Kobo, the Canadian alternative to Amazon, has recently announced that its Kobo Plus subscription program will be made available in the Czech Republic, Greece, Luxembourg, the Philippines, Poland and Romania. (Kobo already has a significant presence in many other European countries.)
This move will doubtless benefit the many writers who are producing work in those local languages.
I should also note that there are presently many fiction writers in Europe who should be writing in their local languages, but who are nonetheless writing in maladroit and often incorrect English, because they have been programmed to believe that English is the only language that matters in the book market. I want Polish and Romanian language writers to have all the opportunities that can reasonably be made available to them.
But what about writers like me, who mostly produce work in English? Since I have my writer/publisher hat on now, I’m going to take the liberty of examining this from a self-interested perspective.
Some indie writer gurus wax enthusiastic about the prospect of selling to the “whole wide world”. This often comes up in the context of wide distribution, i.e. distribution beyond Amazon. These commentators make much of the fact that their books can be made available in Poland, France, Spain, South Korea, and Bulgaria.
This is mostly wishful thinking.
Yes, I realize that English is studied as a second language all over the world. But even in Germany, where English-language skills are higher than the European average, books really need to be translated into German in order to sell well in the local market.
There is a tendency in publishing circles to conflate two very different categories:
People who can function in English
People who can (and will) read novels in English for pleasure
I have adult-level reading skills in both Japanese and Spanish. I can read a newspaper in either one of those languages with only an occasional reference to a dictionary.
And yet—I rarely read fiction in Japanese or Spanish—unless I’m specifically working on leveling up my language skills. And when I do purchase fiction in Japanese or Spanish, it’s almost always a work by a well-known writer: Keigo Higashino or Gabriel García Márquez.
The bottom line is that a reader in Poland who has rudimentary skills in English isn’t going to read or purchase many indie-published novels from the United States. This is a fact that US-based publishing commentators and wishful thinkers (few of whom have much experience with foreign languages) frequently overlook.
Many of you have noticed that my books are now available at multiple retailers.
But not all of my books are available at multiple retailers.
There are reasons for this. Allow me to explain.
As recently as last year, I was Amazon-exclusive on all titles (with the exception of a few non-fiction books). All of my fiction was in Kindle Unlimited.
That’s not the way it is anymore.
Why?
The publishing landscape is changing.
Amazon is still the dominant player in the ebook retailing space (and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future).
But Kobo is rapidly emerging as a viable alternative for many readers (as the video below demonstrates). Other readers will toggle back and forth between the two.
Kobo is not the only non-Amazon e-book retailer, of course. There are also Apple Books, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.
But Kobo, with its high-profile line of e-readers, seems to be the one that is making the most headway. Kobo is serious about increasing its market share.
Where readers go, authors will follow, and vice versa.
The wild card here is Kindle Unlimited’s exclusivity clause. If a title is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it can’t be sold (in ebook format) at any of the other retailers. Historically, this has meant that thousands of titles listed at Amazon aren’t available at Kobo, Google Play, etc.
Many readers, I suspect, aren’t even aware of this.
I’ve noticed a trend: More romance authors are publishing their books “wide”, with an emphasis on Kobo.
Yes, romance… the genre that dare not speak its name at this blog. Regular readers will know how I hate werebear shapeshifter romance, reverse harem romance, and all the other ridiculous romance genres.
But I don’t deny their collective footprint in the marketplace. Those weird romance genres, much as I disdain them, may be instrumental in propelling Kobo’s growth in the near future.
This will indirectly benefit the other non-Amazon retailers—not only Kobo. Because if you’re publishing your book on Kobo, then you had might as well publish it on Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble too.
Readers will go where the books go. This is the network effect in action.
But for me, publishing wide doesn’t mean abandoning Kindle Unlimited. I will still be keeping many backlist and new titles in Amazon’s exclusive subscription program.
Yes—I know that means that those titles will only be available at Amazon. But Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program is a major player in its own right. In my opinion, part of being “wide” means having a footprint in Kindle Unlimited.
This diversified strategy may strike some readers as needlessly complicated. But remember: I’m from the 1980s. And back in the 1980s, content publishers regularly thought in terms of market segmentation.
For example: there were movies and TV shows that were available on network television for free.
Other movies and shows were available on HBO (a subscription program).
Others required viewers to access them via a pay-per-view system.
Then there were all those VHS rentals.
