Kindle Unlimited, Kobo Plus, Taylor Swift tickets, and my books

“Why aren’t all your books in Kindle Unlimited? Why aren’t all your books available on Kobo/Google Play/Barnes & Noble/Apple Books? I only read on the (fill in the blank) platform, you know.”

That’s a composite of the emails I get nowadays.

The book market is rapidly changing. These changes are exacerbated by technological shifts and political turmoil.

There are Amazon readers who will only read books enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. There are US readers who seek alternatives to Amazon (Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Kobo.)

There are Canadian readers who are mad at the current US administration, and only buy books from Kobo, a Canada-based company.

Where readers are concerned, there is no such thing as one-size-fits all anymore, if there ever was.

Which brings us to subscription programs like Kindle Unlimited. When you purchase a membership to a subscription plan, there is generally an expectation that everything you want will be included in that program. (I remember, some years ago, purchasing a subscription to Netflix. I was disappointed to discover that most of the movies I wanted to see, especially old movies from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were not available on Netflix.)

I have no basic qualms with enrolling my titles in Kindle Unlimited. But Kindle Unlimited comes with a rigid exclusivity clause. This means that if a title is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it cannot be sold as an ebook on any other platform. Nor can it be offered anywhere on the Internet for free in electronic, text-based form. This effectively means that if a title is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it is limited to Amazon in ebook form. (So much for that “unlimited” part of Kindle Unlimited.) The corollary: if a book is listed on Kobo, B&N, Apple, or Google Play, it can’t be in Kindle Unlimited.

Which brings us to Taylor Swift. The median ticket price for a concert ticket for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was $1,550, per online sources. Almost all of my ebooks are one third of one percent of that (about 0.32%), or about the same as a Caffè Latte at Starbucks.

Nevertheless, almost all of my books are available in either Kobo Plus, Kindle Unlimited, or via your public library through Overdrive.

Amazon is the big dog among book retailers. I’ll always have all my books for sale at Amazon. That said, I can’t promise to always have all my books in Kindle Unlimited.

There’s a downside to this, of course. If you don’t happen to have both a Kindle Unlimited and a Kobo Plus subscription, there is a chance that you might occasionally have to pay for one of my ebooks.

But this is only because we have so many book platforms nowadays. Not all of them play nice with the other ones. This, unfortunately, is beyond my control.

What would Taylor Swift say about this, though? Remember those aforementioned prices for her concert tickets. Taylor Swift wants four figures from you. All I’m asking for is the humble price of a latte at Starbucks.

-ET

Draft2Digital, AI slop, and the evil necessity of publishing fees

Draft2Digital is a company that provides indie authors and small publishers with a single interface for “wide” distribution of ebooks to a host of online retailers. The company has historically taken a small percentage of sales revenues in exchange for its services.

But in recent years, AI slop has invaded and overwhelmed the publishing world. There is now an entire online ecosystem of low-content and junk content churned out by AI writing tools. This “book spam” is clogging up online bookstores and retailers with content that no one is ever going to buy in any meaningful quantity. And with AI tools, the book spammers can do this at scale.

To make matters worse, there is also now an ecosystem of YouTube and TikTok hucksters, teaching others how to “make millions!” with these techniques. This is like the content farm problem of the 00s, but exponentially larger.

Draft2Digital has addressed the problem in a number of ways. Some time ago, the company announced that it will no longer handle nonfiction titles covering topics that are low-hanging fruit for spammers (exercise, cryptocurrency, diet, and various New Age subject matter).

D2D also announced that it will begin charging a $20 set-up fee for new accounts, along with a $12 per year account maintenance fee for any publishers who earn less than $100 per year.

In other words, less than $8.33 per month.

Needless to say, there are people kvetching about this on the Internet. As for me, I am 100% in favor of it.

This is not because I want to see more fees for their own sake. But rather because something needs to be done about the sheer volume of online garbage.

And when I use terms like “online garbage”, I’m not talking about stories and books that don’t suit my taste. Hey, if someone has labored over their billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novel, and they want to publish that, let them go for it. (Although to be perfectly honest, I would prefer that they didn’t. The romance genres have become as trashy as Pornhub in recent years. But I digress.)

