EXTRAORDINARY BOOK PROMO RESUMES TOMORROW EVENING. SORRY FOR THE HIATUS BUT FIRST MY ASSISTANT GOT SICK, AND THEN MY CPAP WAS MALFUNCTIONING LEADING TO ME JUST ABOUT FACE PLANTING BY 8 PM. BUT WE’RE BETTER, BOTH OF US.
TODAY THERE WILL BE NO EXTRAORDINARY BOOK PROMO, BECAUSE YOU DON’T NEED A BOOK PROMO WITH YOUR BOOK PROMO SO YOU CAN PROMO WHILE YOU PROMO. THERE WILL, HOWEVER, BE SHAMELESS WRITER SELF-PROMO. BECAUSE SOMETIMES I HAVE TO PROMO.
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH
FROM SARAH A. HOYT, FIRST STARTED ON THIS BLOG: Witch’s Daughter (Empires of Magic Book 2)
Some letters come from the living. Some come from the dead. This one comes with a formula that turns a rowboat into a miracle.
Seventeen-year-old Lord Michael Ainsling — youngest brother of the Duke of Darkwater, builder of mechanical marvels, survivor of fairyland — receives a letter from a man sixteen years dead. The inventor Tristram Blakley has not perished; he has been imprisoned by his own genius and begs the one mind in all of Avalon brilliant enough to understand his work to set him free. All Michael has to do is find seven missing brothers first and walk a magical path..
Fifteen-year-old Albinia Blakley has spent her whole life under her mother’s iron thumb — and her mother is a witch. The day Al finally escapes down a rope of knotted sheets, she lands in a world she doesn’t recognize, with no money, no magic kit, and no idea that the stranger who catches her is about to become her greatest ally.
Together, a girl with more secrets than she knows and a boy who builds machines that try to murder him must outwit a sorceress, navigate the treacherous courts of Fairyland, and unravel an enchantment years in the making — before a family is lost for good.
Witch’s Daughter is a gaslamp fantasy brimming with wit, warmth, and wonder, for readers who love their magic wrapped in velvet and their adventures served with morning tea.
FROM SCOTT MCCREA: U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint: Flint’s Bullet: A Western Adventure (A U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint Western Book 9)
Another pulse-pounding Marshal Ezra Flint adventure from award-winning author Scott McCrea!
U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint has a target painted on his back when “Killer” Cain Bendo hires four professional gunmen to assassinate him. Now Flint is on the run, searching for his attempted killers while trying to protect his friends, Deputy P.J. Dunn and sawbones Doc Prouty, who defy his orders and try to help. Can Killer Cain Bendo measure Flint for a coffin while still in prison? Or will Flint go from prey… to predator?
Saddle up for the most explosive Flint adventure yet!
FROM RON CORRIVEAU: The Least Significant
An alien thief has escaped to Earth with an object of critical importance to his planet.
With the authorities close behind, the thief plans to hide by blending in among the people. But there’s a problem. His native form would make him stand out, so he’ll need to borrow a human body.
And he has a specific one in mind.
Catherine and Marcus are a young couple enjoying the evening of their engagement in downtown Dallas when Marcus suddenly vanishes from the sidewalk in a burst of shimmering lights. Unable to explain his disappearance, Catherine is soon approached by a mysterious man who tells her the thief he is chasing has taken over Marcus’ body and displaced his essence to another dimension.
Unsure whether to believe him, Catherine reluctantly agrees to help when she learns the man can return Marcus to his body. But, as they begin to close in on the thief, Catherine uncovers a shocking truth about Marcus and the alien planet more fantastic than she ever imagined.
FROM J. KENTON PIERCE: An Apple for the Legion: A Tales From the Long Night Novella
From the universe of the 2026 Prometheus Award finalist A Kiss for Damocles — welcome to the Tales from the Long Night.
Third Decanus Kaur was engineered for this.
The Mutual Prosperity builds its legionaries from the genes of heroes — and Kaur carries the literal face of Tanveer Kaur, hero of the Spring Thunder Campaign, the soldier whose sacrifice helped pull humanity back from extinction. She has trained since birth to liberate the enslaved populations of the Terran Commonwealth. She has memorized the Social Virtues. She has crushed her doubts, disciplined her questions, and proven herself a worthy daughter of humanity’s finest.
Then she lands on Hesperides Colony, and the liberation refuses to go as planned.
The colonists fight like they mean it — not from ideology or fanaticism, but because they have something worth protecting. When her commander hands her a contraband biography of her own mother and tells her to read it, the headaches begin. Because what Tanveer Kaur actually believed, actually said, in her own unedited words — it doesn’t match anything the Prosperity taught her daughter.
Then the volcano erupts.
Cut off from Fleet. No resupply. No evacuation. A dying colony buried under ash, a population the Prosperity considers expendable, and orders that grow more monstrous by the hour. Kaur is twenty-three years old. She commands ten legionaries. And the man who has spent decades teaching her what it truly means to honor her heritage is running out of time to finish the lesson.
An Apple for the Legion is a gripping, character-driven military science fiction novella — precise, dark, and impossible to set aside. A story set in the Tales from the Long Night: a universe where humanity survived the stars and built something that might not have been worth saving.
FROM RACONTEUR PRESS, EDITED BY RITA BEEMAN: Auntie Heroes (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 74)
They’ve been overlooked, underestimated, and politely sidelined for decades. Fine. That’s fine. Let them keep underestimating.
