Book Bomb Success! Behold the Power of Sad Puppies.

Yesterday’s Book Bomb was a great success:

https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/18/book-bomb-novellas-from-the-sad-puppies-slate/

Our goal was to get some of our Sad Puppies slate out in front of as many readers as possible. I figure most people are familiar with our suggested novels already, so I’d concentrate on the shorter works, which are a much more difficult market to reach a large audience with, and way harder to bump up very high on the overall list. We started with the novella category, and if you’re an author with a novella, you know how rare it is to get novellas ranked up there.

Plus, Amazon tweaked its rating system methodology again so that they didn’t start updating their ranking until late in the afternoon, and they didn’t hit the peak numbers until the middle of the night when most of North America was asleep rather than surfing Amazon. If they’d updated normally I know from experience we could have probably moved a couple hundred more copies. Success breeds success, and when people see that they are part of something winning, they’re more likely to spread the word. The higher they get on the rankings, the more new eyes the works get in front of, the more sales are made, repeat until you are J.K. Rowling. Theoretically. 🙂

Despite those obstacles, a bold coalition of Sad Puppies supporters and courageous manatees were able to do the following:

One Bright Star to Guide Them went from #89,731 to #421 on all of Amazon, and #4 in its extremely competitive genre losing only to Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and Joe Abercrombie.

Big Boys Don’t Cry  went from #52,018 to #483 overall, and #1 in multiple genres.

And Arlan Andrews, keeping in mind that this isn’t even our nominated work because that one wasn’t available on Amazon BUT he will email a FREE copy of the suggested work to any Sad Puppies voter who contacts him at arlan@thingsto.com  but rather this was just a link I threw up to make sure authors GET PAID.

Other Heads went from #403,337 to #1,003, and #1 of all science fiction anthologies.

Damn straight.

I got the actual numbers from Kratman and Wright. I don’t have Arlan’s. Between those two the actual number of copies sold would be equal to about 20 good book signing events. (or what I’d consider at this stage of my career to be a good book signing, so probably 50 or 60 book book signing events worth of sales when I was starting out).

For novellas. Not books. Novellas.

The reason I’m accentuating this is because last week I was accused of trying to get you Sad Puppies volunteers to nominate without reading the actual works: https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/10/sad-puppies-3-update-2-1-addendum-to-prior-update/

On the contrary, with yesterday’s Book Bomb not only did we make it so more people would actually read the suggested works, the Sad Puppies suggestions will now be the most widely read things in that category. By far.

And we’re working on short stories and novelettes next.

Now, all of that is fine and dandy, and Brad really is sincerely trying to make the Hugo nominations represent all of fandom and not just one tiny, insular, politically motivated clique, but as a devout evangelical capitalist I’m all about authors Getting Paid.

Ask most Hugo nominees what their nomination was worth in terms of extra sales or increased fan base, and the honest answers usually range from “meh” to “a little… maybe?” That wasn’t always the case. Back in ye olde tymes it was a prestigious career boost, and the reason most authors give a damn about such prestigious career boosts is because it means our royalty checks get bigger. However, the preponderance of preachy award winning suck in recent decades has made getting awards a sort of disclaimer for the general consumer audience (i.e. all those nice people who pay our bills).

Accountant hat on. That’s bad.

Unlike the Social Justice Warrior contingent—who are all about telling creators what they can’t do, or what they can’t say, or which vocabulary words of the day are off limits, or how you’re doing it wrong, or other assorted forms of pushy, bossy, bullshit—I actually want authors to succeed and make a living writing what they want to write. I don’t want anybody walking on eggshells, afraid of causing outrage, and getting slandered as something-ist or something-phobic, because they crossed some invisible line.

The reason I can get away with pissing off these bullies is I GET PAID. I have enough fans that when they libel me in the Guardian or call me a wife beating rape apologist on Twitter, the lost sales don’t make a noticeable dent. The reason Neil Gaiman doesn’t give a shit about the screeching harpy brigade angry at him for calling his latest book Trigger Warnings is because Sir Neil GETS PAID.  Hell, I probably only make what Neil Gaiman’s butler makes, but that’s still enough to insulate me from the SJW’s wrath.

