Authors Electric

Enginesoptional, Redbubble, 'We Fall Only To Rise.' Long-sleeved t-shirt   Earlier this month, my AE colleague Debbie Bennett posted an amusing (but saddening) blog about the threat posed to writers by the many people, in Debbie's words, 'upload[ing] thousands of low content bits of tat a day' . Much of the tat clumsily ripped off from others. Ripped off from us . As Amazon's bots and human staff check everything uploaded for copyright infringement and other crimes, the rise in low-content tat means that it takes longer for all books published through them to be approved: so the shameless intellectual theft of a few makes indie publishing harder for us all, even when our material is legit. I was reminded of another threat to all us hard-working, and mostly under-paid, writers and artists: the much vaunted AI or Artificial Intelligence. One of my brothers told me about a Polish fantasy artist named Greg Rutkowski who, it seems, is being persecuted and ripped ...

There’s a Facebook group called Amazon KDP Books - Kindle Direct Publishing with a screenshot of the KDP logo as the group picture. It is in no way affiliated with Amazon and I can only assume that Amazon either no longer cares or has simply given up chasing people who appropriate their words and pictures. In the early days of this blog, we had the word kindle in the title and received a polite message from Amazon asking us to cease and desist as it was trademarked to them.  Anyway, this group has over 77 thousand members. I’m not entirely sure why I go there as it is of no benefit to me whatsoever. The majority of posts come from people who have apparently watched YouTube where there are entrepreneurs making a lot of money out of telling other people how to make a lot of money. Of course, it doesn’t work – it never works. There is no get-rich-quick scheme and if there was, few people would be altruistic enough to share it.  It’s all about low content . You can allegedly ma...