And finally, there were movies that could only be seen at the cinema.
I’m doing something very similar. Some of my titles are exclusively at Amazon, other titles are “wide”.
Nor have I forgotten about free, frictionless discovery venues: I’ve also been adding readings of some of my books and stories to my YouTube channel.
The 2026 content distribution marketplace is complicated; but in some ways, it’s no more convoluted than it was in 1986. So we go back to the 1980s yet again.
See Kevin Tumlinson’s video about the changing tides of Amazon reviews, and how the rule changes have been influenced by—you guessed it—AI.
I recently opined about the topic of review begging. Although Kevin Tumlinson approaches the issue from a different angle, he also seems to believe that obsessive review farming is no longer a productive practice for authors and publishers…if it ever was.
I can’t say this enough. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a book review culture existing online, as something that readers do among themselves.
By all means let readers talk about the books they’ve read. And leave them alone while they’re doing it.
The problem arises when authors and publishers begin to see random internet reviews—written by random people—as a key pillar of their marketing strategy.
There are many things I don’t like about how indie publishing has evolved under the influence of the “gurus”. One of these is the practice of review-begging.
(Note: Dean Wesley Smith gets credit for inventing the term review-begging. But it is too apt not to coin.)
Online review culture is a fact of publishing. As one of my former corporate bosses told me, “you can’t stop people from talking.”
And allow me to be clear here: there is nothing inherently wrong with readers getting together in spaces like Goodreads (or on Amazon, for that matter) to discuss their reactions to various books. This is no different from people discussing their preferences for anything else in the online world.
Online reader reviews, like everything else one finds online, is a mixed bag. Your mileage may vary.
I’ve seen some reader reviews that are extremely thoughtful.
On the other hand, I once saw a reader review that gave a book a one-star rating because the book did not have any dragons, and that reader only read books with dragons. Okie dokie.
I came across another reader review that gave a book a one-star rating because a dog happened to die in the book. The one-star reviewer then pointed out that he “didn’t read books in which animals die.” (One assumes that this particular fellow never read Old Yeller.)
I reiterate: there is nothing wrong with any of this. Everyone has a right to broadcast their opinion on the internet. (That’s sort of what I’m doing now, isn’t it?)
What is deleterious is that a handful of indie author “gurus” have convinced writers that they must behave like Instagram models. They must constantly primp and wheedle for reader reviews and ratings, like a teenager desperate for approval. There have been cases of writers giving away cash prizes, Kindles, and even laptops in exchange for reader reviews. The whole thing has become absurd.
And as is always the case, there is no easier mark than an indie author who is eager for success. The practice of review-begging has given birth to a cottage industry, eagerly filled by companies that make money by putting indie-published books in front of advanced reader copies (ARC) readers. The only qualification of said ARC readers is that they are willing to give their opinions about books online. What could possibly go wrong?
On the contrary, I have learned to actively distrust review averages on Amazon. Some of the best books I’ve read in recent years have had middling 3.5-star review averages. On the other hand, some of the astro-turfed 5-star average books have been mediocre at best.
(Note: whenever you see the reviews for a trad-pubbed book, you can assume that the review averages have been gamed in one way or another.)
I reiterate again: I have no desire to censor, quell, or discourage anyone from expressing their opinion about a particular book, movie, television show, or piece of music. That’s the consumer side of the equation. I’m opining from the creator side now.
When you start writing for the folks who are the most vocal online, you’re not just writing by committee (which is bad enough). You’re also writing for people who may not even be your primary readership. Most avid readers seldom review, or even rate, books. They’re too busy reading.
This is why I’m no fan of review-begging, or the self-appointed gurus who advocate for the practice.
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.
Throughout the world, people who make Internet inquiries about Kuwa6226 meet violent deaths.
In online forums and chatrooms, people are warned not to mention the mysterious entity.
But who, or what, is Kuwa6226? A supernatural force? A cult? A global conspiracy?
Most people say that it’s better not to ask…and Kuwa6226’s reign of terror goes unchallenged.
***
Then two unlikely sleuths, from opposite sides of the world, unite.
Minoru Watase is a corporate IT employee in Japan. Julie Lawrence is a college student in the American Pacific Northwest.
Julie and Minoru have each lost a friend to Kuwa6226. Together, they are determined to discover Kuwa6226’s true identity and eliminate the menace.