One nice thing about being seen as the counter-culture “fun” side of this little battle (because SJWs have their fun surgically removed to avoid causing microaggressions) is that us plugging an author doesn’t cause the mass market to think to themselves, “Award winning? Oh, no… Not more dying polar bears and thinly veiled Dick Cheneys globally warming a bold post-binary gender world!”

The thing about SJWs? They are super loud, but there really aren’t that many of them, and as far as I can tell they don’t actually read very many books.

So, growing other authors’ fan bases? Getting authors from The Slatening in front of more readers? It wasn’t an original goal of Sad Puppies, but it is certainly a wonderful side effect.

So, next week, let’s bomb some more slate!

EDIT:

The numbers are still rising. Like I said, you get high enough on there, and you get even more new eyes on you.
One Bright Star to Guide them is now at #383.

Big Boys Don’t cry is at #430

Other Heads is at #883.

EDIT: They’re still climbing.Other Heads peaked at #883 and is currently at #893, but One Bright Star to Guide them is at #359, and Big Boys Don’t Cry is at #411.

How many novellas did we move? It is not my place to give out other author’s sales numbers, but to put this in perspective, the total number of nominating ballots for all the finalists in the Novella category of the Hugos in 2014 was 857.  For just these three in 24 hours, we’ve more than doubled that.

So now that I’ve established Sad Puppies does want voters to read books, and my side actually buys books, I wonder what crazy shit they’re going to make up about us next? 🙂

Another Czech cover. Seriously, I love these.
BOOK BOMB! Novellas from the Sad Puppies Slate!

94 thoughts on “Book Bomb Success! Behold the Power of Sad Puppies.”

  1. What would the Sad Puppies conducting a Slate Bombing look like in a cartoon? Unfortunately, I have no skills in that area.

  2. If Amazon’s accounting period runs noon PST to noon PST, perhaps the Book Bomb’s period should be tweaked. Perhaps extend it by a half day (8 AM EST through Noon EST the next day?), or start the push when Amazon’s accounting begins, and extend it through the end?

  3. Wait, wait, wait….. Gaiman’s latest release is called “Trigger Warning”, and the SJWs are having kittens over it? That’s HILARIOUS!!!

    Great news on the book bomb. Looking forward to next week!

      1. I got TW on the opening day. His preface is a, I sh*t you not, definitive and comprehensive trigger warning. He specifically states that he wants the stories to make you a little uncomfortable.

        By design.

        So kudos to him.

      2. I’m curious how Hurley would respond if someone ranted about one of her books, based solely on the title.

      3. Well they did respond based, not on the title, but on the content. Hurley’s Rapture featured at the bottom of the Trigger Warning post sold 2,000 copies U.S. its first go-round. Now that she flogs white men every week, sales are sure to climb with this second release.

        Or she could concentrate on pure artistry and try a book bomb. There’s a natural limit to an SF plus white men stink audience. You have to do what J.K. Rowling and Ann Rice did and slowly reveal your layers of retardation after your millions are safely in the bank.

        SJWs can go on all they want about New York Times Best-Sellers Lists not having PoC. The truth is they ain’t at rodeos or hockey games either and that’s not racism but a thing called “culture.” This particular culture has a lot of white folks and they can read, and they don’t like being flogged by moronic aesthetes like Scalzi and Hurley.

      4. Quoted from Hurley’s article: “What kind of a world do we live in where other professionals, other creators, fear the social power of another creator to such an extent that they can’t even have professional disagreements? And if other creators won’t say anything, what about the people in our society that these sorts of warnings were designed to protect? Why would any of them say, “Hey, that’s not cool?” and risk the pile-on?”

        Looks like the SJW play book is not appreciated when they feel that it is wielded against them. To be clear, I don’t thing NG is actually doing that, rather, the SJW in question believes it.

