I’m generally happy with ProWritingAid. The software program catches many little typos while you’re writing and/or going through an initial edit.
ProWritingAid, however, is not free from ideological overreach.
For example, I recently had a passage in which I referred to the “opposite sex” in a routine manner. PWA immediately sent up a flag saying that this language could be hurtful to some, and that I should use more inclusive language.
I rejected the suggestion. Now, I’m not going to be a total curmudgeon about this one. I understand how a suggestion like that could be relevant while drafting certain legal documents. But for common, everyday usage, “opposite sex” is just fine.
Then there is the issue of the “master bedroom”. ProWritingAid also scolded me on this one, informing me that the term “master bedroom” is “associated with slave ownership relationships”.
What? Yes, really.
The software once again advised me to use a “more inclusive term”. ProWritingAid’s suggestions included such awkward concoctions as “control bedroom” and “primary bedroom”.
I suppose that “primary bedroom” makes sense; but I have never heard anyone refer to the main bedroom of a house as the “control bedroom”.
Source: ProWritingAid
“Master bedroom” is the common term for the main bedroom in a 21st-century suburban home. Why conflate a meaning that was never intended to be there, that no one even vaguely thought about before you brought it up?
Is any use of the word “master” now to be deemed a winking reference to slavery and oppression? What about “master file”? If I say that I want to “master a new skill”, am I really implying (wink, wink!) that I want to set up a slave-based plantation here in 21st-century Ohio (where such plantations never existed anyway?)
I don’t go out of my way to offend anyone. But this is how political correctness became such a joke. “Master bedroom” is not a racial epithet. ProWritingAid should not treat it as such.
A married woman in the suburbs develops a sudden and inexplicable interest in graveyard photography. Her husband wonders what’s going on with her.
But what secrets is her husband hiding?
Such is the setup of Involuntary Deeds, my new supernatural/psychological horror novella. The novella is set in Clermont County, Ohio, about twenty miles east of Cincinnati.
Involuntary Deeds is presently available on Amazon. It will be rolled out to the other major retailers (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Apple Books) in the coming weeks.
Amazon description:
Some crimes don’t stay buried.
Pam Vance never cared about cemeteries—until the day she couldn’t stay away from them.
What begins as a strange new hobby quickly turns into something else. An obsession. A need to photograph graves she’s never seen before… places she feels drawn to.
Her husband, Robert, knows something is wrong.
Then the warnings begin.
The ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier appears to Robert with a message he can’t ignore: stay away.
But Pam won’t stop.
Because one grave is calling to her—that of a sixteen-year-old girl who died in 1991. A death long forgotten.
But not by Robert.
As the past closes in, a truth buried for decades begins to surface—pulling the living and the dead toward a confrontation that can no longer be avoided.
‘Involuntary Deeds’ is a novella for fans of classic ghost stories in the tradition of Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and E.F. Benson.
I was a little too old to be part of the American Pie target audience in 1999. (I turned 31 that year.) I therefore never developed an awareness of Shannon Elizabeth, let alone an interest in her.
I am, however, not above finding certain female celebrities attractive. To pick an example that comes to mind: I wouldn’t throw Sydney Sweeney out of my bedroom for eating crackers, as they say.
But if Sydney Sweeney ever launches an OnlyFans, my money won’t be going into the till. I have never been tempted to simp online for anyone. I occasionally come across less famous YouTubers who make me think, “Yeah, she’s cute.” But that’s as far as it goes. What, after all, is the point?
As some of you may know, the 52-year-old Shannon Elizabeth recently divorced her husband and started an OnlyFans account. She is not using the online platform to give investment advice, perform unicycle tricks, or sing the full oeuvre of the Beatles a cappella. Shannon isn’t providing any nude content, either, though many OnlyFans creators do.