In the pages of Auntie Heroes, meet ten women of a certain vintage who possess particular sets of skills and absolutely zero patience for the alternative. A fire fairy stepmother navigating werewolves and blended family politics. A retired intelligence operative who knits Kevlar scarves and outsmarts Belarusian thieves in a foreign embassy. A grandmother farming fourteen hundred acres with alien assistance — and handling the unfriendly ones with a shotgun full of rock salt. A sharp-eyed matron in a Lovecraftian coastal town who defeats an elder god with Eternal Father Strong to Save and a can of extra-hold hairspray. A suburban gardener who discovers her neighbor’s invasive kudzu is a Cold War-era biological antenna siphoning encrypted data from Fort Meade — and handles it accordingly.
Across fairy tales, spy thrillers, alien farms, suburban horror, and the salt-choked streets of a town that smells permanently of low tide, these women share one defining trait: they have been here long enough to know exactly what needs doing. And they will absolutely do it.
Stories include: “Stepmother Ever After” by Nancy Frye • “Calhoun Blood” by D.S. Ligon • “The Squamous Among Us” by Spearman Burke • “Salon and Subversion” by Tuvela Thomas • “A Dressing Down” by Aelth Faye • “From the Ashes” by TC Ross • “Knit One, Sanction Two” by Ted Begley • “Pruning with Extreme Prejudice” by Michael Patrick Coady • “Walking the Beans” by Rick Cutler • “The Knitting Circle at Innsmouth” by Malory
The world has a great many hind ends that require a proper thrashing. We’re betting on the lady with the flamethrower.
FROM D. W. PATTERSON: Zero Point
Zero Point: A Novel
Jack Carson had a stroke of luck; a great-uncle had left him land in Arizona.
But that’s when Jack’s luck began to change, mysterious sights and sounds threatened to make his inheritance worthless as a center for the study of physics.
Marta Merritt decided to help, and she didn’t think it a mystery, she thought it was an artifact of a forgotten physics theory called pilot-wave mechanics.
To build the center they would have to find out, and they would have to stay alive to do so.
Zero Point is a novel in a new series of Quantum Adventures which extrapolates future, cutting-edge science from today’s research papers.
For news and future releases see the author’s website, http://www.dwpatterson.com, or hit the Follow button below.
Hard Science Fiction – Old School.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Detritus
Nick Bryant was a junkie. Lived on the streets, and everything. And then, he saved a baby girl from drowning, and fell into the role of protector. As he, the baby, and her older brother get to know one another, he decides that maybe, there’s more left to him than the drugs, and decides to try to live again. And maybe build a family.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion and the Darkness (Timelines Book 4)
At long last, Ariela Rivers Wolff begins her mission to the Simulated Worlds.
As the Martyr of Sardristra, she finds herself in the position of a Joan of Arc, burned at the stake for preaching a sermon of love to a very violent race of . . . blue, four-legged, four-armed, sort-of-horse analogs. Five hundred years later in their history, she finds a totally-reversed welcome as “Saint Ardreyelya” in the country in which she first appeared. Will she be able to prevent the rest of the world from destroying “her” people before she can convert them, too?
As the Goddess of Mahoukai, she finds herself the deity of a world religion in a world governed by magic. And like all worlds with magic, inevitably there is a Demon Lord. She’ll have to deal with that Demon Lord before the world of Mahoukai can be realized into the True Universe . . . but in the event, the Demon Lord is an infiltrated agent of the very enemies she is sworn to fight in the real world. Can The Lion of God take on a Darkness, single-handed? If not, it may spell doom for the inhabitants of Mahoukai – and for herself.
FROM KAREN MYERS: King of the May – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 3)
Book 3 of The Hounds of Annwn.
MORE VALUABLE AS A WEAPON THAN A KINGMAKER, HE MUST MAKE HIS OWN CHOICES TO SECURE THE FUTURE.
George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, had hoped to settle into a quiet life with his new family, but it was not to be. Gwyn ap Nudd, Prince of Annwn, has plans to secure his domain in the new world from the overbearing interference of his father Lludd, the King of Britain.
The security of George’s family is bound to that of his overlord, and he vows to help. But when he and his companions stand against Lludd and his allies at court, disaster overturns all their plans and even threatens the Hounds of Annwn themselves.
George and his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, must survive a subtle attack that undermines them both. Other gods and gods-to-be have taken an interest, but the fae are divided in their allegiances and fear the threat of deadly new powers in their unchanging lives.
George and his companions must save themselves if they are to persuade their potential allies to help. But how can they do so, attacked on so many fronts at once? Will he put his family into greater jeopardy by trying to defend them?
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Spiral Horn, Spiral Tusk
A unicorn’s horn for the king, a medal for the admiral — but what for the lass who makes it possible?
Rissa possesses the dolphin-singer gift, which saved her life when the thief-taker found her. If she can guide the fleet to the white whale with the spiral tusk, she might win back her freedom.
But first she must return to land — and the sea has become angry at her betrayal…
A short story of the Ixilon universe
Originally published in Beyond the Last Star: Stories from the Next Beginning, edited by Sherwood Smith.
FROM JOHN BAILEY: THE CONCIERGE OF HÔTEL AURORE (Science Fiction Singles)
In the occupied colony of Nouvelle Bruges, the Hôtel Aurore still welcomes its guests.
The concierge still keeps her records.
The elevators still run on time.
The system still functions.
And that is precisely the problem.
When the Aurigan Compact seizes control of the colony, they do not burn cities or break institutions. They refine them. Every person is classified. Every movement recorded. Every discrepancy corrected.
At the center of it all stands Élise Marceau, senior concierge—overlooked, precise, and quietly indispensable.
She does not fight with weapons.
She does not organize rebellions.
She does not leave her post.
Instead, she begins to make small corrections.
A name adjusted.
A room reassigned.
A transfer that already happened—on paper.
Soon, people begin to disappear from the system without disappearing at all.