    1. I vaguely remember when Neil Gaiman first mentioned that title – might have been on his Twitter. It was during/shortly after him actually running into the SJWs raaaaaaaaaage that got his friend removed from presenting/MC-ing at the last Hugos for ‘the chance he might make fat jokes.’

      I think he may have gotten rather annoyed. I’m quite curious now about the stories he wrote, because I was blissfully unaware of the SJWs screeching about it.

      1. Yup, Jonathan Ross. All the SJW screeching about Ross supposedly “not caring” or “not being close” to the Hugos is even more ridiculous when you know that Ross’ wife, Jane Goldman, actually has won a Hugo which she shared with Gaiman! (2007 screenplay for Gaiman’s Stardust)

        1. I didn’t know anything about Ross til the Hugo kerfuffle, but I loved Stardust (because it was the first fantasy movie in a while that evoked the ‘yay, I feel like a kid again’ reaction) and remember that Gaiman was very much involved in the screenplay version and liked the changes between the novel and the film. Mr. Ross is apparently One of Us, and that’s why he was originally invited to present at the con.

          And I’ll cheerfully admit that how Charlie Cox’s Tristan-with-the-long-hair reminded me of my hubby’s before he enlisted. *sighs wistfully*

      2. Gaiman also did -not- like the way the SJW crowd treated his wife when she did her concept album about a (fictional) set of musician conjoined twins a few years back.

        Their attacks against her and demands to his personal social media accounts that he divorce her (yes, really) were vicious, unrelenting, and way, way, WAY over the top.

        All in the name of protesting ableism. Or something. 😛

        1. I’ll cheerfully admit that the appeal of Amanda Palmer’s work escapes me, plus I find it head-tiltingly strange, but eh, it appeals to some folks… and I wasn’t fond of her song about the Boston Bomber, but… the heck?! on actually demanding that Gaiman divorce her? Uhm, from what little I see, she makes him happy.

          Maybe it’s a good thing that the only Gaiman fans I’ve been exposed to were in the Philippines when he was visiting?

      3. They must be astonishingly disloyal cowards themselves to imagine for a moment that an author would DIVORCE his WIFE because they felt offended by her. This implies that they would do the same.

    2. Trigger Warning: Trigger Warning Used in Title.

      These are horror stories. They contain horror. They might scare you. You’ve been warned. They are not as scary as H. P. [redacted], but the are very scary.

  4. I’d buy anything Kratman wrote, so picking up Big Boys Don’t Cry was a no-brainer. So glad it boosted him to #1 and put some filthy lucre in his pocket.

  5. Now I have to go find Trigger Warning. My book budget keeps growing thanks to the International Lord of Hate, and company.

  6. You know, if you could get a little Sad Puppy or Manatee logo to put on book covers as a seal of approval (OK, or maybe a seal with an eyepatch) to signify quality of art over purity of message… I’d buy them over a Hugo stamp every time…

      1. It’s rather like Vox taking the SFWA purge as a badge of honor. “If those bozos disapprove, it’s worth a look!”

  7. I’ve already read BBDC, and re-read it. Damn, but that’s a powerful book, especially today.

    I bought “One Bright Star…” and started it last night. And stayed up late to finish it. Damn, but that’s a piece of work. Very detailed, with a ton of references to previous authors and works.

    1. That’s because their addiction to failure is a thing they mistake for success. Their careers, their style of SFF is sinking, that of their opponents rising. There is plenty of evidence of that. They don’t like it. I estimate that within 2 to 3 years the main group of rabble rousers will have dispersed, ironically tainted by their associations with each other. Epub has taken them down, and in a big way. They can’t compete with that or themselves calling their own readers a pack of privileged racists. Who wants to hear that? Had Burroughs and Heinlein did that I’d never have read them, and they’re ten times the artists these morons are.

    1. I just program that into my built-in dyslexia engine and then I don’t have to manually edit the books. See, it does have a useful function!

  8. Is it wrong that the primary reason I have characters from all different ethnicities is in hopes that someone will scream “cultural appropriation” with these characters?

    1. The part that’s boggling is that the entire “cultural appropriation” shaming is directly counter to sole actual benefit of “diversity”.