According to the front page of her OnlyFans account, the former actress’s offerings consist of the following bland fare:
• “behind-the-scenes moments
• exclusive photos & videos
• candid glimpses of my life
• chatting with me directly”
Source: Shannon Elizabeth, OnlyFans
The key draw to all of this seems to be a distant, parasocial connection to Ms. Elizabeth. And for this, waves of thirsty simps have shelled out more than a million dollars during her first week on OnlyFans.
Perhaps I am simply behind the times. I’m not here to advocate for the world’s oldest profession or its customers, but a part of me can understand the rationale of a man paying for actual sex. The pseudo-sex of OnlyFans, though, would have bored me to tears when I was thirteen. As Clara Peller used to say in those 1980s Wendy’s commercials: “Where’s the beef?”
Speaking of beef: I have no beef with the women of OnlyFans, including Ms. Elizabeth. They are only taking money from willing marks.
The men are another matter, and I have a message for each and every one of them. To paraphrase Darth Vader in the original (1977) Star Wars: “I find your lack of testosterone disturbing.”
Man up, grow a pair, and quit spending money on OnlyFans. You make all men look like wimps and dupes by association.
Way back in 1973, a French writer named Jean Raspail penned a dystopian novel called Le Camp des Saints, or The Camp of the Saints in English.
The Camp of the Saints presented an overwhelmingly negative view of mass immigration. The thesis of the novel was that Western societies are being destroyed from without by mass immigration, and from within by those who are sympathetic toward the waves of immigrants from the developing world.
Whether you agree with that argument or not, it is not exactly an original idea. Perhaps it was in 1973. It is certainly not an original idea in 2026.
Jean Raspail’s more than 50-year-old novel had long ago passed into obscurity, at least within the English-speaking world. Then a group of busybodies on Reddit learned of the book’s existence, and decided that here, alas, was an opportunity to engage in some performative outrage.
Members of the subreddit r/bannedbooks worked themselves into a lather, then pooled their efforts to get the book temporarily removed from the virtual shelves at Amazon. (Demonstrating the lack of self-awareness that is typical of such folks, they failed to see the ironic connection between the name of their subreddit, and the fact that they were actively seeking a book ban. But I digress.)
The Amazon book removal was quickly overturned, of course. But the controversy generated interest in a book that no one would have heard of otherwise. As a result, The Camp of the Saints skyrocketed to best-seller status at Amazon, finally peaking at #6.
If we didn’t know better, we might suggest that this was a false-flag publicity stunt, perpetrated by the original publishers of The Camp of the Saints. But we do know better, because we’ve seen this before.
The 2010s were the high point of the “social justice book mob”. This is how it worked in those days: A member of the so-called “book community”, who was active on social media, would find a passage, theme, or character in a novel that could be broadly interpreted as “racist”.
They would then make some posts on social media decrying the evils of the book, and stir up an online mob. The online mob would do the rest.
Sometimes these mobs did real damage. Amélie Wen Zhao was so traumatized by the outcry against Blood Heir that she briefly delayed the publication of the book.
But patience with the social justice book mobs eventually ran thin for two reasons. The first was that, like most mobs, they overplayed their hand. Chinese American author Amélie Wen Zhao was no one’s idea of a white supremacist. The claims against her and her book were so ridiculous that almost no one could take them seriously.
Secondly, there was the “unintentional false flag” effect. Cancel mobs have repeatedly proven themselves effective at promoting the books, films, and artists that are their targets. The recent success of The Camp of the Saints is the most recent case in point.
I’m in my 50s. I haven’t read much YA fiction for many, many years. The last time I was in that market, Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were cutting edge. I heard about The Black Witch and Blood Heir, though—because the online morality patrol was loudly denouncing these books in public.
This works both ways, of course. Almost thirty years ago, I heard about Heather Has Two Mommies because conservatives were kvetching about a children’s book that portrayed LGBTQ families and parents in an approving manner.
None of the above is meant to imply that we shouldn’t debate controversial social issues. We should, however, not get too worked up about the impact of “message art”. This is true for you, too, regardless of where you stand on the political continuum.
