Amazon's at it again.

And authors are apparently upset, at least according to the New York Times.

Why? Amazon created Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service that allows unlimited downloads for a monthly fee.

Within a month, author H.M. Ward saw her income fall 75 percent.

"Six months ago people were quitting their day job, convinced they could make a career out of writing," according to Bob Mayer.

'Those people' may be out there, but I am most certainly not one of them. I've never contemplated quitting my day job in order to make a living as a writer. Seems like an impossible pipe dream from my perspective, to be honest. And having finally launched the book, it feels even more unobtainable. That, however, is my own fault, as my material is quite niche.

I would be remiss not to mention that Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) really is amazing. I was able to put up a book and have it available for purchase all over the world. And Amazon lets authors in Kindle Select earn up to 70 percent of every sale, far more than any traditional publisher.

On the other hand, publishing is changing so quickly one cannot safely rely on it for an income, as the bottom of the boat can fall out at any time.

Ms. Ward, fortunately, has sold over six million books since 2011 and likely has a decent cushion to land on. Authors who left their jobs and were just scraping by are in a different situation entirely. I feel for them. It takes guts to follow your dreams. Writing, however, seems to be something of an income roller coaster, fluctuating monthly, so you'd best have a strong stomach and solid cash reserve before you try it.

In 2010, Amazon had 600,000 e-books in its Kindle store. Today it has more than three million.

That's a lot of books. At some point, books will be produced faster than people can read them. Revenue from ebooks in 2013 was three billion. Three billion! Now that's a lot of mystery, romance, and erotica. Just how much can people read? How long before the market is hopelessly saturated and a need arises for services vetting titles? Will the user star rating system be enough? How many will be compelled to game the system? Inquiring minds and all that.

Apparently the goal of Kindle Unlimited is to draw in readers and entice them to buy even more books.

The books, in that sense, are loss leaders, although the writers take the loss, not Amazon.

But authors are not impressed. As Kathryn Meyer Griffith says: “They’re doing a good job of recreating that whole unfair bogus system where they make the money and we authors survive on the pennies that are left.”

One of the ways to deal with the changes Amazon has implemented is to release shorter books more frequently. That had already occurred to me. For example, kboards only allow you to have one promotional thread per book. You get one discount period per ninety days per book. Multiple titles means multiple promotional threads, multiple sales periods, and greater exposure. To top that off, people only notice you if you have multiple items in your inventory. 

H.M. Ward's first book was 500 pages. Her new books are roughly 100 pages. 

Kindle Unlimited pushes this trend even further, as you get the same amount of money no matter how long the book is. 

Ward now plans to release volumes every month. 

“I’ve started working with four co-authors,” she said. “If you’re not constantly putting out new material, people forget you’re there.”

Seems wise. Other authors are breaking their books into sections and publishing each chapter separately. 

Amazing.

Everything changes, only faster.

It's an interesting article. Check it out.

Feeling blue? Have some yogurt.

Scientists have linked mood to stomach bacteria. Who knew?

Want to talk about the post-apocalypse?

Check out the post-apocalypse forums. 

Adventures in the Post-Apocalypse: Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth

Jack Kirby created Kamandi in the early Seventies, when he hopped over from Marvel to DC. The comic follows a young boy who was raised in an underground bunker, Command-D (from which 'Kaman-di' gets his name). When the bunker is destroyed, he’s thrown out into a wild, post-apocalyptic world filled with gibbering monsters and animal peoples. There are rat-men, ape-men, lion-men, tiger-men, alligator-men, bear-men, leopard-men, nuclear-men, and you get the general idea.

This isn’t The Road.

Rather than being a barren, lifeless wasteland, the post-mystery-disaster world is a fertile playground, ripe for adventure.

Which, of course, is the point.

The post-apocalypse can be divided up into two types: bleak and adult, and fun and juvenile. Kamandi is the latter. This is a comic a ten year old boy would love.

Character sketch of Kamandi

The book has a standardized format that never varies. Each issue broken into four chapters. The title and credit page is always followed by a double spread, typically a lavishly illustrated post-apocalyptic landscape with the Statue of Liberty stuck in somewhere.

The first double page spread. You-know-who is featured prominently.

Sentient and well armed apes attack Kamandi: "Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!"

