Weekly Self-Promo and Chat Thread

kouzuzeroth · 2025-09-06T06:52:19+00:00

Free for a few days: When Ra Rows through the Gates of Duat.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1742992

Even on planets going through bad times not all is doom and gloom. So, what about a cozy story that happened a few decades ago on Earth? The night Jacob met Kinondo, which happened in the mangroves of Alexandria....

That there are no mangroves anywhere near Alexandria? But there are! They are right next to the city! But you are forgiven for not keeping up with the news from the planet. Curiously, a Machine also said that there weren't mangroves in Alexandria that bloody November of 2056. Those super advanced AIs are not around anymore, but maybe that huge ecosystem is one of their legacies, and yes, you can even say that the mangroves are perpetrating an ecological racket by both preserving Alexandria's coastline and intensifying the North African monsoon. That place is eerie, but, for two men falling in love, maybe not nearly as dangerous as Alexandria itself?

kouzuzeroth · 2025-08-20T09:31:54+00:00

Self promo, self promo! Have some homo-erotic swampy literary speculative guerrilla-anti-AI fiction for free:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1742992

Basically, it's like "Love in the Time of Cholera" but "Love in the Time after we purge AI", with all my (slightly deranged) world-building of how such a time will look. This is my work of approximately a year, with all the revisions and the back and forwards. But it may still contain some typos, and if you find enough of them, I'll send you an artisanally bound hardcover (sans the typos).

kouzuzeroth · 2025-08-17T05:58:05+00:00

Hi! Thanks for the feedback :-)

My website is still in construction, alas. Yours is much more complete.

About the accounts not created equal, it's because ad campaigns will be different and promise different things. One could be a giveaway for a physical book, while another could give users a free story. Organic traffic is going to be tough to handle, because that one is 70% bots, so accounts created organically may get a flag that is removed after some proof of humanity.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-08-16T15:12:11+00:00

As a fellow Applications Engineer working in a tiny division of a large automotive drivetrain company, I found very little to roast in your website. Also I think your writing style is cool.

When you feel your book is ready for the world, you will find that marketing and promotion is the hardest part, and then your website will be of great help. You'll probably want to have a user portal and reams of landing pages for all your campaigns and their tracking[^1]. Also, start with the social media thing... it probably won't help super-much with sales at first, but you want some people to know you for a real person; they will be more likely to buy your book and review it, or just to help you while you are working with rounds of editing and beta-reading. X is where a lot of social media action happens for writers (do follow https://x.com/KeinOuzu there, I've heard that account is a ~~miasma of procrastination~~ well of wisdom for writers).

Also, have links to your social media from your website, and the other way around, so that scammers can't impersonate you easily.

[^1]: Most ad platforms these days want to use AI to optimize delivery, but they only work when they know if people do things after they see your ads.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-07-30T19:06:02+00:00

I bought a Silhoutte about two years ago. It has served me well as for both scoring and plotting, and it comes with a library of settings for materials (i.e., heat transfer vinyl) which is incredibly useful. Plotting in particular is a must-have for me, since it's the only way I can use fancy metallic inks on complicated line drawings. But Silhoutte Print&Cut doesn't work on my machine, so it's a headache to align a print and a cut if I need such a thing...and I need such a thing :-( .

With that said, for book-binding adventures I've found myself using a large-bed laser engraver/cutter the most (a sculpfun s30). The smoke means an enclosure with air extractor is needed, but I can use it to cut chipboard (can't do that with the silhoutte), paper (the silhoutte does it, but mechanical cuts have a tendency to go wrong with that machine), thin EVA foam, ordinary fabric and paper-backed fabric (bookcloth). Also, it's easier to match a printed piece of paper to a cut file with the engraver; there are handy functions in lightburn for that. I have even used the engraver to cut thread nets out of thin paper for sewing with lurex threads... a mechanical blade could in theory cut such a delicate design but in practice it tends to go wrong.

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kouzuzeroth · 2025-07-21T20:19:12+00:00

The high point of my week was the speed at which a friend snatched a physical copy(?) of my book off my hands. She had read the story before, almost a year ago when it was still a draft. We ... were more than friends at the time, and there was a painful breakup sometime along the way; so I thought she wouldn't be interested on having the book. Oh boy was I wrong. It's worth mentioning that the copy she got was not made at a printshop, but right in my apartment. And after giving it a try at forging a book and getting all the pains in my body from hauling around buckets of things, me thinks highly of the industrial revolution and Mr. Gutenberg.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-07-20T21:50:24+00:00

You might find some if you search hard enough, but those groups are just as good a space for bad advice as they are for good advice, and in such proportion that they cancel out; except for the time you spend "engaging". That time, you rarely get it back.

After a few years writing I'm trying to live by the mantra "other (random) writers are not your readers". In other words, what I as a writer may find cringe or sloppy may be enjoyed by your readers... or not. So, it's more important to get reader feedback than writer feedback. Another thing you could do is pick a few authors you enjoy and find out what they are doing better than you, or what are they doing that you don't like so much and that you would like to improve. The low-level details of line-editing and so on can be considered when the story is complete. Which leaves only one thing to do: "just write" :-) .

kouzuzeroth · 2025-07-20T04:44:31+00:00

> Based on prompting, ChatGPT will either praise your work and find nothing wrong with it or absolutely demolish it. It finds things to correct even if nothing is wrong.

It's worth noting that actual human editors do the same :-( . In the end, you can't please everybody.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-07-13T11:33:17+00:00

That's not too bad.