I’m talking, rather, about the low-content and extremely low-effort books produced, often with AI tools, for the sole purpose of manipulating bookstore algorithms and exploiting subscription services like Kindle Unlimited. No one benefits from the presence of that—including the authors of billionaire, reverse-harem cowboy hockey player romance novels.

A modest per-book monthly or annual nuisance fee would prune the sheer volume of junk that is accumulating on online bookstores. (Listen to Mal Cooper’s video below.)

I know the nature of the internet. There are people out there who believe that anything on the Internet should always be free, no matter what it is, and no matter what costs are associated with it, simply because it’s on the Internet. That’s an argument that goes back at least 25 years, to the original debates over file-sharing and NAPSTER.

But AI slop threatens to undermine, if not destroy, indie publishing. Online retailers and distributors will never have the manpower to meticulously vet every title. In lieu of that, per-title maintenance fees may be a necessary evil for combating AI slop.

-ET

A story for summer: “The Wasp”

It is not quite summer, if you want to get technical about it. Summer will not officially begin until Sunday, June 21, 2026.

We are still in April. The schools won’t let out for another six weeks. 

But the mercury here in southern Ohio will hit 85 degrees today. That’s close enough for me.

The above is one of my early short stories, “The Wasp”. I wrote it back in 2009, and it was first published in my short story collection, HAY MOON AND OTHER STORIES.

This is very much a summertime story. It’s also based my lifetime loathing of wasps. I can handle spiders, snakes, and other creepy-crawlers (to a point, anyway). I love honeybees.

But I absolutely despise wasps.

As the old German proverbs goes, “God made the bee, but the devil made the wasp.”

-ET

The New York Post fails Economics 101

As Mark Twain reportedly said, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

And then there is sloppy clickbait journalism.

In a recent article, Zachary Kussin of the New York Post presents the following statistics on recent trends in home ownership and home buying:

“Baby boomers — born between 1946 and 1964 — comprised a 42% share of buyers, which remained unchanged from last year. These older Americans benefit from the equity gained from homes they previously sold — and likely lived in for some time as they raised families.

Both the Silent Generation, the eldest Americans born between 1925 and 1945, and Gen Z, who were born between 1999 and 2011, made up the smallest share at 4% each.

Younger millennials — those born between 1990 and 1998 — made up the largest share of first-time buyers over the past year, at 60%. That marks a loss in market share, as that figure is down from the 71% tallied the previous year.

Older millennials, meanwhile — born between 1980 and 1989 — are moving their way up in the world, and that’s manifesting in home purchases…they have the highest median household income of any generation at roughly $133,000, purchased the largest dwellings with a median 2,100 square feet and were less likely to be first-time buyers than younger millennials.”

I won’t argue with the statistics. They may very well be correct.

But somehow, Mr. Kussin managed to spin all that data into the following headline:

“First-time home buying plunges to record low as baby boomers prevent younger Americans from ever owning”

Before you ask: no, I’m not a Boomer. (I was born in 1968.) But “blame the Boomers for everything” has become as tedious (and intellectually lazy) as “all Gen Z are lazy and lack social skills” and “all Gen Xers are cynical loners at heart”.

(Ok–most Gen Xers are cynical loners at heart. But as a Gen Xer, I am entitled to make such an assessment.)

There have always been generational differences in equity in the real estate market. No one has equity when they buy their first home. And there have always been older homeowners with comparatively more equity. It’s called time.

This was the way it was when I purchased my first home in 2000, or when my parents purchased their first house in the early 1970s.

Time and equity are not Baby Boomer conspiracies to deprive younger home buyers. Any journalist who would publish the above headline needs to take a basic course in economics.

-ET

iOS 26 bugs and my old guy instincts

You all know me, or a version of me: I’m one of those stick-in-the-mud older/middle-age people who refuses to upgrade to the latest version of whatever operating system happens to be relevant.

I do this for the reason that most older people are skeptical/cautious: experience. In 2009, Microsoft destroyed my PC with an automated upgrade of the Windows XP operating system. Trust us, Microsoft said. Enable those automated updates. And I, like a fool, believed them.

I’ve since become a Mac user. Apple has yet to outright destroy any of my devices with an upgrade. But they’ve rendered several of them less usable, slower, or buggier.