As an Aurigan audit closes in and the machinery of control tightens, Élise and her colleagues transform the hotel into something else entirely: a place where the records lie just enough to keep people alive.
In a world where identity is defined by documentation, survival depends on a simple question:
What happens when the system is no longer accurate?
Perfect for readers of intelligent, atmospheric science fiction, The Concierge of Hôtel Aurore is a story of quiet defiance, bureaucratic warfare, and the power of small acts to disrupt even the most perfect system.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: Complex.
According To Hoyt 
This prompt is too complicated for me to write a vignette. [Crazy Grin]
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This prompt gave me a vignette in my sleep. Well, not so much a vignette…
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Remember, o Readers, that you can be FORCE MULTIPLIERS!
When you read books, you can rate and review them.
Even short reviews are of aid to the writer, because sheer mass helps. (And if you really can’t review, still rate.)
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“However, considering how many crafts are worked in this land, I think perhaps it is best that Lady Clara show me this dream-spinning that she speaks of.”
For a moment, Clara thought of another spell, any of the spells she had regained in her stolen hours, but that was folly.
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Isaac shook his head, an expression of despair taking over his face. “Dang, I thought compound interest was hard to understand, but this takes it a whole ‘nother level.”
Sanjay walked over to take a closer look. “What’s wrong?”
“Take a look at this stuff the Kitties sent us. Supposedly it’s the math that underlies their stardrive, but I can’t make heads or tails of it, even after it’s transliterated into our notation.”
“Looks like they’re using some serious hypercomplex numbers here. I studied it a little, mostly in relation to matrix theory, but we never went beyond quaternions and octonions. If that’s an accurate transliteration of Chongu mathematical notation, they’re using bicomplex and split-complex numbers that are pretty much pure theoretical math here on Earth.”
“Which means they may not just be blowing smoke about their stardrive dipping into paratime to get around the lightspeed limit. Now that’s going to get some people’s panties seriously in a wad.”
Sanjay had that disappointed look of someone who’d expected better of humanity. Then again, the dharmic faiths seemed to handle ideas like the Many Worlds Interpretation more easily than the Abrahamic faiths.
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The care and feeding of a good orgy are a complex dance of logistics.
And sex. Very important.
And timing. You have to plan around refractory times, endorphin and blood sugar recovery, time to clean up and restock various stations for people to enjoy, aftercare, and most important is to keep people motivated.
It’s possible to get overwhelmed or just plain bored if the dance isn’t done right. So, breaking up the times between poundings with recovery, talk, seduction, and plain relaxation is vital.
The Dawn Empire, bless their hearts, has manuals and documentation about all of this. And the Servants have access to training programs and after-action reports.
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Maybe the Servants could help out Sarah.
She’s said that every time she wants to “set up” an orgy things like invasions of giant spiders happen. [Very Very Big Twisted Grin]
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…I don’t think the Great Aunt would want to write a Living With Monstergirl story, but I could be wrong.
Or I could be crazy.
Or I could just be the lunatic you’re looking for.
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…I’m beginning to think we need more invasions of giant spiders.
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No, just … no. I do NOT do spiders well. Especially Spiders of Unusual Size.
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Okay, fair. : )
But it would be amusing to see an invasion of something descend upon certain places….
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Every time I tried to set up a romance, i got bored and giant spiders killed everyone. So I gave it up for a bad job.
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…do a romance between giant spiders. You get the killing and the romance at the same time.
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Amused Seems fair!
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I write romance as PART of my books, but I was trying to write category romance (like Harlequins) back in the dark ages, because it was easier to break into and make money and we were young and broke.
THOSE I couldn’t write.
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No longer recommending Sarah’s matchmaking service, noted.
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No. This was in the 80s while trying to break into Harlequin which was back then super-formulaic.
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Oh, ok. Outside my expertise, but, did you try making the spiders shirtless?
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Noooo! That must have been the problem.
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Now you’ve made me try to imagine how a spider would put on a shirt. 😁
And I can’t see it.
Nor can I unsee it.
I think the problem is topologically impossible. 😛
Spider clothes. Shirt on four legs, pants on the other four?
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DO NOT MAKE ME DRAW THIS. Go bother Cedar. She’ll enjoy doing it.
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The shirt is very small. The pants are very large.
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One to three shirts on two legs apiece?
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*Cackles*
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Every time romance shows up in my stories it is a surprise, and accident, and totally not on purpose. For some inexplicable reason the readers always seem to want more of the stuff that just kind of falls out when I’m busy doing plot things.
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> just kind of falls out when I’m busy doing plot things
Dress for the genre you want, not the plot you have.
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Hmm. I would think that if there were no promos for the provider of the promos to others that wish to have promos, there would be no promos to be made.
Or maybe I’m just making things a bit too complex…
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A college student at MIT, back in the 90’s, allegedly had an answering machine message that went: “The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90° and dial the number again.”
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Farther back, we finally got a wall-phone in our dorm room.
However, San Francisco phone turnover was pretty high, and numbers would get re-used in just a few weeks.
So, we’d get calls for ‘Kathy’.
After a short while of these calls, we started responding “She can’t come to the phone right now, she’s in bed with [other roommate].”
Fortunately for -us-, neither of our girlfriends were named Kathy.
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I’m at best having mixed feeling about math on planes defined with a real axis and an imaginary axis.
One of the bits I don’t entirely follow starts with defining a real axis pointing right, and an imaginary axis pointing up. A point on that plane has a magnitude, and an angle with respect to the real line. A problem I have had is that I was years into my study before I went back and learned these basic definitions. There’s a bunch of things like mapping a complex variable A to a complex variable B that I did not properly learn, because of having a weak grasp of what is going on.