Their search will take them from the streets of Tokyo to an American college town in Washington State. When they finally come face-to-face with Kuwa6226, Julie and Minoru will be unprepared for the revelation…and the ruthlessness of their adversary!
Kuwa 6226 is a horror-mystery with endless twists and turns!
Read NO SURE THING in Kobo Plus. Also available for purchase at Amazon, Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble
No Sure Thing: a Gen X coming-of-age novel set in 1988 is now available in Kobo Plus.
Kobo Plus is Kobo’s version of Kindle Unlimited. I’ve been moving some titles in there on an experimental basis.
Kobo Plus, like Kindle Unlimited, will inevitably be swamped with trashy, sexually explicit romance novels. (Unfortunately, that’s probably already the case). But at least Kobo Plus does not require exclusivity. So I’m willing to give it a try for now.
No Sure Thing, like the title suggests, is a coming-of-age novel in a distinctly Gen X setting. While the novel is not autobiographical in any significant way, many of the characters and conflicts presented therein are based on people and situations that I observed myself during the 1980s. So it is authentic, if nothing else.
While there are several “love plots” in the book, this is not a romance novel in any traditional sense. If that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere.
But not all of the teen movies of the 1980s followed the traditional romance script. Consider the endings of Risky Business and The Last American Virgin. These were much more disillusionment plots than by-the-numbers romance plots (even though the romance element was heavily used in marketing both films).
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, despite the sex and comedy, also had several unmistakable disillusionment plots: Stacy learned the consequences of reckless sexual experimentation; Brad learned the pitfalls of hubris.
As noted above, No Sure Thing is available at all the major online bookstores.
David Van Dyke Stewart is waxing pessimistic about the state of indie publishing. In his view, indie publishing is so threatened by AI slop and genre slop that it is no longer worth doing anymore.
He announces in the video below that he intends to “step away” from indie publishing. He’s even flirting with the idea of unpublishing some of his existing novels, because he does not want to be associated with some of the ridiculous excesses that we now see in indie publishing.
A part of me fully sympathizes. As I’ve written previously, I can hardly stand to enter indie writing groups on Facebook anymore. 90% of the authors participating in such spaces are now writing shifter romances, reverse harem—and similarly ridiculous books adorned with man chests. Then there are the dogs and cats solving mysteries, the witch cozies, etc. It is possible for one to feel ridiculous by association.
As for AI…yes, that is a problem of an entirely different magnitude.
And yet…I remain optimistic, if not in the short run, then at least in the long run.
Why? Because I’ve seen this movie before. I remember almost twenty years ago, how everyone was predicting that the entire internet would be taken down—not by AI, but by content farms.
For those of you who don’t remember (or who are a little fuzzy) on the history, content farms were junk sites that were hastily written to maximize clicks in Google search results, and thereby maximize AdSense income. For a few years they represented a real threat to the integrity of the internet.
But the content farms eventually went the way of the pterodactyl. Google changed its algorithm. Search engine users became more discriminating, and learned to recognize query results that led to content farms. The economic incentive for the content farms went away.
That’s what I expect to happen with AI slop (and—to some degree—genre slop). How long can it remain profitable to turn out template-driven trashy romance novels, for instance? Even for the voracious porn/romance readership?
And once you throw AI into the mix, the race to the unprofitable bottom is inevitable. I look for the genre slop writers, and the AI slop producers, to eventually be driven out by their own excesses.
One irony here is that AI slop and genre slop have a mutually destructive, symbiotic relationship. Template-driven, repetitive genre novels are the easiest to produce with various AI programs.
What does concern me is that before it all goes away, it will completely undermine the Kindle Unlimited ecosystem. This is a real threat in the short- to mid-term.
But I don’t look for AI and genre slop to take down indie publishing as an industry. As long as the internet has existed, there have been both outright scammers and individuals who seek to maximize profit by turning out low-effort, repetitive content. That problem is not going to go away. One bag of tricks will simply be replaced by another.
The rest of us will soldier on. As for David Van Dyke Stewart, I hope that he soldiers on, too. I haven’t read any of his novels; but I have watched some of his YouTube content. He strikes me as a thoughtful fellow.
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.
Such mobs were particularly common in YA fantasy literature. Notable mob targets from a little less than a decade ago include: The Black Witch by Laurie Forest and Blood Heir by Amélie Wen Zhao.
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 Mommiesbecause 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’ group 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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