      Do they -want- us to go back to Roman numerals? Do they even have any idea what -Greek- numerals -look- like? “Hey ma, I hate math, carving the little triangles in the clay tablets sucks that much.”

      1. Hey, I thought cultural appropriation was the American Way. I mean, don’t we coopt everyone’s culture and meld it into ours if it works?

        But hey, if I can make some heads explode by creating cool characters who also happen to check EEOC boxes and still make SJW’s furious, that’s the price I’m willing to pay. 😀

      2. The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.

        @ T.L. – I’d love for the SJWs to stop using English then, out of protest for the quote above, and moral outrage for STEALING from OTHER LANGUAGES and … oh wait they won’t. ‘Coz, that would require effort.

        It would have been funny if they did though, wouldn’t it?

    2. I recently dealt with this argument of “cultural appropriation”. Rather meanly, I invited the the squalling Progressive, that if they have such strong opinions about “cultural appropriation”, to kindly get out of “my” internet.

      This was not received well.

      1. Seen on Twitter, author’s name withheld:

        “Friends, you don’t get brownie points for including marginalized voices in your books.

        They should’ve been there all along.”

        Stupid, stupid, burning bright.

        1. Guess they’ve never heard the term “positive reinforcement”?

          I mean, it’s not exactly new or anything, but the idea, in case they seem to be trolling around here looking for stuff, is that if you want a behavior to continue, you give some kind of reward for it. If someone includes a diverse cast of characters like you want, you reward that behavior. Granted, it has to be a reward someone wants for it to work, but you get the idea.

          Instead, they just stomp their feet like petulant children until they get what they want, then when people go back to what they were doing before, they’re utterly perplexed for the supposed backslide.

      2. Here is an example of how utterly clueless these people are:

        Mixon links us to a page where they write: “I suggest that you make an effort to read and review the works of writers with marginalized identities, and to promote the writers themselves whenever possible, such as by considering them as convention guests, lecturers, columnists, and so forth.”

        That is accompanied by a list of SFF authors, the majority of whom make it their business to crowd with each other on Twitter and blogs and single out whites as an entire group for their special attention – daily! – 100% of it negative, some it hysteric delusions, and with plenty of racial insults and demonization theories no different from those used against Jews in the past.

        Mixon writes “I have a hope that somehow, someday, we can find a path to a place where we can hold conversations around some of the conflicts we’ve had in recent years regarding race, culture, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and so on… women, people of color, non-Westerners, LGBTQI, and dis/abled people are less likely to be given opportunities in the public sphere than white, cis-gendered, straight men, and more likely to have violence perpetrated against us”

        Then Mixon links us to a Guardian article that starts out like this:

        “Aminatta Forna: don’t judge a book by its author
        ‘I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer’ … Aminatta Forna on her frustration at the book world’s obsession with labels and identity”

        Then Mixon give us a list of people “who actively write, seek out, promote, and discuss diverse works.”

        “Don’t judge a book by its author.” We don’t. It’s these wacky intersectional race and gender-obsessed feminists who do. Mixon hits us with the black hole of an Orwelian circular argument SJWs always do:

        We’re divided… by gender, gender identity, race, culture, nationality, sexual orientation, dis/ability status… we should do away with identity politics altogether. But assuming social-justice concepts create divisions between us is a logical fallacy—akin to assuming that if we speak someone’s name, they’ll magically appear: if we just don’t talk about stereotyping and bias, it won’t get us! Except that this only works for those not harmed by those stereotypes.”

        In other words they are compelled to do what they don’t want to – convenient. Even better, straight white men make them, because straight white men are homophobic, racist, misoynists – as an entire group. It continually blows my mind how these folks jump through logic-hoops – pretending to have principles and rules – but which always bring us back to the same millions of offenders: “white, cis-gendered, straight men.”