Novels and films with political messages are most impactful early on, when no one has yet named the issue in public, often out of public reticence about a topic. Heather Has Two Mommies might have been able to make that claim when it was first published in 1989. Today, however, a book or film describing LGBTQ individuals in hagiographic terms is so commonplace that we merely shrug and move on. Likewise, it has been virtually impossible to write an original novel or screenplay about race in America for at least 30 years. The topic has literally been done to death.
Beyond the earliest stages, message films and novels usually devolve into repetitions of well-worn talking points. In this way, most message art is derivative, just like most political speech.
Outrage over such materials now also follows a predictable pattern, as the recent bestseller status of The Camp of the Saints demonstrates. Here is the takeaway: if you don’t like what a particular book or movie is saying (or seems to be saying), your best course of action is to ignore it. In this era of online cancel mobs and counter-cancel mobs, all your efforts to censor a work of art will be in vain. You will only contribute to its popularity, which may have been a long shot otherwise.
In the video below, Kevin Tumlinson discusses his new direct sales strategy.
Just a few years ago, direct sales was regarded as a highly experimental, almost whimsical course. As recently as 2020 or so, conventional wisdom held that there was only one bookstore an indie author really needed.
Times have changed. All of the major booksellers (as well as distributor Draft2Digital) are taking measures to combat AI slop. Legitimate authors sometimes get caught up in these sweeps. Throughout 2026, there have been reports of arbitrary KDP account closures.
The point here is not to declare that any one retailer has nefarious intentions. Rather, the environment has changed. Building an author business on one platform is no longer the safe and sensible strategy that it seemed only a few years ago.
Increasingly, authors will need to rely on distributed ecosystems, which will embody various elements of discovery, marketing, and distribution.
The exact combination will vary for each author. For example, I regularly write here on my blog, so I have no desire to duplicate what I do here on Substack.Other writers don’t want to do any kind of editorializing about anything, since giving one’s opinion about anything of substance invites backlash and social media mobs. Some writers will want to keep all their opinions to themselves. To each his own.
Likewise, Kevin’s storefront, while impressive, is more of a project than I would want to take on at this time. But I’m definitely expanding my presence beyond a single retailer and Kindle Unlimited. Twenty twenty-six is not 2016, or even 2021. We should not pretend otherwise.
One of you asked me the other day which online writers’ groups I recommend. Many of these groups exist on Facebook.
Ten years ago I would have been able to heartily recommend several of them.
Today, there are none that are very useful to me. Here’s the problem.
Over the last five years, the online writers’ groups have become inundated with writers of “spicy” (i.e., sexually explicit) romance and outright erotica (i.e., even more sexually explicit material).
Now let me be clear here. I am no prude. Oh…far, far from it. I am quite sure that some of my off-hours activities would shock and/or offend the prudish among you.
But there is a limit to how much I enjoy talking about sex, writing about sex, and creating stories around it. My tolerance for that sort of thing is fairly limited.
I don’t like sex stories for the same reason I don’t like pornographic videos: watching other people have sex is a bit like watching other people eat.
Similarly, talking about sex is like talking about eating. I eat lunch every day. But I don’t wish to spend more time discussing my lunch than I spend actually eating it. I have a similar approach to matters of the bedroom. Some of these writers and their readers need to spend less time with their noses in books, and more time with living, breathing people. (Nothing cures a chronic preoccupation with sex like a little of the real thing.)
From a business perspective, the marketing of romance/erotica has much more to do with the marketing of OnlyFans or other pornographic material than it does with traditional book marketing. A person who picks up a Michael Connelly novel is not responding to the same motivations as a person who watches pornographic videos, or who reads pornographic stories.
No ill will for all the “spicy” romance and erotica writers out there, mind you. But they’ve made the online writing space more or less useless for everyone else, with their sheer numbers.