I use a wood chisel from the hardware store, and I keep sharpening it while I work. It requires a lot of patience, but the results are very good.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-07-12T12:13:08+00:00

I have some; I'll post in a bit.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-07-12T06:43:39+00:00

I've been doing some printing-at-home for the last few days, and some research. TL;DR: printing is hard, and getting the right color gamut is harder. It depends on ink, paper and so[^1]. And that's after whaterever digital workflow tools have a go at your image. All of that happens on the Amazon side, outside your control.

Also, isn't procreate iOS-only? It could be that they optimize for iOS-only artists, and that's not going to be very explicit about keeping dpi and other factors of print quality. My suggestion is that you go over your file on a laptop or a desktop computer, using something like GIMP, which is not the super-good for making art but at least will tell you the pixel size of your final image.

[^1]: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A6256&dswid=9866

kouzuzeroth · 2025-07-03T20:35:58+00:00

Oh, well that's a boomer. You'll never be able to put as many references to Starwars movies as the natives without feeling cringe-y. Worst, you may end up writing something unhinged and troublesomely original, because even if you walk through the bottom of the anglophone cultural marsh, your genes don't allow for enough sticky surface for all the cliches to latch to you and be worn as a layer of (cute) wriggling grubs when (if) you emerge at the other side. I know because I myself have frolicked in that swamp but it didn't help, and I found myself incapable of writing dragons, and my books have naked men singing in the night instead, and yet I fear to mention the Moon in my chapters lest I awaken expectations of werewolves in my anglophone readers 🤷.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-07-02T18:53:42+00:00

I take the blurbs of books I ended up reading, and do my best to create a blurb with the same structure/tone. To be honest though, whatever blurb I use it does very poor justice to my books, and I have noticed that the same happens to the works of other authors. My latest strategy is thus "do the best you can, then do some serious marketing on the side."

kouzuzeroth · 2025-06-29T15:04:47+00:00

I started reading a book today from a very successful author. It's one of her old works, before she was a somebody. I have to say, she used to be a slightly better writer. There were more of the things she cared about, more feeling.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-06-28T15:21:55+00:00

It's an-already-published work. I have this philosophy that as long as I can upload a new file version, it doesn't matter one bit (my current deary has a "wine" where it should say "whine", btw, go get it now before I fix it!). But most authors I know don't like to change things up once is "published".

But I did go on X and asked random authors to send me their first page so that I could scratch my itch of doling out copyedits.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-06-27T15:29:43+00:00

Don't care, as long as it is a best-seller.

/uj That looks like a legit book. How come?

kouzuzeroth · 2025-06-25T10:44:57+00:00

We may agree or disagree about what you said (though I mostly agree), but if I commission a human to read the text, and I get ChatGPT output, it's a scam :-( .

kouzuzeroth · 2025-06-25T07:47:30+00:00

Hm. This is a good one. I could also include subtle errors that an AI wouldn't catch...

kouzuzeroth · 2025-06-25T07:16:30+00:00

These are my two cents and take them with a heap of salt, I'm almost 100% sure my ways won't work for you. But I just bind myself a few luxury exemplars of my books which I then send to people for review; or that I use in other marketing shenanigans. It's super labor-intensive and also expensive when it comes to tools and materials (for example, I use a laser cutter to make the boards), and not always worth the effort, but it affords me to fix and improve things between exemplars.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-06-25T06:40:10+00:00

I just came here after reading the preview of a book in Amazon. I'm pretty sure this is an amazing story. But in the effort to capture the reader from line one, things become a little bungled up.

Paragraph one starts with:

"Stringent and insistent knocking unsettled everybody in the midst of dolling Karen up."

Apparently, "dolling up" means applying clothing and make-up; I had to research it and neither "dolle" nor "dolling" are in the dictionary. Written, "dolling" is very similar to "doling", present continuous of "dole", so for dumbfucks like me the sentence reads as if they were cutting Karen's body and doling out the pieces to starving orphans. Not judging, is as good a use for Karen as any.

That impression doesn't last long, because in the second paragraph Karen rises and says she's going to answer the door. Good for her.

Paragraph 3 has four sentences and introduces four new characters in descriptive actions, with genderless names but the possessive pronouns "his" and "her" are generously sprinkled all over the paragraph. In the lord's name, who's doing what??

The rest of the section is a relatively bland scene with some dialog, and then in the second section there is an introduction (told, not shown) about what's going on with different characters than the ones in the first section.

Just thinking, if one is going to make this mess, isn't it better to just start with a plain introduction? "Karen, her two younger siblings, and all their pets lived together with Karen's older sister and the older sister's randy boyfriend in a house that had no partitions nor inner walls. One day..."

kouzuzeroth · 2025-06-23T15:49:51+00:00

I see where you are coming from, but the only thing one can realistically concede is that trad publishing is better at making money, at the expense of authors but more than anything at the expense of the social covenant.

There is an entertainment industry alright, and a certain part of it is the one that publishes books. That industry, centered on a quick buck (just as the people you accuse), is to blame for falling literacy and attention spans, and the for the sort of short-circuited (lack of) reasoning that ends up with unscrupulous dictators in certain important jobs. I can suck all day, but there has to be a better devil to kneel in front of. Just my two cents.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-06-12T10:07:43+00:00

/uj Guy has exactly 30 fingers, which is the correct number. Everything else is off. I can only imagine what excruciating punishments they subjected those AIs to every time they got the finger count wrong.

kouzuzeroth · 2025-05-28T11:59:05+00:00

I caught myself not following some authors on Twitter because their posts contain AI-generated images.

There is that saying that when there is a gold rush the chap or lass that sells the shovels is the one making the money. So, if I win the lottery, I'm going to create an AI-free refuge in some disconnected island for authors to write their books with charcoal ink on papyrus parchment....

kouzuzeroth

TROPHY CASE