Got a couple treats coming up for you from guest poster IINFAMOUS REVIEWER GIO Probably next week, you’ll see the review right here–followed by an interview with the author.
Gio calls this a legendary tale in the tradition of Robert E. Howard.
Sounds like this book is a standout, five star read, so start the New Year off right and come back to check it out!
I quit Farceborg and Twatter cold turkey circa 2013. Never got rid of the Twatter account. Had to dust it off when a friend gave me a lead on a possible artist for a graphic novel project. So I got back on and was surprised to discover there’s some right-wingers tweeting over there. Also a whole lot of authors and some readers.
There must be dozens of writers who host #shamelessselfpromotion threads there. Every single day, it turns out. At first I jumped on, because I could always use new readers, especially for my new series. Now it’s dawning on me that there probably aren’t any readers/buyers who look at any of those threads. It’s like most other thirsty writer spaces–a bunch of tryhards pimping their wares without even reading what others post.
It’s one heck of a reader-friendly market out there. Unfortunately, most of the literature out there is mediocre or worse, written by tradpub wannabes/imitators. And authors seem to outnumber readers by maybe 5-to-1.
I had a group on MeWe but didn’t have the time (or personality) to manage it, and it became one of those shooting galleries for thirsty authors. A ghost town where everybody self-promotes but nobody reads, responds, or even clicks “like” buttons. I didn’t want to have a bunch of rules or be the content cop, but human nature being what it is, I guess that’s what you have to do if you want a quality space with interest, engagement, value, etc.
The book-related groups on Gab (that I’m still a member of) are mostly the same–no conversations, no sharing, just thirsty authors shooting their full auto promotion guns into the ghost town.
In conclusion…just kidding–I don’t have a coherent conclusion.
I suspect a lot of us are Generation X, and even though we are on “social” media, we just can’t overcome our survivalist “look out for #1” mindset. We’re not networking, or “building relationships,” we’re fishing. And we’ve depleted the fishing hole’s already-shrinking population of literate consumers by inundating them with bait and lures. I guess.
Too bad, It would be nice to have those conversations and take a break from the sellsellsell! mania.
The sponsors of the invasion at America’s border aren’t even trying all that hard to conceal their intentions anymore. The military-age male invaders are bringing weapons across openly, in broad daylight, knowing nothing will be done to stop them.
The last, most daunting obstacle to enslaving the American people is that we’re armed. Before the coup de grace can be executed to finish our fundamental transformation, a strategy must be devised to defeat an armed population. Efforts to disarm us have progressed considerably since the Prohibition era, but haven’t completely succeeded in most of the country. Maybe 70-90 million people in the US keep and bear arms. If even 3-10% of them decide to actively resist the Great Reset, our would-be overlords will have their hands full trying to subjugate all of us. So how do you deal with that threat?
Looks like the Cabal has decided to import and prepare (all at their intended victims’ expense, of course) a foreign army to make war on us. Cabal stooges are already revealing their plans to install the invaders as police and soldiers. “Defund the police” initiatives were one tactic herding us toward that mission objective. The Cold Civil War probably won’t turn hot until the Cabal is confident their invaders are sufficiently trained (and armed/equipped/organized) to shoot it out with the American people and prevail.
Lack of critical thinking in our dumbed-down population, public incredulity, and Swamp Media gaslighting, prevent most people from understanding what is going on all around them. But what will the Ministry of Propaganda do when the shooting starts? They won’t be able to deceive people about it anymore, right?
Wrong.
The Cabal needs as many of us as possible to sit on our hands “trusting the plan” or whatever until the invaders have locked down the initiative and secured crucial objectives. The reporting might go something like this:
“Crazed white supremacist militias (we told you those right-wingers were hateful and dangerous!) have organized nationwide in an ethnic cleansing campaign to rid the country of all non-white people! Oppressed, marginalized communities have no choice but to fight back. With the help of our heroic troops and police, the domestic terrorist forces are being split, enveloped, and neutralized in separate firefights across the country. If someone you know might be a right-winger, call this hotline.”
Even if, by some miracle, we could repeat 2016 and overcome the election rigging in ’24, a hostile foreign army will obey its masters, no matter who is in the White House, They are even less beholden to the Constitution than the criminals and traitors running our government now.
According to Vox Day, the cultural Marxist Thought Cops are now taking over BIC (Bounding Into Comics) too. News to me, though I should have expected it.
Anyway, a new online entertainment magazine has already stepped in to receive the baton.
