is that they think anyone was paying any attention to their “stand”, and that they think they’ve proved “Donald Trump simply has no one supporting his views for America”.
What it really means is that no one is paying attention to their idiot politics. Yet.
Dear CEO,
Please give us a moment to share something we hope you will find very valuable.
Our customers come from all walks of life. The kindness of cooks knows no borders or divides. In the aftermath of the election, seeing the intentional damage inflicted on so many outside the white heterosexual male world, we raised our voice. We felt we had to. We did this because we are Penzeys. The Spice business is so intertwined with history that it’s not really possible to have one without the other. It became clear to us that we are now in a moment history will long have its eyes upon. For the sake of our customers, and for the sake of future generations, we felt the time had come to stand on the right side of history.
And while the reasons for why we took a stand might be specific to our unique outlook, what we learned actually applies to all commerce in the United States. What we learned is that President-elect Donald Trump has no real support. Voters, sure, but no constituency. Running a campaign on “that horrible-terrible-woman who should be locked up,” while at the same time working to raise fear of minorities among white voters with limited access to education, clearly achieved its goal. But none of it left Americans with any sense of connection to the candidate they actually voted for.
Willing to take a hit for what is right, we did what we did. In the two weeks since, online sales are up 59.9%, gift box sales up 135%. And we didn’t have a catalog arrive in this window this year, while last year we had 1.1 million! Yes, maybe for the moment we have lost 3% of our customers because of the so-called “right wing firestorm.” And, yes, they send emails of rage, and ALL CAPS, and bad language with the hope of creating the perception that they are bigger than they really are. But what we learned is that, in terms of retail spending, Donald Trump simply has no one supporting his views for America. He has no constituency.
America’s Values, on the other hand, have a really sizable constituency, and that constituency moves quickly to support those that stand up for the values of America. If, as a company, you have values, now is the time to share them. You may well lose a chunk of your AM radio-listening customers, but if you really are honest and sincere, don’t be surprised to see your promotions suddenly, finally, find active engagement with the Millennial generation.
And the time for this really is now. We understand all too well that, with the holidays, December is a tough month to get things done. We understand that a change in direction will not be easy, but you are where you are because you don’t need things to be easy. If you wait until after the wheels come off the track for the incoming administration, this moment will have passed. And while there’s no bad time to do the right thing, to do the right thing at the same time as others in your industry will work so much better than waiting until someone else has shown the way.
In this moment there is finally the real chance to unite our nation in our shared rejection of sexism, homophobia, and racism. This is your chance to stand up for America’s values and make January a tent pole in your company’s history. Opportunities to do the right thing at the time when doing the right thing makes all the difference come once in a lifetime. Make your history proud.
The German government has reacted to the shocking news about a Muslim migrant who raped and killed a 19-year-old woman by warning that it would be watching Facebook posts carefully for instances of Islamophobia.
A teenage Afghan asylum seeker was arrested on Friday for the alleged rape and murder of medical student in Freiburg which took place last month.
The victim’s father is a senior EU official and a vehement supporter of the migrant policy that has seen over a million “refugees” pour into Germany over the last year. The aftermath of the murder was made even more bizarre by the fact that the victim’s parents used her funeral to raise money for charities that are working to bring more “refugees” into Germany. The victim herself was also a “refugee activist”.
As if the story couldn’t get any more disturbing, the German government’s response was to warn German citizens who expressed anger over the incident on Facebook that it would be on the lookout for Islamophobic hate speech.
Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel asserted that the murder should not be used to stoke anti-migrant sentiment.
These monsters are even more delusional and morally vacuous than the National Socialists were. I find it absolutely incredible that the German people continue to tolerate them. Here is hoping that the nationalism rising across Europe will soon sweep them into the deepest dustbin of history.
The Comet Ping Pong gunman story smells very much like a false flag starring a crisis actor meant to distract from deeper investigation into #Pizzagate
A North Carolina man who sent customers and employees scrambling when he fired a gun inside a northwest Washington pizzeria Sunday told police he went there to investigate a fictitious online conspiracy theory involving the restaurant and high-ranking Democrats.
Police received a report of a man armed with a rifle at Comet Ping Pong about 3 p.m. Sunday…. The gunman fired at least one shot from the rifle into the floor, but no one was hurt, police said.
The incident drew heavy police response. Dozens of officers with guns drawn were in the streets, and a helicopter circled above the scene. Police arrested 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, North Carolina, and charged him with assault with a dangerous weapon. Police recovered two guns inside Comet and another inside the suspect’s vehicle, which police towed away from in front of the pizzeria.
After his arrest, Welch told police he was there to investigate a fake news conspiracy theory known as “pizzagate” involving the pizzeria in the 5000 block of Connecticut Avenue NW. Posts to Facebook and Reddit claim Comet was the home base of a child sex abuse ring run by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign chair, John Podesta.