Planet of the Apes was an obvious influence. Kirby takes the film as a starting point and then runs with it, and doesn't stop. The live action Ape film was grounded by a limited production budget; there was only so much they could pull off convincingly. Kirby’s imagination, by contrast, is free of such limitations, and he lets it loose.

The three nuclear men in indestructible mode.

The disaster behind this post-apoclayptic trope fest is described by Kirby as ‘a natural disaster linked with radiation’, but it really doesn’t matter what caused it all.

It could have been a dirty telephone.

The result? Humans, of course, have been left mental midgets, reduced to the status of cattle. Animals have evolved into dozens of sentient species. And yet, legacy vehicles and devices are everywhere, and still work. Nevermind how long it would take for lions (and just about every other large mammal) to evolve into intelligent humanoids, complete with a distinctive fashion sense and accompanying civilization. If that kind of selective aging bothers you, you’d best back away from the book slowly before your brain explodes.

The post-apocalypse is the most fun with Variable Decay. Our inner ten year old wants cool mutants loitering about recognizable landmarks, after all, and Kirby doesn't disappoint. He serves some up every issue.

Kirby doesn’t let little things like science or facts get in his way.  He'll explain things away with little snippets: animal evolution, for example, was accelerated by a drug called Cortexin. 'All we have to do is add a line of dialogue…'


In one of Kamandi’s first adventures, he comes across tiger lancers fighting leopard-men. Beause why not? It’s not his fight, but he intervenes anyway, shooting a leopard sniper, and in doing so, saving tiger team leader.

The tigers capture him, beginning a long tradition. Kamandi is going to spend a lot of time getting captured. But the grateful tiger leader and Kamandi become fast friends.

He's done up like a competitor in The Hunger Games and brought to watch the tigers worship their god, an ICBM. Echoes of Beneath Planet of the Apes. The nuke is minded by Dr. Canus, a super intelligent dog like Mr. Peabody, only less snarky. Canus has to stop Kamandi from detonating the nuke, bored-Charlton Heston / Taylor style.

For some reason the dog is intrigued by this suicidal talking human, and saves him from certain death. Once mans best friend…

The Rat-men of New York, New York

Canus goes on to introduce Kamandi to Ben Boxer, a mutant human who’s ‘a natural atomic-pile’ and able to make himself invulnerable using his ‘cyclo-heart’. Yep: scientific bafflegab is thrown around to justify all sorts of cool, batty stuff.

Kirby created a couple of maps of his new earth, and you can follow Kamandi’s adventures across them. The Tiger Empire rules the eastern seaboard, although Rat-men control the half-submerged ruins of New York. Gorilla communes dominate Texas, lions rule California, and devils dominate Canada, except Quebec, where human herds run free through verdant forests. Why? Because the other monsters and humanoid animals never learned to speak french.

Such is the power of Language Laws!

Map of Kamandi's world. It was later expanded to include Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Canus, Ben Boxer, and Kamandi head south, seeking Boxer’s home: Tracking Site, City of the Nuclear People.

Sounds super cool, right?

Nuclear powered people! When these guys tap their chest, they turn silvery and invulnerable.

I want me a cyclo-heart.

Sadly, when they finally reach their destination, they discover to their (inevitable) horror, it is ruled with an iron grip by a giant brained midget: The Misfit. 'A pumpkin-headed toad’ is how Kamandi describes him, within earshot, which probably doesn’t endear Kamandi to the little fellow.

Never piss off a giant brained midget in charge of nuclear powered people! As fast as you can blink, Misfit enslaves Kamandi and rides him about Master-Blaster style (if you remember Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome), just to let Kamandi know who’s boss, then shows Kamandi Mr. Morticoccus, The Ultimate Germ. Tracking Site must keep Morti contained if life on earth is to continue.

You just know what is going to happen.

Bat attack! Giant bats are the natural enemy of Nuclear People.
Never invite them on the same talk show episode.

The first collection of Kamandi ends with the battle for Tracking Site City, with the fate of the post-world at stake. One good apocalypse deserves another.

Endless action

The issues are filled with fights, chases, Kamandi getting captured, daring escapes and lots of punching.