First off, BIC was never a right-wing, right-leaning or culturally consoivative site to begin with. As mainstream comics became increasingly feminized and sodomized, BIC always struck me as firmly in the “not that there’s anything wrong with that” camp. So I can’t even say that once they, too, are completely pozzed, it would be 180 degrees off from their founding principles (like I even know what those were). Will they begin gushing over comics that suck? To the extent they even cover comics: yeah, probably. More on that soon.
I went over to Fandom Pulse and looked around. What I found was in sync with online comics media and forums I’m familiar with. I follow the BIC group on MeWe, a more Big Tent comics fan group on Gab (that I haven’t managed to get kicked off of, yet), read the Arkhaven blog regularly, and have BIC and Bleeding Fool bookmarked in a browser. This has been part of my status quo for a couple few years now. In case it is not for you, breaking story:
Visit any of these sites and you will find all kinds of posts about manga, movies and toys, but not much at all about comics. After pondering this over a glass of wine at the country club (not really, but it makes me sound more sophisticated, don’t it?), I concocted a theory. The theory has two major components/exhibits.
Exhibit A: Mainstream comics/the Big Two are in a flaming death spiral, due to abysmal writing and utter depravity. Bloggers could fisk and critique DC/Marvel’s latest abominations on a regular basis, but that’s like asking them to spend their life sniffing turds and reporting on what they smell.
Why not write articles about the indie comics and graphic novels being produced? There’s decent work out there.
Exhibit B: From what I can tell, current SEO doctrine dictates that websites must generate scads and scads of content. (Please note my courageous stand here at VP that defies SEO doctrine.) From my brief perusal of Fandom Pulse, I can tell Supply Side Content Creation is their guiding philosophy, too. Content, content, content! More content! There’s just not enough sequential art being produced they can write articles about to meet this mad demand for 500-word articles.
Where is that demand coming from–the fans or the editors? That’s a question worth asking IMO. As somebody who loved comics as a kid and is stumbling toward creating some original graphic novels of his own, and is still interested in the medium and whatever good sequential art can still be found, I would rather read one or two relevant articles a day about comics/graphic novels than 50 articles a day about Hollywood inside baseball, action figures, videogames, film adaptations, and Bob Iger’s most recent brainfart.
But, as often is the case, my reasoning is much, much different than the prevailing wisdom.
Part of the story has been told in previous posts. It turned out that November would be the best month for the debut of the first book in the Paradox series. When I had a publish date, my next step was to arrange a promotion.
I hate marketing; I’m not good at it; but it’s one of those pesky chores you just have to do if you want folks to know your book exists, so I did what I could. My hope was to assemble a package of promotions that would overlap and feed each other seamlessly.
The overall ranking had slipped by over 10,000 places by the time of this screen shot, but it never reached an impressive rank during this phase anyway.
The next phase began on the 21st. From early morning until about 2pm, the ranking continued to slip, down to about 220,000+ overall. Then, finally, evidence began to show up that the needle was finally moving upwards again.
Not a bestseller yet, but moving in the right direction with enough time left in the day to possibly get there. Two of my Retreads novels had already topped 
Top 100 in three categories was less than what I hoped for, but might possibly mean that the book was showing up where book shoppers could at least see it. And technically, it was now a bestseller.
Around 8pm, when the data updated again, Escaping Fate was at #6 in Time Travel Science Fiction (for the Kindle); #25 in Time Travel Fiction (all formats); and #45 in Conspiracy Thrillers (all formats). Glass was half full.
This not being my first rodeo, I remembered to go to a bestseller’s page to grab a screen shot.
Here’s where I noticed a John Scalzi book was holding the #2 spot. My first encounter with Scalzi fiction was in a library many moons ago. I knew almost nothing about the author at the time, but after a reading a chapter or two, decided it was representative of everything wrong with the pozzed, woke publishing industry. Later, after discovering Vox Day’s blog, I learned more about the author and discovered my instinctive assessment was spot-on. Long story short, I thought it would be a satisfying coup if my underdog politically incorrect heteronormative red-blooded right-wing indie novel could unseat his gatekeeper-approved Establishment Left cookie-cutter book from that #2 slot.
Lo and behold, at 11:30ish pm…
Not only was it sitting at #2 in Time Travel Science Fiction (Kindle), but it was now designated as the “#1 New Release.” So a quick re-visit to the Bestseller’s Page was in order.
And there you can see Escaping Fate sitting at #2 with Gay Time Between the SJWs coming in 3rd. I wanted to stay up and see if it would hit #1 that night, but pooped out and went to bed.