        Even though Requires Hate made it her special business on her site to go after whites and men, somehow Mixon has magically changed that to women and PoC. But there was no “LOL blacks/Asians” keywords on the sidebar on her site. There was “LOL whites.” There was no “LOL gays,” there was “LOL heterosexuals.” There was no “LOL women,” there was “LOL neckbeards” and “white men.” There was “Whitey McWhite,” but never a “Black McBlack.”

        In short, for SJWs “we women, people of color, the dis/abled, and other marginalized people” are never wrong, no matter what and white men are never right no matter what.

        This entire pack of lies and bullshit could be solved tomorrow if SJWs simply obeyed the rules of their own convention harassment policies, or used the concepts behind a strike zone, equal protection and law. But they won’t do that and I’m supposed to accept that 200 million plus whites throw pitch after pitch after pitch that’s called a “ball” and SJWs are no-dog-in-the-hunt umpires who do the exact opposite in calling 100% strikes if it’s a darling member of the “marginalized” throwing a pitch.

        The reason SJWs don’t make these simple comparisons is because they can’t because they are addicted to identity or don’t want to because they are straight up racists. Who embraces the idea whites are racists as eagerly as they dismiss out of hand non-whites are? It’s a stacked deck of a con game that always comes right back to the same target: straight white men – millions of them.

        Mixon’s searching “investigation” never has RH quotes like “white people scrambling to save face and look more enlightened than the next white person” or the most important, “…though I’ve called R. Scott Bakker a shit-eating roach (and will happily continue to!), you can be sure I won’t be calling any minority writer anything like that, and have never done so.” Somehow that quote goes into a memory-hole. Heal yourselves, morons. If you’re looking for a KKK look in a mirror.

  9. I bought One Bright Star a few weeks back. JCW is an impressive writer. Looking forward to reading Big Boys and Other Heads.

    In the irony department, I found Hurley’s critique of Gaiman using “Trigger Warning” as a title. At the bottom of the page is a bit of ad copy for one of Hurley’s books, a thriller full of “brutal action.” I wonder if she put a trigger warning on all that brutality?

  10. Here’s a nice comment from 770’s Mixon post about “’Sad Puppies’ who seem to be trying to impose their Ideology on Fandom, in place of its long-standing Ideology, with which I’m quite comfortable.”

    My first question is what is our ideology? As far as I can tell it operates much like our Constitution, equal protection or live and let live. What is it we are promoting? Whiteness? Ladies in the kitchen? We all seem to dote on the most out-there SF stories from the classic era, which in no way have been eclipsed in the modern era when it comes to eccentric or radical artistry. What peculiar and recognizable semantics do we use that demonize ethnic and sexual groupings like “rape culture” and “white privilege”? Do we have influential blogs for Tor.com where our ideologically friendly author uses terms like “homo peeeoooople” on Twitter as did Alex MacFarlane “cis peeeoooople”? And it’s not like she’s alone. The number of racial and sexual insults which emanates from SJW SFF institutions is a flood.

    As for the end, why is this guy comfortable with an ideology that in no way is “long-standing”? I don’t recall anything about “cis-gendered males” and “white dude parades” that precedes 3 or 4 years ago, which is when the neo-KKK entered the scene. This is what we’re up against: sheer cluelessness with no teeth.

    And as a heads-up, Mixon’s post is a must-read for sheer stupidity and disingenuousness. It is classic Orwellian gender feminist confusion and anti-defamation defamation. Given free rein, this cult will turn all of America into a Detroit. They certainly have done so in their particular area of SFF, where idiotic Turner Diaries fanfic gets awards. Luckily cis-gendered white males have given them the Rosetta Stone called XHTML or they’d be posting letters via donkey express.

  11. Sorry, Larry, all you’ve proved is we buy books. Read them? Pshaw!
    They go on our (virtual) coffee tables to prove how erudite we is.
    (now where did I put that ‘sarcasm’ tag….)

    1. “…prove how erudite we is.”

      Murgy, you’re never going to convince them using such poor grammar. Here’s how it’s done:

      “Ha! I’m eruditer than you!”

  12. Congratulations. You’ve done more for Science Fiction with this one book bomb than every SJW combined has for cumulative effects of their seemingly endless crybaby-whine-fests.