The Last Enemy

The endless ‘manimals’ come across as just silly. Too much of a good thing, too quickly. Creative overload can be a problem for someone as imaginative as Kirby.

The series can also be repetitive, but this is a problem with every comic from the Seventies: all of them reiterate their premise on an issue by issue basis, a necessary evil to bring newcomers up to speed pre-internet. When issues are read over a period of several months, or years, it’s not noticeable. When the comics are read all in one go, as a collection, it becomes annoying.

It’s also aimed at a fairly young audience.

Nevertheless, the scope of imagination on display is impressive. It can be seen as derivative but I prefer to look at it as building on previous efforts, combining tropes into an entirely new thing.

Lucas for example built Star Wars atop Flash Gordon, which he couldn't get the rights to. Same thing here.

In fact, the genesis point for Kamandi was actually a short story called The Last Enemy, which he did before Planet of the Apes came out. Zing!

As far as the post-apocalypse goes, Kamandi is one of the wildest and most fun out there. It would inspire other franchises, such as Thundarr the Barbarian, a children's TV show which Kirby also worked on. Series creator Steve Gerber, better known for creating Howard the Duck, brought him in because he had great taste.

I don't even know what this is.

Kirby both wrote and drew the Kamandi series all the way up to issue 37. From 38 to 40, he only drew it. Then he passed it on to others, and there my interest wanes.

Statues of the Tiger Empire

Flower: Kamandi's doomed love interest

A Land of the Lost like landscape

Crab dinner fights back

Prisoner of the Leopard People!

Sketch of a slave cart and master ape on a tricycle,
because that's the way the future rolls.

Zigging and Zagging along The Promotional Path

I've finished all the basic steps I believe one should take upon publishing on Kindle.

I have a blog, a Facebook page, a Goodreads page, an Amazon Author page, a Kindle book page, maybe even a Kindle Author Book Blog page. I don't know. I've set up so many pages in the last week I don't remember them all, which calls into question how effective they will be.

But due diligence has been done. The one thing I'm not stepping in is Twitter. I didn't even have a Facebook page until a couple months ago. There are limits.

My initial plans have changed quite drastically. No plan ever survives contact with the audience, as they say. I'm thinking of postponing the banner ad 'campaign' and hoarding my micro-ad budget until I get some reviews. If I can get a couple of good ones, or even one that I can find a positive sentence in and then thoroughly misrepresent in an ad banner, I'll splurge. Until then, I doubt they'd do me much good. I'm an unknown quantity of unknown quality in a market absolutely saturated with prose.

Supposedly most books, print books that is, don't sell more than 500 copies. Since it's much easier and cheaper to buy an ebook, it initially seemed reasonable to set the goal of selling 1000 copies as an objective. True, at $3.99, that'd only bring in $4000, of which I'd make roughly $3000. From the outside, it probably looks like a fairly modest ambition. Or even subpar.

Ha! How quickly the foolish dreams of the novice are dashed on the rocks of reality.

I now realize that a reasonable goal will be to sell 100 books within the next year.

My main objective will be to have fun and improve my writing SkillZ. That's been achieved, to a greater or lesser extent (let us not quibble), and it's best to just be happy with that. Not making any money I can certainly live with. I wasn't planning on giving up my day job. But not having any audience at all just makes me think of that Beatles song Nowhere Man:

He's a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his nowhere land,
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

In The Yellow Submarine, they show the 'Nowhere Man' sitting, even dancing, at a typewriter.

Brrr.

I've been reading up on the kboards a bit. A lot of people are writing erotica, which does very, very well on kindle. Oddly enough, book promotions often explicitly exclude erotica.

Erotica probably doesn't need them.

It's a whole other world.

You can apply to be a Bargain Book, but they want four star ratings for that, which likely better serves established authors. A new writer is likely to attract speculators who ultimately don't like the book, and it only takes a few negative reviews to drag a book's rating down. Fortunately, by the time you publish your tenth book, everybody who hates your writing has learned to avoid it.

Ratings can have quite an effect on how well a book does, and what opportunities are open to it. It's very competitive. Which just motivates people to manipulate the system. I recall reading a story a few years back about some Amazon writers who created fake online identities, and then went around writing scathing critiques of their competitors and fawning reviews of their own work. Amazon had to implement new policies to clamp down on this phenomenon.