Complex numbers are widely used as a model for certain things, and some of the sources are careful to explain why they think that choice is valid.
I still have questions.
If I have four or five variables in that area of modeling, how do I tell which ones can have complex values? How can I tell what complex values mean for a particular case?
Generally, how should I solve polynomials of several complex variables? How can I tell which methods are legitimate, and why? (answer, I need to study more, apparently.)
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He turned. He felt unsurprised to see the white-haired man emerging from the forest with another boy. A man he recognized.
Erik stiffened beside him, but did not reach for his bow. He wondered if both men felt as odd as he did.
The boy hurried forward toward the girl.
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Well, that vignette went into moderation. Inexplicably.
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Earth was going dark. Every remaining uninfected human sought safety, but safety was in short supply. Next on the list was evacuation. Of all the evacuation plans, most failed in the first two steps.
The first step was acquiring transport off-planet. The scarcity of this one need not be overstated. Not even in the golden age that came before the Fall.
The second step was getting to orbit at all.
Of all the methods and ways tried, one stands out. Not because of its overall efficacy, though in that case it was remarkable. Most of all it stands alone because of its complexity. At any point, even a slight deviation could have doomed the entire structure, like so many others.
Despite that, in the end, the lives saved were what mattered. Estimates differ. After the system net crashed and took much of the cached and power stored data with it thing became harder to track. Some said a quarter of a million.
This was one of the lower estimates.
“That’s done it, hordetracker.neet is live.” Compiler deamons and shard machines did most of the heavy lifting. But the code was alive and in the wild on the net. Any public node could access it. All public nodes fed it.
In another time, that sort of hacking could have gotten him either killed or force recruited into a slave contract. Now, anyone looking to arrest him was either dead or fleeing themselves.
This was public service. Self service, too. Not atonement.
“Coming up on private docking bay: Toruga. Access granted. Fees waived. Welcome, guest.”
The stealth modded boost truck rocketed through the opening in the security perimeter. The walls were thicker than the truck was long, complete overhead coverage, and subterranean armored to boot. The place was a massive coffin with two holes.
One controlled explosion later and two became one. The truck slowed with reckless application of braking force, but still slammed hard into the null-blocks. It would never run again, but that didn’t matter. Time did.
Its occupant staggered into a sprint, up the stairs and then into a drop shaft without stopping.
“Wake the hive.”
Three words initiated a growing cascade of consequence. Across the coast, dozens, then hundreds, and then hundreds of thousands of machines, vehicles, billboards, displays, and still more received an activation code for software that built itself on the fly. The kind of backdoor hack that could only happen through proprietary channels. The kind of thing that would never see the light of day with even one functioning overseer monitoring the network.
Still falling, the hacker in question triggered more commands.
“Operation holiday mark six. Link to hordetracker.neet. Pathing priority. End command. Call Sergeant Forester.”
Obediah Forester settled down in his favorite chair. Retirement had come just in time. Out of the rat race of corporate life, combat and counter-spy games. Out of context for the new and upcoming generation. Out of reach of pretty much everyone that could touch him.
Just him, his junkyard, a well-stocked liquor cabinet, and a library that would take him the rest of his life to get through. Things were just about-
“Call from -contact unknown-. Priority: urgent.”
“Deny it, Nancy,” he harrumphed. “I don’t owe anyone living enough to-”
“Contact established.”
“Sergeant Forrester. This is Farmhand.”
Forrester’s heart lurched. Farmhand was dead. Everybody knew that. He’d seen the body with his own eyes. Nobody, but nobody could pierce a privacy barrier like that, though.
“Time is short. I need the Ugly. And I need it now. At these coordinates.”
Forrester grumbled. Farmhand cut him off.
“If you need to know more, turn on the damned net news you old hermit-monk.”
He did so. All thoughts of retirement fled like shadows before the dawn.
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“Run Sidney, run!”
A handful of survivors burst into the open street. Screams, gunfire, and smoke filled the air. Holos and street signs flashed dully, then rewrote themselves.
Horde coming down Oakwood going south. Follow the signs. Stay quiet. Pickup is outside town.
For every panicked civilian that ran screaming into trouble, another followed the signs to safety. Sometimes they actually made it.
Every one that did told a different story. For some, it was corporate security drones that held the horde at bay just long enough. For others it was a lucky bridge collapse that cut off pursuit. Sometimes it was defense forces that got orders to hold a particular intersection and let all civilians through that weren’t trying to eat them.
Some were picked up by produce delivery carts, heavy trucks, or passenger cabs and dropped off in empty lots. Directions were always the same. Head outside of town. Get clear of the city. Any city. Any infrastructure.
Then the ships came. Smugglers. Short haul lifters. Shuttles. Even retroboosters with tiny payload capsules fitted with pressure suits and tanks.
Those that got on the ships lived. Most of the time.
“Hold for as long as you can.”
That was the word from on high. For Charlie squad, it wasn’t quite the final fuck-you but you could see it from there.
Abruptly getting the call out in the middle of their sleep cycle wasn’t anything new. Getting deployed in the middle of town on the other hand, that was.
“Frag out!”
Also, the new opfor. Dumb as a post but there were a lot of them. They’d been hopping from ammo point to ammo point, stacking corpses to the second story windows. Never staying too long and never enough ammunition to make it stick. At least, not until now.
New howls made it through the post-combat tinnitus. Eddie and crew had been scything through the hordes since mid-day. Late afternoon was well established with hints of sundown on the horizon.
“New ammo dump coming in. Looks like we finally got some .300HMG with this lot.”