I’ve therefore adopted a policy over the last five to ten years: one operating system per device. (This isn’t as radical as it sounds; I upgrade my devices at reasonable intervals.) My expectation to the tech companies is: Get it right the first time.

I purchased my iPhone 16 Plus last spring. The factory-installed iOS was 18.

I was planning to keep that. It worked. Then I read numerous online reports from the “techies” about how essential it was to upgrade. Iranian and Russian agents could exploit my current iOS, hack my phone, and steal all my data.

So I upgraded to iOS 26.4.1 last week. I’ve got a fancy new “liquid glass” display, and lots of new emojis that I’ll never use.

But CarPlay no longer works. (CarPlay worked perfectly, every time, on iOS 18.) YouTube videos freeze and error out. These are both documented flaws that have been discussed on Reddit and in other online venues.

Two observations from all this. First, this demonstrates yet again that our over- reliance on digital technology is a weakness as well as a convenience. I know young people who can’t read a map, write in cursive, or maintain their composure during a voice call, all because they’ve been hobbled by reliance on tech. But what happens when the machines glitch?

Secondly, I’m disappointed at Apple’s shoddiness. I’m an indie author, and I feel guilty if I release a $4.99 ebook with a handful of typos in it. But most of us paid close to a grand for our iPhones. Apple is a $350 billion company. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, earns $74 million per year in total compensation. Am I asking too much, when I humbly request that Apple not break CarPlay and destabilize YouTube when they release an update that I am told I must have?

I’m sure—or no, scratch that—I hope that Apple will eventually fix these bugs, along with the other ones I have yet to discover.

In the meantime, I wish I would have listened to my old guy instincts last week, and stayed on iOS 18.

-ET

Selective Service, then and now

In the late summer of 1986, I signed up for Selective Service, aka “the draft”. I had just turned 18, and this was the law.

In those pre-internet days, everything was paper-based. Most of us signed up at the nearest branch of the US Post Office.

I would like to claim that I was rip-roaringly gung-ho to kill commies (the default US enemy of choice in those days), but that would make me seem far more heroic than I actually was.

In those latter days of the Cold War, relations between the USSR and the West were thawing. A youthful reformer named Mikhail Gorbachev was in the Kremlin, and he seemed very eager to reach an accommodation with the West. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Despite Reagan’s earlier remarks about the USSR being an “evil empire”, Reagan wanted peace, too.

Then, as now, the Middle East flared up from time to time. In April 1986, Reagan bombed Libya in retaliation for that country’s part in the bombing of a West German disco, in which two US service personnel were killed. This action went down in history as Operation El Dorado Canyon.

But no one expected a protracted conflict in the Middle East, some five years before the 1990-1 Persian Gulf War.

The Vietnam War, moreover, was still in recent memory (though I could not remember it). Anyone over the age of 35 could recall how divisive that war (and its accompanying draft) had been.

In August 1986, my odds of being drafted were about the same as my odds of going on a date with Heather Locklear.

That was then, and this is now. The Trump administration has just announced plans to automatically register 18 to 25 year old men for the draft, starting in December.

On one hand, this represents no substantial change of the law. To the best of my knowledge, today’s 18-year-old men are subject to the same Selective Service obligation that I complied with back in 1986.

What about the war in Iran? Disastrous and ill-advised as that conflict is turning out to be, I don’t foresee a long commitment there. This is not the USA of 1964 or 1990. There is no appetite for an extended ground conflict in the Middle East. Even President Trump seems to realize that he’s made a major blunder. At some point, we will either negotiate a settlement, or declare victory and go home.

The new policy is, rather, typical of the automating craze of the twenty-first century, one that requires us to opt out, while Big Brother (in either corporate or governmental form) constantly opts us in.

From an administrative standpoint, if there is going to be a Selective Service system at all, this new policy probably makes sense. We aren’t in 1986 anymore, and that old system was burdensome and inefficient.

I noted this even then. The government already had my name, age, address, and Social Security number. Why did they need me to proactively sign up for Selective Service, when it wasn’t optional, anyway?

-ET

Buc-ee’s and the need for belonging

This past week the first Buc-ee’s opened here in Ohio. The event attracted Buc-ee’s fans from throughout the Midwest. Some reportedly camped out in front of the store. They saw sleeping on the pavement as a small price to pay, if it meant being among the first customers through the doors on the morning of the grand opening.