Makes you wonder.

Nowhere Man, don't worry,
Take your time, don't hurry.
Leave it all till somebody else lends you a hand.

Doesn't have a point of view,
Knows not where he's going to.
Isn't he a bit like you and me?

The best of world building: J.R.R. Tolkien

The greatest map in all of fantasy and sci-fi literature. 

I love world building. There's nothing quite like being transported to a convincing alternate reality. There are a few of such sweeping scope and imagination that they've stuck with me for decades. They aren't just convincing. They delight and intrigue and tantalize. In the end, I don't care if they break the cosmological constants so long as they entertain and inspire.

Team Fellowship

To bastardize Homer Simpson, in my house, we don't obey the laws of thermodynamics.

J.R.R. Tolkien, in my books, is the uncontested King of World Building.

He's not the first. Not by a long shot. But Tolkien is unquestionably the most punctiliously thorough. This is a guy who wrote The Silmarillion, which is essentially a thousand page background document for the world of Middle Earth.

It doesn't get more hard core.

Heck, the appendices of Return of the King are almost as long as the book.

Tolkien developed not one, but several imaginary languages and scripts for the peoples of his imaginary world, along with some of the most thrillingly detailed maps. I remember pouring over Tolkien's rendering of Middle Earth when I was a kid for hours on end. Then I'd scribble my own map in pencil crayon, aping Tolkien's style and populating it with dark forests and jagged mountain ranges. Half the boys in my grade six class read The Lord of the Rings around the same time, and we were fascinated by it. Middle Earth was a thrilling, magical place. It was an alternate world, thought out in minute detail. There's a history behind everything, grounding the material and making it all the more believable.

If only real history were so emotionally fulfilling. But then, that's what myth is for: it makes history make sense.

The two big dudes.

There's something obsessive compulsive in Tolkien's work, which neatly fits with the mindset of a young boy. When boys get interested in something (or at least when I did), they learn absolutely everything about it, and Tolkien delivered on that thirst for detail in spades.

My grandfather had a Tolkien calendar, painted by The Hildebrant Brothers, which reproduced Tolkien's map in sumptuous detail, and I spent an inordinate time looking at that as well. After 1977 ended, I kept the calendar for over a decade. There's something incredibly solid about the way the Hildebrants sculpted and defined shapes with paint. The milky white highlights and deep shadows guide the eye with expert precision about the page with the confidence and surety of a master.

Even now I am in awe of not only Tolkien's imagination, but the art it has inspired. His imaginary world is a meme that sits in the heads of millions and millions of people, as real a place to many as ancient Rome or Greece.

Let there be no mistake: the key to the story are the characters, Frodo and Sam and Gandalf and Gollum, and the environments they travel through can only have meaning in relation to them. They resonate against each other. A world without characters is just an empty space. But a well conceived and emotionally resonant one can take the story, and the characters, to the next level.

Quiet beginnings.
Gandalf meets Bilbo.

Tolkien was a product of his age, which straddled the apex The British Empire. He was born under the reign of Queen Victoria in 1892, and if you read his work you can certainly see a fondness for monarchy and traditional order. The third book, after all, is called Return of the King, which is a big hint as to where his sympathies lie. Indeed, he has been taken to task for this traditional bent by Michael Moorcock in his essay, Epic Pooh. But Tolkien's views are not two dimensional; he advocated, for example, for the dismantling of the British Empire.

And while his books idealize rural life, he was no Luddite. He had doubts about how society was changing, which is understandable, especially these days. Ours is an age of unprecedented, accelerated change. Workers have to adapt quickly to keep up. Careers need to be reinvented. Learning and education are lifelong pursuits out of necessity. It's the only way to remain relevant and employable.

It should be remembered that even the Luddites were not acting out of blind, anti-technology zealotry. They were acting out of self-interest, protecting their jobs from being rendered obsolete by mechanical looms. It's futile to stand against the tides of progress, but it is understandable why some choose to do so.

Tolkien learned Latin at a young age, as well as Welsh, and studied Anglo-Saxon. He collaborated with his cousins in creating a language called Nevbosh, and later a language called Naffarin on his own. This interest in language would later find expression in The Lord of the Rings, for which he'd create Quenya, Sindarin, Black Speech, Entish and Valarin.