“Come to papa,” Corporal Lewis crooned. Holding down the left flank with Kinneson with just a sidearm had made the man grumpy. That was it. Not shooting monsters wearing the rags of civilian clothing.
“You ever wonder where these orders are coming from? Doesn’t sound like Cap Hound or the Old Man, y’know?”
Private Sal was still the FNG. But after today, who knew. Maybe there’d be no more war after this. Maybe they could all go home once all the monsters were gone.
“Does it matter, Sally-boy? Swap your barrel and put more rounds downrange. The job’s not done yet.”
The hordes came on in spurts and surges. Some made it close to the barricade, but none closer than the one that came tumbling off a roof onto a parked car almost a dozen feet away. That one didn’t back get up.
Relief came in the form of an uparmored track hauler that skidded to a halt just behind the barricade.
“Load up. Bring the ammo.”
Charlie squad slept in their gear. More combat awaited them and all the other soldiers, bodyguards, bouncers, and gang members that stayed to fight. The reasons differed. What mattered were the results.
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“TODAY THERE WILL BE NO EXTRAORDINARY BOOK PROMO, BECAUSE YOU DON’T NEED A BOOK PROMO WITH YOUR BOOK PROMO SO YOU CAN PROMO WHILE YOU PROMO. THERE WILL, HOWEVER, BE SHAMELESS WRITER SELF-PROMO. BECAUSE SOMETIMES I HAVE TO PROMO.“
If this gives anyone heartburn, I suggest Promo Seltzer . . .
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It will resume tomorrow. I was kidnapped today.
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I almost feel petty posting this…. I could have just minded my own business and kept my mouth shut. I know it is becoming a really contentious subject, however it is something that is negatively affecting my reading on an almost daily basis nowadays.
THE CONCIERGE OF HÔTEL AURORE
I haven’t read it and won’t be because the description is AI generated. Either that or the author has been corrupted by AI and is writing like it now. To be fair I’m not reading not because AI was involved but because the specific AI (I don’t know which one, it’s just used by a lot of authors) has a writing style that sucks so bad it actually aggravates me. I first ran into this AI’s writing on youtube where a year or two ago someone started posting so called reddit stories on there. Across multiple accounts the writing style was identical and really annoying. It was the kind of stories that have little redeeming value but lots of Jerry Springer soap opera. If you started one it was hard to stop but at the same time so badly done that it made you cringe. Kinda like eating Doritos’s, you just can’t stop at one!
This AI’s style is endemic in almost all the current fiction/science fiction I have been reading. It’s getting really bad in that books I really like that are written by humans are the minority by 3 to 1. I have returned more books partially read to amazon in the last 2 months than in the last 20 years. Again to be fair, not because an ai was involved but because it did a horrible job.
I am finding a discouragingly large number of authors I have followed for years that their current books are AI and in no way reflect the quality or style of their prior works. After reading the authors works for years, the new books are obviously not written by them. The content is boring, the style is irritating and I can’t be bothered to finish the newer books. I never don’t finish books, at least until the last couple years. Whats sad is that after I see a couple books like that I remove the author and no longer follow them. If they get over this and go back to actually writing decent books again, I will probably never know as I won’t be looking at their books anymore.
Back to our current book. I looked at the authors other books and at the blurbs about what they are about. Its very obvious that this is the only book blurb written by the AI. His others have all the feel of written by a reasonably educated human. So given this minimal and highly lacking sample size, I am judging that he is dipping his toes in the AI arena to see how it works. For me it is a turn off. Why would I be interested in a book by an AI that truly sucks. I have left more negative reviews in the last 3 months than in the last 10 years.
I read a book about a week ago that used the same AI and it was ok. Not because the AI was any better but because it was obvious that the author went back and edited the living daylights out of it. 90% of the AI style had been rewritten and edited out. There was enough left to make you notice but it was a vast step up in quality.. The other issue was that there was a major plot hole that kept occurring back and forth from chapter to chapter. It was something that an incompetent author wouldn’t even do. I’m surprised it didn’t get caught in the editing but still it was pretty massive. The saving grace was it was an interesting story.
I wish that authors that use AI to generate the content of a story would just list themselves as the editors and give the credit to the AI for being the Author. It is in my opinion, which is worth not much, that it is plagiarism of the worst kind to claim credit for having written such works. Writing a story and then using AI to help in the grammatical editing is the opposite. It’s using a tool to enhance your own efforts. Grammerly is a good example.
If AI wrote stories as good as my favorite authors, I would be reading them. I would still give bad reviews to the author using it if they claimed it as their own writing and didn’t list themselves as the editor, but I would read it and probably enjoy it if it’s well done.
The feelings and comments of a very irked reader!
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Sir? My descriptions are AI generated. WHY? BECAUSE I CAN’T WRITE PROMOTIONAL COPY. NEVER COULD. If you fear the books are also AI generated, the proper procedure is to read the beginning. OR wait till it has reviews.
It is contentious because hating AI is as stupid as stopping reading someone because “he used a word processor.” (Yes, people did, in the eighties.) The question is not “did they use it” it’s how well they used it.
I don’t READ these books, and I always tell people to download a sample. THE SAMPLES ARE RIGHT THERE.
Also, FYI, some AIs were EXTENSIVELY trained on my writing. So I had to study AI tells and I remove them FROM MY OWN WRITING (I don’t use AI to write my books. Not virtue signaling. It JUST is.) on a second or third pass. Because of people who instead of evaluating on QUALITY evaluate on “did the evil thing touch it.”
It’s contentious because you’re not THINKING. You’re emoting on the page. I’m sorry, but it’s true.