In the spring of 1986, many Americans were following events in the Soviet Union. The new man in the Kremlin was Mikhail Gorbachev, a young (by Soviet standards) leader who was eager to reform the Soviet system. Gorbachev also sought better relations with the West.
I was a senior in high school in 1986. I was interested in the Soviet Union, too. I was old enough to remember the final Cold War tensions of the late 1970s and early 1980s: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the downing of KAL 007. But now, a new world seemed to be in the making.
Then, on April 26, there was a major nuclear accident at Chernobyl, in an area of the Soviet Union then commonly known as “the Ukraine”.
The Kremlin tried to cover it up (of course). The Kremlin had covered up similar disasters in the past (including one at a biological weapons facility in a remote part of the USSR). But this was too big to conceal.
Chernobyl would be in the news for months—years—afterward. The problem still hasn’t gone away completely.
In retrospect, the Chernobyl disaster (which sprung from Soviet ineptitude) was the first sign that Western optimism about the USSR in the mid-1980s was misplaced.
Forty years have passed since then. The former Soviet lands are still the source of mostly bad news. Case-in-point: the war between Russia and Ukraine, now in its fifth year.
We may soon have a linguistic version of President Trump’s 2025 “Gulf of America” stunt. There is a proposal within MAGA circles to rename our national language, American English, to “American”. This would be done in commemoration of America’s 250th birthday this summer.
The proposal is gaining traction on venues like Fox & Friends. The president may or may not be too busy (with minor complications like the Iran war) to give this idea full consideration before July.
This is a dumb idea, and characteristic of the anti-intellectualism rampant in populist circles. If carried to its logical implications, this would mean that any language spoken in more than one country would have to be renamed for political/nationalistic purposes.
No more Spanish in Mexico, Chile, and Guatemala. Henceforth, the Spanish spoken in these nations would be called “Mexican”, “Chilean”, and “Guatemalan”. No more German in Austria. No more Portuguese in Brazil.
American English descended from British English. Everyone seems to agree about that. And yes: American English is distinctive, as are the versions of English spoken in Australia and Canada.
At what point should a language be called something different, though? That’s easy: when it becomes mutually unintelligible with its source language.
English, German, and Dutch all share common roots. There is some crossover vocabulary. But an English speaker doesn’t automatically understand German or Dutch. These are different languages.
All of us can understand the English spoken in the UK, Canada, or Australia. Which is why they’re all the same language.
I occasionally check various online forums that are part of what is known as the “online writing community”. These mostly exist on social media platforms like Reddit and Facebook. I do this as little as possible.
Over the past few years, I have noticed a great deal of outrage in these venues over the use of artificial intelligence, more commonly known as “AI”.
By now, anyone with a dog in this fight is aware of the arguments. On one side there is the case for the inevitability of technological advancements, and putting those advancements to use in the marketplace. On the other side, there is the argument against replacing living, breathing human beings with soulless software. There is also the fact that those living, breathing human beings require paychecks to purchase food, rent, and health insurance.
Writers are kind of in the middle of all this. There are a handful of online hacks teaching both weary and aspiring writers how to generate something approximating a novel with software prompts. This is an entirely separate issue and not one that I will cover in depth here.
But writing a novel with software is essentially writers trying to replace themselves with AI. Most writers already have fixed views on this one. Those who actually enjoy writing laugh at the very idea. Others are burned out or frustrated, and would love nothing more than to hand off their creative work to a software package.
That’s a fool’s trap; because the results of AI writing are about what you would expect. (Note: The people teaching these AI writing shortcuts don’t like the results, either. They are making money by teaching their “secrets” to others, not by selling the AI novels they’re creating. But I digress.)
No, where the real conflict—and often the moral dilemma—arises for writers is in the realm of adjacent services. Some of these adjacent services are not cheap, after all.
Four hundred dollars for a book cover from a freelance artist? Three to four grand for an audiobook from a narrator? This is real money, even from the perspective of people who have real businesses. Why not just rely on AI for these services and save all that cash?