    1. I agree this push back is having an effect. The SJWs haven’t changed their ways – far from it. But many of them have toned down their rhetoric and many of the lesser lights are giving up. That doesn’t mean they are not playing their discriminatory games in private, but we know who they are so that works both ways. Most importantly they’ve stopped with the swarming tactics. Two years ago posts like this would’ve brought out 70 blog posts with all the usual cries about racism, homophobia and women-hating. But they’ve been caught out for who and what they really are so that doesn’t fly anymore.

      SJWs are still putting a brave front on it and many can’t stop simply because the are obsessives with mental health issues. But it’s obvious they’re demoralized and they sense there is much worse to come for them. They can’t really shut up and the more they open their mouths the more readers they lose now, and that’s because the signal-boosting isn’t so one-sided now.

      Exactly how many times do you have to sarcastically Tweet “We ladies would be more tasteful if we would just shut up.” That’s not reality, that’s irrational paranoia, and of millions of people. Anyone who thinks something as innocuous as SFF is a Jim Crow for the “marginalized” is plain nuts. They don’t need to be debated but quarantined and quoted.

  13. SJWs: “Neil, we’re totally going to shun you!”

    Neil Gaiman: “Like you shunned me after my wife released the album about the conjoined twins? Oh, yeah, I’m SO SCARED.”

    SJW: *fumes*

    …glad it was a success. 🙂

      1. Both Gaiman and his wife have been on the wrong side of the inquisition which eats it’s own to keep them in line. Hurley’s just the latest to go at him. Her two Hugos are diminished by Gaiman turning his back on them. That’s a reflection of what the Hugos and Nebulas mean now. The SFWA especially only has itself to stare at. In literally only 2 years the Nebulas have ceased to have any meaning. What happened last year was a disgrace. Kowal can Tweet all she wants about no white men winning an award and it’ll be an increasingly hollow victory. It’s like running out of people to play practical jokes on at a party cuz everyone left. It’s Kerth Gersen after he killed the last Demon Prince. He says “I have been deserted by my enemies.” It’s Bradbury’s black folks who leave for Mars. Let this KKK blink at each other. The Hugos are right behind them. What happened their last year was also a disgrace. Who in their right mind believes they’re marching on Selma for all the poor oppressed women, gays and PoC marginalized in SFF? You have to be either nuts, a complete bigot or a moron, and that’s not much to choose from for company.

  14. The SJWs don’t care about sales. Because they don’t really make money off of books.

    Most of them are academics of some variety. They get paid by universities, or nonprofits, or arts grants. For those groups, sales don’t matter. In fact, good sales might actually endanger your chance of getting more grants or academic promotions.

    However, reviews — especially from lit’ry reviewers outside the SF ghetto — are gold. That’s the currency of getting appointments at better institutions, getting tenure, getting fellowships, etc.

    So for the SJWs, it’s actually a FEATURE if their crap kills SF and fantasy commercially. They want it to be a little hermetic academic clique like modern poetry.

    In short: they’re not just trying to take over SF, they’re trying to kill it.

  15. “last week I was accused of trying to get you Sad Puppies volunteers to nominate without reading the actual works”

    I missed that page in the memo. [rats, that’s what I get for skimming] I’ve been reading anything I could get my hands on.

    Picked up ‘Bright Star’ last night, just finished it. Very powerful and worthy of an award. Gotta work out a way to send ‘Big Boys’ to my sister so I can borrow her Kindle. Sitting at the puter to read ‘Bright Star’ got to my back. {ow, ow}

    Finished “Lines of Departure” over the weekend and now working my way through ‘Dark Between’. Running out of time to get everything read and get my noms in.

  16. I would have liked to participate, but…I bought “One Bright Star” and “Big Boys Don’t Cry” as soon as they were first released. As for the other, well, I’m in the middle of a move and the book fund is currently tapped out.

    Alas.

  17. At 21:00 Central, those numbers look to have been peaks, all three are now down between 10 and 30 points.

    Still, HUGE WIN. Plus, at the very least a couple of thousand Washingtons in the various authors pockets. Nothing wrong with that.