“What happened today demonstrates that promoting false and reckless conspiracy theories does come with consequences,” Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis said.
So, we’re supposed to believe that he went there “investigating” with an assault rifle, and fired one shot into the floor at no one? That sounds totally credible. It actually raises the question: who hired Edgar Maddison Welch to play the part of an armed and dangerous conspiracy theorist? He’s a failed actor listed on IMDB. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Alefantis himself hired the guy to “attack” his own restaurant.
Castalia author Peter Grant, the author of the post-Civil War western Brings the Lightning, has just published a new book in his Maxwell Saga, Stoke the Flames Higher. We don’t publish this military SF series in ebook, although I’m pleased to announce that Castalia will be publishing all five books of the Maxwell Saga in print and audio, as well as all three books of Peter’s Laredo series, the third of which we will be publishing in ebook as well. Peter has posted an excerpt from the new book, and I can confirm that you don’t have to have read the four preceding volumes in order to pick up the story here.
Peter had considerable military experience in South Africa and it shows in his writing; he knows whereof he writes.
Also, Peter has reviewed the input of his readers regarding one of his next projects, and he has decided to proceed with the space detective story, which he apparently intends to bring to Castalia. I’m delighted to hear that, since, as QUANTUM MORTIS fans know, I’m rather partial to space detective stories myself. In the unlikely event he would like to situate it there, instead of in the Maxwell universe, he’ll certainly have my permission. But regardless, we’ll be more than happy to publish it. And yes, this is actually how we work, with our publishing decisions not only being made without our involvement, but sometimes without our knowledge.
In other book news, I experimented with Amazon’s new KDP paperback system yesterday, and a paperback version of On the Question of Free Trade was the result. I chose it because a) we were never going to get around to doing it via our normal system, and, b) it struck me as the sort of book you might want to give someone or carry around to use as a reference in an economics course. I have to confess, I was VERY disappointed to learn that the system is nothing more than an integrated version of the CreateSpace system, as I thought it was going to auto-generate a print layout from the Kindle file. I expect that’s what Amazon ultimately has in mind, but they certainly aren’t anywhere near there yet.
Since some of our authors will no doubt be curious about it, here are the pros and cons I observed.
PROS
It’s pretty easy to use and the Cover Creator’s limitations should ensure that you can’t screw up the spine placement very easily.
It’s fast. It takes about one week to get a published book up on Amazon through our usual system. This took only 12 hours. However, it doesn’t automatically connect to the Kindle edition any more automatically than non-KDP-published books, which is a little odd.
The printing price is pretty good. $2.15 for a small book like that one, and eighty-five cents plus 1.2 cents per page for up to 828 pages.
You can upload your own cover images and use them in a variety of ways in the Content Creator.
It doesn’t cost anything and it’s integrated with KDP. This will take yet another chunk out of the mainstream publishers, and in combination with Kindle Unlimited, will probably cause the Big Five to shrink to four, and possibly three.
Although you can’t just use the Kindle file, you can provide either a formatted PDF or an unformatted Word document for the text.
They give you a free ISBN.
CONS
The 40 percent slice that Amazon takes in addition to the print charge is pretty hefty. This will preclude most independent publishers from using it. We’ll probably use it for some books, like On War and some of our less popular books that aren’t even on the print production list, but it will never be our primary option.
I’ve never heard anything good about the quality of the CreateSpace paperbacks and there is no reason to believe these will be any better. There was a reason we looked for a better alternative from the start. I’ll be very interested to know what people make of now On the Question of Free Tradeturned out because I have absolutely no idea. So, please consider yourself warned in that regard.
Distribution is limited to Amazon. CreateSpace tried to claim otherwise, which wasn’t really true, but Amazon isn’t even bothering to try. Amazon is the big dog, but it’s not the only market out there and an increasing percentage of our book sales are print books sold though other resellers. Although we still tend to think of ourselves as an epublisher, and barely half our books are even available in print editions, 40 percent of our sales are now in print.
The ISBN is only good for use on Amazon.
There is no way to identify the publisher or imprint.
Conclusion: absolutely great for self-publishers, of minor interest to authors with publishers, a potentially useful second option for low-margin independent publishers, and a complete nightmare for high-margin traditional publishers. I expect most successful authors are going to increasingly gravitate to the Peter Grant approach, and making publication decisions based on a series-by-series basis. As for me, I think I will use it to publish all of my collected WND columns in a two-volume paperback set, which will be useful for my own reference, if nothing else.
And finally, in case you missed it over the weekend, Back From the Dead by Rolf Nelson is finally available in paperback and hardcover editions. Don’t think you’ve seen the end of the book shilling either, because we have no less than FOUR (4) big announcements to make before Christmas.
Speaking of which, I would like 10 volunteer reviewers who are familiar with ATOB. If you’re a) interested in reviewing ASOS and b) you’ve already reviewed ATOB on Amazon, please send me an email with ASOS in the subject and a link to your review on Amazon.