This is a gas station we’re talking about.

I can just imagine the reaction of some of the readers in Massachusetts or California. “Well, what do you expect of the unwashed masses in Ohio, that flyover state where most people vote Republican?”

But foolish mass events are not limited to Ohio or the Midwest. Consider the time, money, and emotional energy that people invest in Taylor Swift and spectator sports. Remember the Pokémon GO fever of a few years ago?

It would be easy—and facile—to dismiss all such followers of mass enthusiasms as dimwits or sheep. But there is something far more complex going on here. No one really cares that much about a gas station, even if every Buc-ee’s does have a vast, deluxe restroom.

And no, they aren’t all idiots.

I grew up during the 1970s and 1980s. I didn’t grow up in a small town, but I grew up in a close-knit suburban environment. I saw both parents every day, and my grandparents every week. I attended the same schools that my mother attended. Many of my classmates’ parents had been my mother’s classmates.

My growing-up environment felt almost like one big extended family. This doesn’t mean that everyone was always kind and supportive (though many people were). But there was a sense of: this is your home, your microcosm within the much larger, much more random and unknowable world.

I don’t feel that way about this twenty-first-century environment, and I know that many others share this sense of dislocation, or isolation. The situation is made even worse by the uncertainty of global events, and the bad behavior of our national leadership in recent years.

And yes, if you’re married (or otherwise romantically partnered) you might smugly say: “Well, I have my significant other.”

Perhaps you do…for now. Romantic partners are notorious for dying, moving on, and changing the locks on you. Most people, even if they’re romantically partnered, find that they need more than that.

I’m talking about a broader social support system. This is what used to be provided by communities of church, school, extended family, neighbors, and old friends. This was once the reality for many Americans—not in some distant, mythical past, but within my lifetime. I know, because I experienced it.

But we no longer attend church, we homeschool our kids, and most of our relatives live in another state. Old friendships and acquaintances are limited to Facebook.

It is therefore not entirely surprising that people seek group affiliation via Taylor Swift or Kansas City Chiefs fandom.

Or, perhaps, enthusiasm for the grand opening of the next Buc-ee’s.

So yes, I understand, on one level. But I can’t help reminding you: at the end of the day, it’s just a gas station.

-ET

Bryon Noem and a Japanese proverb

Whatever one’s political orientation, it seems impossible to ignore the Bryon Noem sex scandal. Here is a 56-year-old, married father of three, who—by all indications—has a cross-dressing fetish that he feels compelled to share with an online sex worker.

And speaking of Bryon Noem’s wife…Whatever you think of Kristi Noem’s politics, or her performance as DHS Secretary, she is very easy on the eyes, as women in their middle fifties go. Her detractors call her “ICE Barbie” partly because they don’t like her, but also because they grudgingly recognize that she’s hot.

And yet, we know two things about her husband: his online “bimbofication” fetish, and his [apparent] willingness to share his wife with Corey Lewandowski.

What gives?

As is so often the case, the Japanese have a term for this. Or rather, a proverb:

蓼食う虫も好き好き

Tade kuu mushi mo sukizuki

“Some bugs prefer nettles.”

A rough English equivalent of this proverb would be: “There is no accounting for taste.”

I’ve read the descriptions of Bryon Noem’s proclivities. There is nothing about any of that that strikes me as the least bit stimulating. (I have never understood why any man would be drawn to any form of cross-dressing.)

And yet—I know for a fact that some of the things that float my boat are boring, distasteful, and even laughable to others.

This applies not only in regard to sex—but other areas as well. To cite one simple and innocuous example: I would much rather read a book in my living room than attend a raucous public crowd event like a concert or a professional sports game.

But that’s me, and it’s highly likely that I’m wired up differently than you are. One person’s nettles are another’s delight.

-ET

Tigers, Devils, and Fools: A Guide to Japanese Proverbs, Second Edition

Available at :

Social interactions in the 1980s were a different game completely

In the 1980s, there was no social media and no dating apps. We didn’t even have email.

If you wanted to meet someone new, there was usually only one way to go about it.