This is the point where the debate predictably gets nasty, often with freelance illustrators and voice actors jumping into the fray. I’m not going to weigh the different arguments here, nor condemn anyone for taking a strong, emotionally charged position. People’s livelihoods and bottom lines are on the line on both sides of these issues.
I have noticed something new, though—and more than a little ironic. One of the low-cost AI services to hit the market recently is AI translation. It used to cost thousands of dollars to get a translation of a manuscript from English into Spanish, French, or German, let alone into Japanese or Mandarin. Software now takes care of this at minimal cost…after a fashion. Amazon, in fact, has recently rolled out a beta version of AI translation for writers.
In online writing forums, I have seen a few debates about the accuracy of AI literary translations. Some writers wonder aloud (with good reason) if a whiz-bang AI translation program is trustworthy for a 90K-word book. (Hint: it almost certainly isn’t.) But I have seen none of the usual hand-wringing about replacing human translators with software. Not a peep. The outrage over AI, it turns out, is highly selective. What about the “art” of literary translation? What about the literary translators’ paychecks?
I’ve seen this cycle repeat many times over the years. An issue provokes outrage among a certain group of people…until it doesn’t. In the early 1980s, folks on the progressive left used to inveigh against nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. But for a variety of reasons, nuclear weapons are no longer the fashionable concern that they once were. Folks with a progressive mindset now see the plastic bags at their local grocery store as a far more pressing issue than warheads that could wipe out the entire world in a few hours.
I used to work as a translator myself (Japanese/English). I did corporate work, not literary work. For a three-year stretch during the 1990s, I made a very comfortable income doing nothing else. I was the in-house interpreter/translator at a Japanese automotive components manufacturer in Ohio.
I haven’t worked as a translator for well over 20 years. But if I did, I would no doubt have some strong feelings about the tendency toward replacing human translators with machines.
Another irony: I saw that shift coming in translation even in the 1990s. Sometime around 1995, I began reading articles about Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu experimenting with machine translation. End-to-end, seamless machine translation has long been a goal in the corporate sector.
Therefore, I’m not surprised to see software-based translations in the age of AI. I am, though, somewhat surprised that literary translators aren’t more vocal about being replaced. They are certainly a reticent bunch…at least when compared to the hyper-vocal illustrators and voice actors.
The graphic below, along with the following blurb, appeared in my Facebook feed this morning:
“Gen Z men feel hated by Gen Z women so they are seeking less ‘toxic’ relationships’
Kara Kennedy argues that frustration in modern dating is pushing some Gen Z men towards older partners, in search of what they see as more stable relationships”
Source: The Graduate, The Independent, Facebook
The author of the article is one Kara Kennedy, of The Independent, a news site that is often grumpy in the typical British fashion.
The above HuffPost article is 17 years old; but it could have been published yesterday.
There are a number of reasons behind this recurring, predictable media trend. The first is that women over the age of 35 tend to dominate the senior ranks of journalism. In other words, there is a great deal of wishful thinking involved here.
But there is also a certain degree of reality behind it. After all, this is a “meme” that goes all the way back to Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and The Graduate in 1967 (the year before I was born).
Remember Rod Stewart’s song “Maggie May”, back in 1971? That was the same thing.
Beyond pop culture, I suspect it goes back much farther than that, although there was a time when it wasn’t widely discussed in polite company.
As my above revelation concerning my birth year concedes, I am no longer a “young” man. But I was one once. I remember that state of mind very, very well.
Here’s the way it works when you are a young male. You are desperately horny and emotionally hungry for the company of young women, twenty-four hours per day.
But everyone out there is seeking the company of young women: other young men, slightly younger and older men, and men old enough to be those young women’s fathers.
The result is that in any demographically unaltered sexual marketplace, young males are a dime a dozen, and young women are solid gold doubloons.
This is not a “manosphere” conspiracy theory. It’s just observable sexual economics. Nor does it last. (Things balance out between the ages of 35 and 40.) But for a few years, young women are in the catbird seat, and they hold most of the cards.