Biblo writing the Red Book of Westmarch.
Or There and Back Again. One of them.

Tolkien mixed Nordic mythology together with his own life and inventions seamlessly. The Shire is reminiscent of an idealized English countryside, a pure and placid place upon which Saruman inflicts the blight of modern factories that belch smoke and ruin. The Misty Mountains were inspired by his trips to the Swiss Alps. The bloody, swampy, muddy mess of The Somme inspired The Dead Marshes. The war made quite an impression, upon him, after all: all but one of his close friends was dead by 1918. His wife Edith became inspiration for the main story of the Silmarillion.

The events in his fiction are externalized aspects of his self, of his own life experiences. Like an externalized dream. Dreams recycle and reconfigure our waking life and try and make sense of it. The places in his books are inextricably linked to the characters who pass through them. Good writing is holistic. Locations reflect or externalize internal struggle.

It's about emotional truth.

Mordor at its most evocative.
By the Hildebrant Brothers

Tolkien argued that Beowulf was not about a specific monster, and therefore juvenile, as critics alleged, but about mankind's struggle in general. The monster is an expression of emotional truth. Just because it's cool and evocative doesn't make it illegitimate. Let the fuddy duddy pedants bloviate while we enjoy.

That is how, as an avid youth, I consumed his books.

We emotionally react to Sauron and Smaug and the fear of the Mirkwood dark just as we marvel at the tree forts of the elves and majesty of the Misty Mountains. These are evocative, emotional places, not physical ones. Mirkwood is a state of mind.

The depth of thought that went into these imaginary realms help make the books wonderful reads, or did, back in the days before the internet and truncated attention spans. Few today can read omniscient third person POV anymore, at least not without throwing the book against the wall and running around screaming in outrage. I kid you not. Writing fashions change like everything else.

But I am from an earlier age, the last millennium, like an elf who has outstayed his welcome in Middle Earth and must soon depart for the Grey Havens. I guess it's like Florida.

Mirkwood, Mount Doom, Gondor, Minas Tirith, The Shire, Rivendell. All these places evoke strong memories in me, perhaps even more so having seen the film adaptations by Peter 'Swoop' Jackson.

There's enough detail on this imaginary world to create cool 3D maps showing Middle Earth from orbit. Which is just awesome. Few fantasy worlds inspire faux satellite shots.

Middle Earth from space. That's Mordor in the lower right.

Essays have been written on Tolkien's world building efforts. Tor has a good one (Although they are mistaken that he invented world building. More on that later).

It also should be mentioned that Tolkien's writings are a major point of inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons, which started off the whole craze of role playing, novels, movies, map making and television shows.

Tolkien defined not only the genre, but made maps and world building an inextricable part of it.

Need I say more?

For a recap on the people and creatures of LOTR? See this video:

And for those who've seen and enjoyed the LOTR films, a bit of fun courtesy Honest Trailers:

Top spots on my imaginary Middle Earth travel itinerary:

Rivendell
Who wouldn't want to visit this oasis of peace and tranquility in a world being overrun by slobbering orcs and fire belching balrogs? It's the Switzerland of the fantasy world. Better than a Swedish spa, and infinitely more scenic.

Mines of Moria
I think Moria is probably the most majestic mine ever imagined, with great soaring staircases and gaping chasms that lead down to the centre of the earth. Jackson's film brought them to life and I have to admit his cinematic version rivaled, if not exceeded, my own imagination. But I think I'd go with a tour group, and keep a close eye on the guide. Safety in numbers. It's not a place I'd want to get lost in.

Mirkwood
Another dark, foreboding place that leapt to life in my imagination. The tour would be carried out from an armored van equipped with flamethrowers, but I'd still be game.

Minas Tirith
The definitive fantasy city, and the source of inspiration for many others. Seven tiered rings! Gleaming white towers! The White Tree! The nearby Pelennor Fields archeological site, where one of the greatest fantasy battles ever was fought. How could you go wrong? You can always visit the real life inspiration: Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, France.

Or just go to New Zealand.

Next time: the original world builder, granddaddy of them all!

Michael Shank's Time Trap

This is pretty amazing. From the guy who did the George Lucas' Special Edition Trailer for Episode VII.