You had to approach them in person, and strike up a conversation.

Below is a scene from NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988. In the scene below, the main character must jump through numerous hoops to meet an attractive young woman:

NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988

CHAPTER 43

Since my hand had previously been stamped, I had little trouble gaining reentry to the Casablanca Club. I walked by the doorman as if I owned the place, flashing him a glimpse of my left hand. He gave me no trouble this time.

Once inside, I got another break: there was no sign of Lance Corporal Evans or his fellow marines.

But where was Sergeant George Tuttle, fearless defender of the law in Cincinnati “for more than thirty  years?”

Maybe I would get lucky there. Maybe the cop had called it a night, or (more likely) been drawn away from the Casablanca Club by other police business.

I only had to walk around for a few minutes before I spotted her: the young woman from the Tangeman University Center. The pretty blonde who had caught my attention that day.

She was standing by herself at the edge of the nearest dance floor. Where were the other young women she had entered with, the ones I had assumed to be her friends? Was she meeting a guy here?

I didn’t know. And in that moment, I didn’t care. It was full speed ahead.

“Hi,” I said, when I got within speaking distance.

She turned toward me. I thought I detected a flash of recognition.

“You go to the University of Cincinnati, don’t you?” I asked.

Strictly speaking, this was a lame question with an obvious answer. The Casablanca Club was located a few blocks from the university, and we were both of university age. Probably half of the patrons here tonight were university students.

But few lines uttered by young men to young women in bars and nightclubs are brilliant. This wasn’t Toastmasters. Nor was I making an argument before Dr. Blevins. I was willing to improvise.

She smiled, but seemed at a loss for words.

“I think we may have spoken briefly in the Tangeman Center. That day you were looking at all the Armed Forces displays.

“More like I spoke briefly,” she said. “The proverbial cat seemed to have gotten your tongue.”

“There are no cats on my tongue now.”

This had to have been the most awkward line a man ever uttered to a woman in a bar. But it did the trick. She laughed.

“I’m Kim,” she said.

“I’m Paul.”

We talked for a few minutes more. I learned that she was a marketing major…common enough at the University of Cincinnati.

This was actually working, I suddenly realized. There was none of the awkwardness and fumbling that I’d felt when trying to talk to Tara and Courtney.

The difference, of course, was that the attraction with Kim was mutual, rather than one-sided. I therefore didn’t have to talk her into anything. All I had to do was go with the flow, be moderately assertive, and not say anything stupid.

But I was also conscious of Scott, who would right now be waiting for me in my car. I was also aware that in my very presence here, I was defying police orders, and breaking a promise I had made to a sergeant in the Cincinnati Police Department.

“I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Kim, but—”

“But now you have to go.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Call it intuition. Or maybe that you seem an awful lot like someone in a hurry.”

“I am in a hurry,” I confessed. “My friend is waiting for me at my car. Before I go, though: would you give me your phone number? I’d like to call you sometime.”

She smiled. “That’s usually what people have in mind when they ask for someone’s phone number. They want to call them sometime.”

A few minutes later, I was walking toward the main entrance/exit of The Casablanca Club with Kim’s phone number in my pocket.

She had written it on one of the club’s cocktail napkins, along with her last name. She was Kim Jones.

I was feeling on top of the world, more or less. Wait until Scott heard about this, I thought triumphantly.

I was outside in the parking lot of the Casablanca Club, almost home free, when everything unraveled.

“I thought you’d learned your lesson,” an older male voice declared. “But I guess I was wrong about that, wasn’t I?”

NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988 is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play and Apple Books.

Civil War veterans in the 20th century, and other temporal oddities

Union and Confederate veterans shake hands at the Gettysburg reunion of 1913.

The last verified combat veteran of the American Revolutionary War was John Gray. He died in Noble County, Ohio, at the age of 104. Gray was present at the Siege of Yorktown, among other battles.

So here was a man who lived long enough to a.) fight in the American Revolution (1775-1783) and b.) see the conclusion of the American Civil War (1861-1865).

Speaking of the Civil War: many Civil War veterans, both Union and Confederate, lived well into the first half of the twentieth century. I have seen newspaper clippings from the Cincinnati Enquirer, showing such men in Memorial Day parades as late as the early 1940s.