Yes, badly done AI is a horror. For a while it infected my “I am depressed” reads in Jane Austen Fan Fic. It lasted about three weeks, because they don’t sell or get HORRIBLE reviews. one of my “I can read it but it doesn’t set my world on fire” authors writes with AI and extensive rewriting. Is she just the editor? No. I stumbled on her videos telling people how to do it. She RE-Writes. It’s not the same. Why does she do that? I don’t know.
Please read this: https://madgeniusclub.com/2026/04/22/ai-slop/
And think about it.
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I understand your irk at my comment but I also think maybe you guys should re-read it. I didn’t say I hated AI I said I hate bad AI. I am perfectly willing to read a good story no matter who writes it. The majority of the AI books I have read all seem to be from the same bad AI. If other books use AI and I don’t get smacked in the face with the jarringly horrible dialog and English usage then I could care less. A good story is a good story at the end of the day.
Mr. Bailey’s book THE CONCIERGE OF HÔTEL AURORE hit that nerve dead on with the blurb describing it. The concept of his book is fascinating, It was the one book in the the ones shared that caught my attention the most. The problem lies with the word phrasing that specific AI uses. It is grating, I hate it with a passion, I will not apologize for hating it.
example of what I mean
The concierge still keeps her records.
The elevators still run on time.
The system still functions.
She does not fight with weapons.
She does not organize rebellions.
She does not leave her post.
A name adjusted.
A room reassigned.
A transfer that already happened—on paper.
This word usage and phrasing is in hundreds of books I have read in the last year. It is the same as used in the aforementioned youtube videos where they read so called reddit stories. It would be fine if it was just once in a while. It even works for the blurb. Problem is that 98% of the books written by this AI use it on every single page. After the thousandth time you see it it becomes the straw that breaks the camels back.
I gave a good review to a book written by this same AI this past week. The author/editor spent a huge amount of time re-editing it to remove most of the verbiage that matches what I just shared above. It went from teeth grating to just mildly annoying and the story got me past that. I didn’t give a 5 star review as it wasn’t a 5 star book but I also didn’t give my normal 1 star review for absolute crap writing. I have very seldom ever given 1 star reviews over the last 20+ years on amazon. Stuff written by this specific AI (of which I really would love to know what AI Model it is) is really bad. I hear you guys saying I use AI, maybe your not using that AI and I would never notice. I’m good with that. Maybe your using an AI I know about and the quality is good and it personalizes your work to match your writing style, again if it matches your style and has the same quality as your normal work, I’m all for it.
What I’m talking about is in the last 2 months reading a dozen books from a dozen authors, some new and some authors that I have been reading for more than 5 or 6 years that I couldn’t tell the difference in the books, it’s as if one person wrote them all with identical dialog, linguistic usage and style. Of the authors I had read prior, it simply wasn’t even close to the style or quality they previously put out. I have waded through slow and even bad books in the past, because even a lot of badly done books still have redeeming features. I can’t do it with this AI’s style, It aggravates me, it is also boring, something is lost. I will get a quarter to halfway through the book and just can’t keep reading. Some of the concepts for these books were great but the implementation just killed it dead. I wondered if maybe I was just having an off day, month, year and it was just me, then I hit my next book that was by an author I like and it wasn’t me. I loved it. It left me laughing, intrigued and entertained, something that this AI model doesn’t do.
So where does that leave us. If it was just one or two books I would just quietly ignore it, but it isn’t one or two, its hundreds and hundreds of books. In the genre’s I like it is 60 to 70 percent of the books and I am spending a lot of time wading through crap. It’s not a wannabe author that is doing their best. I respect that author, I give really honest reviews, and explain what I liked and didn’t for that author in the hope they improve because I saw something good there. It is authors being lazy and putting out masses of books as quickly as possible because they are lazy. If the quality was there I wouldn’t care. Now I don’t know what AI you are using. I’m assuming that the one I am referencing is really inexpensive and the AI book slop shops that are pumping massive volume in books are using it because of that.
I am writing a non fiction book right now, might never finish it but I’m writing it and am about 200 pages in. People that have looked at it liked it. When I get close to finished I will run it through multiple AI editors to find stupid shit I messed up. Maybe even to organize it better than it is, because I can see a lack in my organization of topics, but ever word will be mine. If someone doesn’t like it, it will be because they don’t like my writing, and I am good with that.
on the topic of AI art for covers, I have played with that and gotten some really great results. I know that a huge amount of covers now are AI generated and in general just don’t care. Some are pretty damn good and others are just generic and blend in with all the other ones. Honestly I tend to skip some of those books when looking for the next one simply because the cover doesn’t grab my attention. Same as I did 20 years ago. A good cover will grab attention to get you to flip through and read the blurb where something less will maybe not when you have hundreds of choices. I read a lot of books that have text only covers by authors I really like. Some how I read a book by them with a totally sucky cover and loved it and then their covers didn’t matter :)
Again it isn’t about who did it or how but about the quality. So far the only AI stuff I can identify as AI sucks so bad that I actually hate it for how grating and boring it is and how it is overwhelming the decent books on the market. If authors put out crap I’m going to say so, if its AI crap I’m going to really say so since at that point it isn’t really even the person publishing it. It might be their concept and idea but for sure not their writing.
I get the defensiveness of having people criticize using AI to write with if you use it in your process, but you have to separate out what people are criticizing. I’m criticizing bad horrible books, I’m also criticizing bad AI books. Bad AI books get a double whammy, one that it is bad writing, two that it was someone being lazy that used a bad AI and still published it.
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Bad is BAD. It’s not AI bad. It’s just bad.
I’m just sick and tired of “AI slop” witch hunters. this post is more rational and less just emotions screamed at us, but again, as much as I understand that YOU THINK these books are all the same style or whatever, how much is that your perceptions? How much is it EDITORS using AI to edit? Do you know? Can you tell?