  18. Novellas are frigging awesome, and I’m surprised at how many of them have influenced mainstream culture. One of my favorites is Who Goes There? that inspired John Carpenter’s The Thing, one of the best horror movies ever!

    It is true though that authors today have difficulty selling novellas when competing against full-sized novels. However they seem to be making a resurgence these days due to ebook systems which allow young authors to sell stuff dirt cheap without having to sell an arm and a leg to publish.

    I can’t help but wonder how a newbie like me might work my way onto one of these, since I’m writing novellas, but am a relative nobody at the moment. I don’t mean to sound like a leech you understand, I’m sure Larry gets swarmed by people asking for Book Bombs like locusts on wheat fields. Still, I can’t very well find out without asking, y’know? A guy has to eat, right? If it helps at all I’m writing stories revolving around cowboys fighting dinosaurs. Thank you Rule of Cool! 😀

    I don’t want to go plugging here without permission though, makes me feel dirty.
    Any advice or thoughts would be most appreciated by this tiny N-list author. 🙂

        1. Is it? I thought Kindle would be a larger pool since there are short stories, novelettes, novellas, and books that are kindle only while most print books coming out have a kindle format as well.

          Of course, Amazon has out of print books listed as well, so that skews it a bit. :/

          1. There are a LOT of books, current ones, that are not in eBook format. There can’t be more than maybe 2 million Kindle eBooks. Probably close to 1,122,599….

  19. Kratman’s book is about a sentient super-tank…does that make it “post-gender?”
    Unless they’ve got AI tanks that are ‘male’ and ‘female’ in ways beyond the first Brit tanks in WWI, and they’re making little baby tanks.

    1. I wonder what the SJW’s think of the genders of the members of the Dinochrome Brigade. Some, after all, do have distinctly male — or female — personalities. Technically, all the later ones would be biologically “female,” as they contain enough information and equipment to if necessary reproduce (it would take them a long time) unless they’ve been specifically forbidden to do so by their masters.

      Now I want to write a story about a gay Bolo … 😀

  20. “Not more dying polar bears and thinly veiled Dick Cheneys globally warming a bold post-binary gender world!”

    Yeah… Stross’ Merchant Princes started out as a worthy successor to Zelazny’s Amber, but tragically devolved into something that could only make sense to Guardian readers, with Republicans trying to nuke America because cheap foreign oil or something. Which was especially ironic considering 1) the books were largely about the protagonist’s attempt to upgrade interworld rare commodity exchange into interworld intellectual property exchange and 2) fracking was invented in the real world and the US became the #1 oil producer… because we innovated new intellectual property.

    1. I’ve read first two “Merchant Princes” books few years ago and liked them. Recently I was wondering about reading the rest. Thanks for the warning.

    2. The problem with Stross is he’s just so economically ignorant that reading him is like listening to fingernails on chalkboards. “Venture altruist”? Can you get any stupider than that?

  21. Here’s one of Scalzi’s favorite bands he promotes on Twitter. Surprisingly, they don’t think much of men or have any talent.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axP-bk17C7I

    Don’t forget to check out their other hit called “Mansplaining.” I think they have a Patreon account. Make sure you ask if they have change for a nickel.

    1. Really… nothing but “cute” involved with baby Jesus in the trash… I’ve totally changed my mind and become a feminist.

      If all the sexist haters in the world disappeared, I wonder how many SJW’s would be left…

      Look… I met a sexist once. He was a cadet from the Citadel, upper class Southern… 25 years ago. There was a mechanic that wouldn’t tell me what the broken part did, said my husband knew and proceeded to ignore me… 20 years ago. Vox probably is a sexist but I’m not entirely certain and it doesn’t bother me. So that is what… THREE in three decades? Oh, there were probably others, but in the age range of fossilized, so I don’t count them.

      Who do these women meet that they’re wading through sexists on a daily basis? “I’m not impressed by your bull shit” isn’t the definition of sexism. I rather suspect that if they think it is, the actual sexists they’ve met is zero.