My paternal grandfather (born in 1909) once told me that he interacted with many Civil War veterans during his Indiana boyhood, though they were all very old men by this time.

The last verified veteran of the American Civil War, Albert Henry Woolson, died in Duluth, Minnesota in 1956. Woolson was 106 years old.

Wow. Nineteen fifty-six. That is not so long ago, in historical terms. My parents were both ten years old in 1956. I would be born a mere 12 years later. So fifteen years before I was born, the American Civil War was still technically part of “living memory”.

The last verified African American slave, Peter Mills, died in 1972 at the age of 110. (There were a few other claimants who died around the same time, but Mills was the oldest one whose story was verifiable.) That was well within my lifetime. (I was four.)

Facts like this fascinate me, because I am both a.) a history aficionado, and b.) a nostalgic. (I had a strong sense of nostalgia by the time I entered my teens.)

I can claim no meetings with Civil War veterans or former slaves, but I do have one connection to the nineteenth century. My great grandfather, who was born in 1895, lived until 1987, the year I turned nineteen. I can now claim to know, or have known, individuals born in three consecutive centuries.

-ET

1932: supernatural zombie horror in rural Ohio

My maternal grandfather, born in 1921, grew up in rural Adams County, Ohio. He told me so much about that time and place, that I sometimes feel as if I lived it all myself.

“Hay Moon” is a short story set in rural Ohio in the summer of 1932. My grandfather never told me a story like this, filled with supernatural forces and the undead. But his real-life accounts of his childhood years helped me add a realistic flavor to the tale, if I say so myself.

You can listen to the story here, or on my YouTube channel (where you’ll find lots of additional audio content).

You can purchase this story as part of my Hay Moon and Other Stories collection. If you like my approach to historical horror, consider The Rockland Horror historical horror series, which is also available in a five-volume boxset on Kindle.

-ET

“Cherry Bomb”: vintage Mellencamp with vintage footage

I really miss the music culture of the 1980s, especially MTV.

And John Mellencamp was one of my favorite solo artists. His commercial breakout album, American Fool, came out in 1982, just as I was entering high school.

Mellencamp was atypical in an era of polished arena rock and heavy synthesizers. Both his songs and his persona had a distinctly midwestern American vibe.

The singer hailed from Seymour, Indiana, less than two hours from my home in Cincinnati, Ohio. My dad grew up in the same general area of the Hoosier State. Perhaps for this reason, I found Mellencamp’s music relatable. (On the other hand, I could never relate to the worlds of David Bowie or Ratt.)

The attached video is for the single “Cherry Bomb”. It was released in 1987, and included on the album The Lonesome Jubilee. The music video features plenty of vintage footage from the 1960s and early 1970s. I don’t know if these video clips are from Indiana, but they sure look like Indiana, back in those days.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the interracial couple featured in the video. John Mellencamp has never been shy about his (progressive) politics; and we can be sure that this was a deliberate choice.

I remember 1987 like it was yesterday. (I was nineteen.) In 1987, a young interracial couple in a music video was not as shocking as it would have been twenty years earlier, and not as ho-hum as it would have been twenty years later. And certainly not the cliché that it would be now, almost 40 years after the music video for “Cherry Bomb” was made.

In 1987, this was something that people would notice, without being either outraged or inspired by it. Mellencamp was not being “brave” or ground-breaking by presenting this in 1987. But he was making a statement.

-ET

1980s college fiction: new cover reveal

NO SURE THING has a new cover. The setting is a modified image of the University of Cincinnati campus, which I attended in the late 1980s.

Who should read NO SURE THING? You’ll enjoy this book if you fondly remember teen and young adult movies of the 80s. The book is based on a number of ideas I’ve been kicking around for years, but it really crystalized when I rewatched Risky Business, the 1983 film that made Tom Cruise a household name.

NO SURE THING is available at Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.

-ET

Pete Hegseth and Catholics

I am no one’s idea of a devout Roman Catholic. Still, I was raised in that tradition and respect its values (even if I fall short of them).

Which brings us to “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth. Our national military leader is a follower of radical pastor Doug Wilson, an evangelical Christian nationalist. Wilson wants to impose a uniquely evangelical version of Christianity on these United States.

