Author: Edward Trimnell

Draft 2 Digital, AI slop, and the evil necessity of publishing fees

Draft 2 Digital 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

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 at 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

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 tedious and intellectually lazy, the last resort of all simpletons who are not Baby Boomers.

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

What about the literary translators? The selective outrage over AI

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.

-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

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.

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

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

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

Bryon Noem: tade kuu mushi mo sukizuki

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

**View TIGERS, DEVILS, & FOOLS at Amazon**

 

I met a famous poet, I asked a stupid question

People occasionally ask me what I like in the way of poetry. When this happens, I hem and haw around, and try to change the subject. I might suggest the lyrics of Neil Peart, the drummer and chief songwriter for the Canadian rock band Rush.

But that’s a non-answer. Neil Peart mostly wrote song lyrics, which are distinct from—though closely related to—poetry that is meant to be read from a page, rather than performed as music.

The sad fact is: a lot of contemporary American poetry is not very good. Regular readers will know that I’m fond of trashing the twenty-first century. But the decline of English-language verse began far back in the last century. By the time I was born (1968), English-language poetry was already in decline.

Most of it seems to fall into one of two camps. At one extreme, there is sappy love poetry that imitates the late Rod McKuen. At the other extreme, there is slam poetry, which devolved from the rantings of Allen Ginsberg.

But not all is doom and gloom. Richard Wilbur (1921-1997) was a twentieth century poet who wrote verse as the English language gods intended it to be written. That is: with discipline and structure, and focused on concretes rather than abstractions.

Here’s a sample of Wilbur’s classic poem, “Advice to a Prophet”:

“When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,   

Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,

Not proclaiming our fall but begging us

In God’s name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,   

The long numbers that rocket the mind;

Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,   

Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.   

How should we dream of this place without us?—

The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,   

A stone look on the stone’s face?…”

That is great stuff. I loved these lines when I first read them, back in the mid-1980s. And I love them still.

I briefly met Richard Wilbur in 1987, when he was a guest speaker at Northern Kentucky University, where I was a student. I was already a moderately enthusiastic fan by this point. I asked him a question or two during the Q&A session— probably dumb questions. But hey, I was nineteen years old at the time.

If you are interested in poetry at all, then you should read Richard Wilbur’s poems. The best way to do this is by purchasing his omnibus collection, Collected Poems 1943-2004: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Winner―Sixty Years of American Verse. I purchased this volume a few years ago. It is well worth whatever Amazon is charging for it nowadays.

-ET

Killer robots in the factory

“The Robots of Jericho” is one of my early short stories. I wrote this back in 2009.

I spent a lot of years in the automotive industry, and countless hours in automotive plants.

Many of these factories had industrial robots. If you’ve ever watched industrial robots move, you’ll agree that they often appear to be alive.

Of course, I know that industrial robots aren’t really alive and sentient. But what if they were? “The Robots of Jericho” is a story about such a scenario.

“The Robots of Jericho” is available in print and ebook as one of the stories in my Hay Moon short story collection. But you’re welcome to listen to the story in the video below:

Read about the 1980s on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Google Play

NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988 now available on: Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Apple Books
 
 
I pulled the book out of Kindle Unlimited (which comes with an Amazon exclusivity agreement) earlier this month.
 
Why the change? Two reasons.
 
1.) I’ve been getting some requests from readers who prefer to buy books on Apple, Kobo, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.
 
2.) Kindle Unlimited is great for a certain kind of reader and a certain kind of author. But since its inception 12 years ago, Kindle Unlimited has become an increasingly specialized venue. KU is now dominated by niche romance titles, as well as a few niche fantasy subgenres (LitRPG). These are not my wheelhouse. So it increasingly makes sense for my books to be “wide”.
 
NO SURE THING: A GEN X COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET IN 1988 is for fans of 1980s teen and young adult movies.
 
Set on the campus of the University of Cincinnati in 1988, NO SURE THING will bring back memories from a bygone decade.
 
-ET

New Cover for REVOLUTIONARY GHOSTS!

Revolutionary Ghosts is my 2019 novel based on a premise that mixes supernatural horror and history:

Suppose that the Headless Horseman of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” were to return to terrorize modern-day America.

But not 21st-century, present-day America. (The current century has enough real horrors without make-believe, thank you very much.)

Most of Revolutionary Ghosts is set in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial. This is historical horror with a cool ‘70s vibe.

The original 2019 cover was, however, badly in need of a refresh. This is the new cover:

You can find Revolutionary Ghosts on Amazon. The book is coming out of Kindle Unlimited on April 1. Shortly after that, you’ll be able to get it on Apple Books, Kobo, Google, and B&N. Library distribution will also be rolled out. So you can read it that way if your local library has an arrangement with OverDrive.

-ET