      1. Other things that aren’t sexism…
        1. “I’m not impressed by your bull sh*t” (deserves repeating)
        2. “I failed to keep myself from noticing that you’re female.”
        3. Treating a girl like one of the guys.
        4. The word “pussy.”
        5. The word “hysterical.”
        6. Treating a woman like a lady.
        7. The word “lady”.
        8. Ridiculous fantasy armor with operatic metal boob cones.
        9. A failure to suppress biological response.
        10. And…. not being impressed by your bull sh*t.

      2. Are we surprised this vacuum of talent and humor is enjoyed by SJWs? I think a better name for them would be “The Irritations” or “The Doublehicks.” WorldCon has found its future emcees and that’s for sure, because singing redneck nuns is about their speed. There’s something mean-spirited about their humor where the “mean” precedes” the “humor.” There’s tons of jokes about men that are funny but this is more on the level of “Jewsplaining,” because when you forget the actual satire all this is stuff amounts to is putting words like “blacks” and “watermelons” together and expecting me to laugh.

    2. Why am I not surprised that they have comments disabled on the video? As usual, the rabbits can’t deal with any criticism.

      Also, I’m calling BS on that song. No one who possesses the gift of sight would catcall either of them. Certainly no one who could hear their sorry excuse for singing, either.

      Scalzi’s promoting them? Well, I guess they might sound better than his wife’s Klingon poetry.

      1. Actually, I’m sure somebody would, if nothing else, just to annoy them. But it takes all kinds to make a world, so, much to our detriment, some peculiar fellow probably did.

    3. Poor Scalzi. If he only knew the contempt female feminists hold male feminists in. He’ll never be able to join the Cool Girls.

  22. Picked up One Bright Star to Guide Them, already had Big Boys Don’t Cry. I need more John C. Wright in my Kindle.

  23. Thanks for recommending Big Boys Don’t Cry – got it, read it, really enjoyed it. I made a note to check out more by the author once I get through a bit more backlog.

  24. Despite all the bleating about racist whites in SFF which has produced the bitterness in the SFF community which in turn eventually produced Sad Puppies, the truth is in only the space of a few days you have another hit piece about “white, cis-gendered, straight men” by Laura Mixon, the wife of the SFWA president. You have a list of 18 anti-white “marginalized” writers at a link in her post, the British SF Assoc. nominating Requires Hate (the worst racist in SF history) for an award alongside a story from the frequently anti-white Book Smugglers, and the release of the Nebula nominees, with its usual little cadre of anti-white voices.

    It never stops – not for one day and it is by the most prominent authors and editors in SFF. The amount of hysteric anti-white rhetoric compared to an actual reason for it is so divorced from reality and over-the-top it’s incredible. The insults are against what is basically a white demographic no different than the National Hockey League being unfairly characterized as a KKK. Then when we push back SJWs say “we told you so.” Who do they think is going to push back – non-whites? Gays? Maybe people from China, or Muslims? Is GLAAD and the Jewish Anti-Defamation League full of plumbers and carpenters?

    Mixon maintains “Internet trolls are nearly all men, who ferociously and endlessly attack mostly women and people of color. Guess who gets it worst? Feminists and women of color.” Well, duh. Apparently Mixon can write posts but not read them.

    There is nothing remotely like that the so-called “marginalized” in SFF are facing by way of racist anti-non-white voices institutionalized into SF and I defy them or anyone to present the quotes that would prove me wrong. Their bleating about not being “safe” and having their careers “strangled” verges on insanity.

    I’m getting the sense the next prank is going to involve loading up the SFWA because of their new epub rules and change the voting there too. If Social Justice Warriors are going to make unsubstantiated daily racist claims across a few years without a stick of evidence while bystanders (for example like Chris Gerrib, Mike Glyer and Kevin Standlee) sit back and pretend it’s not even happening, then being pranked is really all this entire crew deserves. SJWs have brought it on themselves by forming up into an affirmative action section of the KKK and telling me it’s rain or “politics.”

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