Again, rage about the quality not who did it or how it was done.
Right now my congress with AI is “Please write my book description.” I have admitted my book descriptions SUCK otherwise.
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I get it. In a way you are correct bad writing is bad writing, but in the examples I’m using it wasn’t written by the author, it was written by an AI. I’ve tried to be careful to make that distinction. I find the outright unreasoning fear of AI, very superstitious, unreasoning, kind of crazed also. However we could have a very detailed and pretty discouraging conversation if we were to talk about AI and the state of the world. Not even about how bad AI does stuff, but about the recursive improvement in AI where it is getting better and better faster and faster.
I very much do fear the affect of AI on our society and culture over the next decade or two. My prediction is that more than 50% of the current workforce will no longer have jobs, including plumbers and electricians and construction guys etc.. not just white collar jobs.
Robotic factory lines devastated the work force many years ago. Today we have factory’s in china that they don’t even turn the lights on. parts and or raw materials come in one end and trucks of products or cars come out the other with absolutely no one on the floor of the factory. Those cars deliver themselves to the ships that export them to other countries. Autonomous robots are real now. mostly we don’t see them in day to day life but in the next decade they will be endemic. Add the recursive learning rates of AI and add that to autonomous robots and a lot of jobs that people do will go away, the same that those auto line workers jobs did and welders jobs did in factories when we were children. My grandfather helped design and implement factory lines with automated welding for appliances in the 60’s. Today is the next generation of that but with the ability of AI and the creation of cost effective autonomous robots it is going to be devastating.
This type of production and tech in one way is just to cool, but lets step beyond that. What happens when 50% of our workforce looses their jobs and can’t pay mortgages and put food on the table. There will be massive unrest. Maybe the gov actually does a UBI, but what does that look like economically. For good or bad we are holding the tigers tail and can’t turn loose so what will happen will happen, but it will be the epitome of the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” all puns were intended.
1.2 million jobs were lost in 2025 attributed to AI, 330,00 jobs lost so far directly attributed to AI. Call it roughly 1/2 a percent of the entire US workforce laid off due to AI in the last 18 months. Then look at the technologies in robotics, AI, Batteries etc.. that are converging and figure that we are at the very thin bleeding edge of what is coming. Think about what 10% unemployment means and then think about what 50% could potentially mean.
On top of this it isn’t a good environment to start a small business. There are so many regulations and barriers to entry anymore that it is hard. What they need to do is legislate a ban on regulation and barriers to entry for individuals and small businesses under a million dollars revenue to give the people that will lose their jobs a fighting chance to find a niche they might fit in.
I am not an unreasoning person nor do I do superstition, but I do look at historical examples and extrapolate current events into the near and mid future based on those concrete historical examples.
Have you as authors really thought about this in your industry. I’m bitching about bad AI books. Which means you still can do better than that. However it won’t be long, months or years till that recursive improvement has the AI writing books as good as the average author and then better than the average author. 4 years ago your new book was competing with 1 million other new books world wide. This year with that 50% bad AI examples your competing with 2 million books world wide, next year you might be competing with 5 million books at your same competence level and in 10 years with 20 million books that are better than you, or your then having the AI totally write books for you but your still competing with that 20x more books.
I read an article by a CFO of a major company a few months ago as he talked about their experience with implementing and training AI to use in their company for financial planning, projection and accounting. At the beginning he said it was pretty horrible and the results were not usable. At 6 months he said it was usable and helpful but that someone had to go behind it and make sure there were no major mistakes. At one years he said it was doing a better job with fewer mistakes than the humans. As of the article he said it could do his job better than he could. They had reduced the people in that department by about 30% but increased what they were doing by 100%. What happens when next year it is 2x as good as it is today. It’s not the horrible AI of today that is going to change the world it is the one that truly is good. It’s already happening has happened in a few industries already.
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Yes. We’ve thought about it. No, those of us who actually have cultivated our individual storytelling styles are NOT afraid. Next?
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Ok, lets grant that you have a loyal fan base that will follow you the rest of your life and that buffers you. What about the new author that book for book has 20x the competition that you currently have. The financially successful will be the people that pump out 20 books a month so that the fraction of the market they can reach in comparison to others doing the same.
It wont be about writing a book your passionate about but about how good you are at the business of spinning ideas to the AI and having it create the story based on that idea and then selling books. We already see this happening or at least I have seen it.
All the authors writing a book a week, or every other week, year in and year out. There is no humanly possible way to maintain that pace without some serious AI assistance. It has changed the publishing landscape already and is just this year really getting cranked up by a vastly larger group of authors or maybe it is a handful of businesses that have a group of employees that do nothing but brainstorm ideas and plots and push them to the AI and then from there to market. I have my suspicions that this has been happening a lot in the last few years. That a lot of the authors I see are just pseudonyms of a business pumping out hundreds of different books a year under different names. Not that this didn’t happen even back as far as the 1920’s with a lot of pulp fiction. Just now the technology allows it on a massively greater scale.
Ok… I have had a lot of fun actually debating this with you guys, I do believe what I have said but we really don’t know what the future holds. We can only pray that the darker predictions truly don’t come true. On the bright side maybe AI will lead to a future in which scarcity isn’t the driving economic force.
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May I say you DO sound like an AI? Possibly Deep Seek.
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Seriously?
I have to say that is the first I have heard that before today. I have written and spoken like this my whole life. I’m unsure of what to even think about it. There is a lot of existential shit to unpack around that idea.
What exactly makes you feel that? I know that can be really hard to quantify but I’m actually interested in knowing if you can verbalize actual quantifiable attributes.