In advance of Good Friday, Hegseth’s Pentagon sent out the following memo:

“Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel.”

This is the problem with a national religion. It is not that the government should be aggressively atheist, but that the government should be denominationally neutral. For if we are going to impose God on the populace from Washington D.C., the next question becomes “whose version of God?”

This is why, as Anwar Sadat asserted (shortly before he was murdered by Islamic extremists): “no religion in politics, and no politics in religion.”

-ET

Trad-pubbed books in Kindle Unlimited, and my elitist confessions

Michael Kozlowski is the ultimate self-loathing elitist. He is a self-publishing journalist who never misses an opportunity to trash self-publishing fiction writers.

Kozlowski [self-publishes] his own analyses of the electronic book world on his website, Good e-Reader. He began a recent post, “Here are all the new books hitting Kindle Unlimited for March 2026” with a familiar dig at indie authors.

“Amazon Kindle Unlimited used to be the laughingstock of the e-book world, with the subscription service heavily populated by indie author slime.”

Indie author slime! Not just dreck or trash…but slime! Bodily excretions, no less.

Source: Good e-Reader

But there is a bright spot in all of this. According to Kozlowski, Kindle Unlimited “has really grown in the past couple of years, and it is not [sic] possible to get tons of New York Times bestselling authors from major publishers.” He then goes on to list a number of trad-pubbed titles that are available in the program.

I won’t be a jerk about this, and point out that Kozlowski typed “not” when he clearly meant “now”. Perhaps he could have avoided this mistake, if only a “major publisher” had proofread his work (?)

But Kozlowksi has a point. There have long been problems in Kindle Unlimited (KU).

When the program was launched back in 2014, it promised to be a “Netflix of books”. Readers would have unlimited access to a wide variety of titles. Publishers and authors, meanwhile, would earn revenue from borrows.

But not all went according to plan. The major publishers that Michael Kozlowski gushes over rejected KU. This was largely because Amazon made ebook exclusivity a requirement of the program.

Kindle Unlimited also became a target for scammers. This caused Amazon to reconfigure the way authors and publishers were compensated several times. At present, Amazon is coping with AI slop scammers.

And to make matters worse, Kindle Unlimited grew disproportionately stuffed with bizarre romance genres. (“Monster romance” seems to be a big one right now.) Many of these books are little more than porn in literary guise. (Hmm…maybe Michael Kozlowski has a point about “slime” after all.)

Amazon seems to have recognized the problem. Lest Kindle Unlimited become a ghetto for romance-porn, the company has cut deals with some major publishers to ensure that “mainstream”, household-name authors also have a presence in KU.

I did a quick perusal on Amazon. At present, you can find titles by Michael Connelly, Clive Cussler, and Sandra Brown in KU. It doesn’t get any more mainstream than that.

For independent publishers like myself, this is a mixed bag.

On one hand, Amazon has clearly exempted traditional publishers from the exclusivity clause of Kindle Unlimited. All the trad-pubbed books presently in KU can also be found on Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, and B&N.

Not fair! the egalitarian in me protests. Unequal treatment!

On the other hand, I appreciate what Amazon is doing.

I know that Clive Cussler’s publisher swings a bigger club in the publishing world than I do, or likely ever will. Amazon has therefore given Cussler’s publisher a sweeter deal for the titles it enrolls in Kindle Unlimited. Non-exclusivity is one verifiable aspect of this. A higher compensation rate is likely another.

This may prevent Kindle Unlimited from becoming a ghetto for monster romance and billionaire reverse harem sex stories. If KU genuinely becomes more “mainstream”, I could certainly benefit from that. We shall see.

For now, I’m hedging my bets. I am keeping some of my catalog in Kindle Unlimited. I’m also pulling some titles out, so that they can also be sold on Kobo, Google Play, B&N, and Apple Books.

This is partly because I don’t want to rely on a single company for all of my income. That was inevitable back when I was a corporate cubicle serf. It’s a bad idea now that I work for myself.

I also recognize that monopolies are eventually bad for everyone—except the owners of the monopoly. (I majored in economics.)

But there’s another reason, as well. I don’t want all of my books in the same program presently known for reverse harem, and other kinds of weird romance stories. I guess I’m a bit of an elitist, too.

-ET