And if you are a young guy, you can’t help noticing: there are all these women out there who are five, ten, fifteen…or maybe even twenty years older than you. Some of them remind you of your mom’s friends. But some of them, actually…are not too bad.
Many of them also seem to be a lot less standoffish and more approachable than young women in your peer group. Some of them seem to be genuinely interested in you. So nature, which abhors a vacuum, takes its course.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the older partner is the second choice, the runner-up, the consolation prize. A young man goes for an older woman because he can’t get what he is looking for with the younger woman whom he would naturally prefer—or at least not enough of what he is looking for.
Young men, moreover, are so overflowing with desire that very few of them are able to get “enough” of what they want from younger women. This is why almost every man, regardless of his age or generation, has an “older woman” story to tell. (Yes…I have mine, too.)
In other words, the “cougar trend” is not a “trend” at all. It’s a recurring pattern.
But we need to be fair here. The same is also true of the “trend” of younger women dating older men. There is just as much repetition of familiar tropes, and just as much wishful thinking involved.
I remember something I read back in 1981. I was 13 at the time, and one of the neighbor boys raided his father’s stash of Playboy magazines. There was a group of us that day, stereotypical Gen X latchkey kids with not enough supervision. We spent one summer afternoon reading about a dozen issues of Playboy.
Playboy magazine, June 1981
Yes, I looked at the photos. But I also read at least one or two of the articles. I remember reading one article about the “trend” of college women dating more distinguished, more accomplished men in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. The author of the article claimed that college coeds were “sick of college guys who treat them like Kleenex”, and so they were looking for solace in the arms of older men.
Sound familiar? Keep in mind: I read this back in 1981. Forty-five years ago. Proof that there is really very little that is new under the sun.
But there is often a slightly new spin on these stories. Kara Kennedy’s piece claims that the most recent trend of young men going for older women is driven by the unique alienation between Gen Z males and Gen Z females. This alienation is the product of the Internet and the culture wars.
Is this a thing? Perhaps. But here in my neck of the woods, I meet a lot of ungainly, socially awkward Gen Z males who have somehow managed to stumble their way into romantic relationships with women their own age. I also meet many who are solitary. But it isn’t as if every young man had a girlfriend, without interruption, in 1990 or 1980.
Perhaps there is another explanation. There has always been a certain degree of tension between young men and young women. Both are learning to cope with new feelings, and both are navigating a supply-and-demand environment which (initially, at least) vastly favors young women.
The inherent tension between young men and young women leads to inevitable cases of resentment, misunderstanding, and alienation among the young. As a result, there will always be young individuals who are temporarily dissatisfied with what the youthful courtship marketplace provides for them, or seems to provide. And there will always be cougars (or randy older men) who are willing to step into the breach.
Those older men described in that 1981 Playboy article I read would now be in their 80s and 90s. The college coeds of 1981? They’re now in their 60s. None of this was invented by present generations.
I’ll conclude by circling back to Rod Stewart and his 1971 song “Maggie May.” Rod Stewart, who is now in his 80s, wrote “Maggie May” as a young man, based on his personal experience.
The lyrics of “Maggie May” describe a young man’s ambivalence at being involved with an older woman. From the very opening of the song, there is a sense that such a relationship is not the natural order of things, and that it comes with an expiration date.
This was the way it was for me. When I was in my early twenties I had a relationship with an “older woman.” The exact circumstances of how it came about are irrelevant here; but it adhered to many of the common tropes.
Long story short: I ended up parting ways with the older woman when I struck up a relationship with a woman who was a few years younger than me.
As Rod Stewart pointed out more than fifty years ago, that is the inevitable outcome. (And yes: many older men get dumped by their young sweethearts, too.) A cautionary note for older female readers who get too hopeful about the latest, Gen Z-specific iteration of the cougar trend. Nihil sub sole novum.
“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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