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“Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain transistors.”
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Amusingly enough… your post reads like AI generated writing.
Specifically, the ones that are used to generate form-letters for write-in campaigns.
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Rofl
sigh, omg they used me to train an ai on how to right? god that is cruel and unusual punishment! lol.
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Unlikely, given your malapropism.
They did use me, which is why anthropic owes me money.
HOWEVER they seem to have leaned mostly on my young, drunk on words stuff, alas. Sigh.
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rofl.. that’s how you can tell im not a AI trolling a human.. I still make dumb spelling mistakes :(
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I swear you people who hate the clankers are mental.
I don’t write with AI myself, but I know people who are using the tools to help in the writing process. I do use AI — with a generous amount of Photoshop post-processing — to make covers, because guess what, I’m not an artist, and I don’t make enough in royalties to pay someone to make a cover for me. But the writing all comes out of my own poor tired brain.
If some people are using AI to simply spit out content, slap it between covers, and publish it, well, I don’t know what to say about that (though I’ve read a few books that read exactly like that, and they’re pretty horrible). That said, the people I’m aware of who use AI in their writing are using it primarily as a tool to develop plot, to resolve internal contradictions, and suchlike. It is what it is.
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lol… I hate bad AI writing. If it was good I probably would never notice or care. I do despise bad AI writing more than just normal bad author writing though just to be fully honest. I don’t hate it more because of the AI but because the author was lazy and it wasn’t his writing but he/she is still inflicting it on readers. I wouldn’t care except that over 50% of the new books I try to read now are by the same bad AI and it actually makes me angry at the total waste of my time now.
Used to be i would read 3 or 4 great books a year, 200 decent reads, 300 mediocre books that had good stories and maybe 10 that were pretty bad.
in the last year I have read 3 or 4 good books 100+ decent reads, 200 mediocre books and 300 or 400 AI slop that I couldn’t even get through. It’s not the one author or two authors, its the 100’s of authors flooding the market with this tripe. But it isn’t 100’s of authors, it’s 1 AI model that 100’s of people pretending to be authors are using to write books they are minimally edited, if at all, and published.
For those using AI that is improving your writing I’m all for it, however the mass of books flooding the market are not that. It is having a real effect on readers such as me. I am not a person that gets angry and despises stuff much at all. It really takes effort to get me there. The industry so to say in that mass of 100’s of authors pumping out bad AI crap has gotten me there.
I find it funny that everyone jumped on me over disliking AI slop. My background is IT, I have owned my own IT company for over 30 years. I love the idea of AI, and when it works well I love it. I also really hate a lot of what is being done with it. I could say the same thing about the internet in general. About corporate America, our government etc.. Just like all of those it is a potentially great resource if applied correctly, it is also just like all of them a font of evil if applied by people who don’t care or who have bad intentions.
As a reader my experience with it is horrible. It is overwhelming my pool of available books. I had the thought the other day that maybe I should just start re-reading my 10,000 plus book physical library again. There is enough there to enjoy till I pass away, including a bunch of Mrs Hoyts books :).
Now think about that. I have read 500+ books a year for 53 years. I am an obsessive reader. I am upset enough over the flood of AI content that is horrible that it is making me weary of just wading through it to find a good book. This is legitimate, it is what I feel. I am sure I am not the only one. This is a problem for authors, all authors. If I change my habits over the volume of stuff pumped out by people abusing the AI it is still going to affect those that are not to a degree. I have about a couple dozen favorite authors and it would be easy to just quite trying new authors and just wait on these few authors to publish something new and go back to re reading the 10’s of thousands of ebooks I have bought and the 10,000 ish paper back and hard backs I own.
In the same way that drastic price increases might limit how much I read, the opportunity cost of wading through 50% crap has started to emotionally cause me to think about changing my habits. For you authors this is a reality. If it’s not just me it could change the marketplace eventually.
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There is NO AI slop. There is only slop. I’ve never in my entire time read REALLY bad obviously AI (I bet I know the tells better than you, because I’m sensitive to words) writing that was worse than really bad beginning writer writing. Actually the sins are pretty much the same, even if AI tends to use certain phrases (AND CHARACTER NAMES, often from movies or series) that newbies rarely use.
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I’m going to both agree and disagree. There is only bad writing is true, but I can currently also truly attribute some of it to the use of certain AI and blame the author for not caring enough to actually publish it. That AI is a valid subset of Bad Writing. Combine Bad Writing with AI and I like to call it AI slop. I get that can in your perception cross over in how the unthinking haters rate anything to do with AI good or bad but it still from my perspective is accurate when applied to specific examples of AI incompetence.
I get the feeling of pushing back against the unthinking hatred of AI, but there is also a very rational set of people that also worry about and are upset at how bad AI is affecting our lives in real time, and worry about what really good productive AI will do to the job market.
For me the books are an example, also the new AI answering and troubleshooting systems that places like amazon or say Sam’s club are using currently. It is now even harder to get a person on the phone that can help me with problems the AI can’t help with, leading to a reduction in my happiness when dealing with issues needing a resolution with those companies. The AI for Sam’s club is so happy and tries to be very helpful that it is even hard to get mad at it. How they got that effect I’m not sure but at the end of the day I wasted another half an hour every time I have had to deal with it. just to be clear I was very unhappy with non AI telephone systems also prior. It was just that I knew usually how to pass through to a real person that had the authority to actually fix the situation. The AI is really good at trying to find a solution long beyond my ability to be patient in getting a person that is still needed to have the authority to fix the issue. On the other hand, the few times I had an issue that the AI could fix it was a positive experience as it was quicker than dealing with a person. Sadly most of my issues don’t seem to be of that variety.
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