I’ll probably never know if it cracked #1 in that category for a hot second–unless one of my readers just happened to be grabbing screen shots in that corner of the Web right then, and sends me one.
It had slid down to #3 the next morning when I checked it, and held that position throughout the day–so in that respect, at least, my promotion package has managed to sustain a decent ranking for a while. Not bad for a one-man operation cutting against the grain with none of the advantages handed out to the woketard authors.
On the subject of bestsellers, it hasn’t met with the same success as my Retreads novels (yet), but it’s a pretty strong launch, and the series is just getting started. I’ll call this one a “W”.
BTW, heartfelt thanks to the readers who have posted reviews. Those help immensely with visibility. I’ve written about the importance of reviews before and elsewhere, and groused about what’s been happening to mine, so will spare you that this time.
Actually, you can buy them from November 22nd-29th.
As word spreads about the Big Based Book Sale, this one might be the biggest and best yet.
The books offered are, at the very minimum, void of PC content. Some, like Schantz’s own novels, actually serve up direct counter-arguments to the shibboleths of a PC worldview. In his novels, these might be reflected in the narrative arc or in the dialogue itself. (His young adult trilogy, The Hidden Truth, for instance, is predicated on the reality of a globalist cabal, while his fictional high school students debate topics such as why or why not women should have the vote.) In the end, I imagine that all of the authors offering their works for this event approach being “based” differently.
BTW, I have finished The Hidden Truth and highly recommend it. I’ll post a review here in the near future. Hans G. Schantz has also made 49 chapters (so far) from The Wise of Heart available to read for free on Arkhaven and his substack.
The promotion for Escaping Fate begins tomorrow. The price of the E-book has already been reduced to 99 cents across all platforms, so if you haven’t already picked it up, there’s no better time.
The pilot book has three reviews so far, for which I’m very grateful. Motivation to complain comes a lot easier than to praise; and I’m pleased for those who are willing to expend a little effort to share their thoughts on a book they enjoyed. I know ‘Zon can make it a pain in the 4th point to post a review, too. (I’m glad Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, BookBub, etc. are not quite as painful.)
However, one of the early reviews has confirmed that one of my feared outcomes is probably in play. When I pontificated on turning Paradox into a series, one of my worries was that readers of the first book might fall under the impression that the entire series is a young adult coming-of-age story. My remedy was to try to make it obvious in the blurb that the hero is only a boy at first. (He’s a young man entering college by the end of the second book.)
Evidently it’s not so obvious in the blurb. At least not to all readers.
I’ll be pondering this in days to come.
I hope you are all on your way to a restful Thanksgiving week with loved ones. I’ll be traveling and (God willing) spending some quality time with family. But I’ll try to keep an eye on rankings and such. If the book performs well, hopefully I’ll be able to get some screen shots and share them here.
Well, this is embarrassing.
Back when I finally made the decision to break my enormous tome into a series, I somehow came to the conclusion that dividing it into books of about 20 chapters each would result in five books.
Nothing seemed obviously wrong with my calculation. I even used a calculator. And a quick browse convinced me that approximately every 20th chapter sat some sort of plot element I could tweak into a story conclusion.
Then today, while looking for that point in what is slated to become Book Four, I couldn’t find it. Huh? How come it seemed workable then, but the 20th chapter in this soon-to-be book doesn’t look remotely like anything that could be tweaked into an ending note?
Well, that’s my problem, not yours. Bottom line and long story short: looks like the series will have six books instead of five. And I’m not sweating it, because these are the kind of problems I enjoy solving.
The Paradox series is officially launched, with the publishing today of the first book in the series. Heap big thanks to those who pre-ordered.
Be advised: at the end of the book I linked to where you can leave a review on ‘Zon…but the fact that I made the link from the pre-order page caused an error. I was able to upload a correction/working link now that the E-book is live, so henceforth, no worries. But apologies for the inconvenience to those who already have your copy. I have learned my lesson and for subsequent books I will simply wait until the publish date before I try adding the review link.
I sure hope I got everything right on the paperback, because there is no more revising the content, and that publish date is on Tuesday.
…And I’m rollin’ down the line.
So ya better get outa’ my way, now…
Ahem.
E-book and paperback versions of the first Paradox book go live in just a few days. I have also edited the second book, which is scheduled to be published just before Christmas.
I used the paperback proof again this time and caught all kinds of text that needed tweaking. Funny how that works.
But wait–there’s more! I may be done with the major tweaks to the third book. Well, based on recent experience, probably not. I’m about to order the paperback proof for that one–no doubt I’ll find all kinds of stuff to edit.
