Idiotprogrammer Blog

Robert’s Roundup #51 (March-April 2025)

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Robert Nagle

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MAILING LIST: I just started a mailing list for my publishing company. Will mail out every 2 months and will include excerpts from my Robert’s Roundup columns and other random stuff. MASTADON: https://booktoot.club/@nagletx

Abbreviations: KU means Kindle Unlimited,  and APUB means it was published under an Amazon imprint.NYP means “Name Your Price” (that’s an option on Smashwords and other booksellers). If you’d like to submit an ebook to me for review or mention in this column, see my instructions here.

Hey, guess what? I made a 12 minute video about my obsession with ebooks (See below).

Update: I made some book trailers for Youtube and gave them a catchy name: “Literary Elevator Pitches”. The Elevator Pitch for Soldier Boys includes 3 minutes of talk with the author and 1 minute talk with the publisher (Me!) The elevator pitch for Second Death of E.A. Poe has a 2 1/2 minute talk with me, the Publisher.

These elevator pitches are fairly easy to make, and maybe they will help to market the ebook. The question remains though: how will potential readers learn about these videos and will they actually watch them? I personally love them especially if they feature the author; I almost always click on a video if one is available. On the other hand Amazon and other distributors don’t allow video links (except for customer reviews). In these cases, the person talking is not the author; I don’t know if the potential reader would find this useful. I mean, couldn’t they just read the book descriptions?

Maybe their promotional value is limited, but I hope that the elevator pitches could also raise a literary or aesthetic issue about a book. Also, I’d like to do elevator pitches about books I have no connection with.

Random Musing: Someone mentioned online that it’s interesting that nobody ever talks about Updike’s fiction anymore. I’m a big fan of Updike, but Updike reached a level of fame that ensured that all of his books would be reviewed and talked about. It’s inevitable that the interest after his death wouldn’t keep this same level of visibility. I really should read Rabbit is Rich though. On my short list for a while.

Using AI

Perhaps this merits a separate blog post, but using AI engines has been invaluable in doing research for stories I am writing. Often I just need to do background research or research into a certain technology. Sure, search engines have allowed you to find useful information, but in the last decade or so, search results have become cluttered with irrelevant information. I don’t need the information to be 100% accurate. More often, I simply need to know about terminology in a field which my characters can use. Also, this terminology allows me to ask more sophisticated questions of AI.

Here’s a prompt I have been using for book advice:

What are some of the themes in the novel “Vathek” by author William Beckford? Who might want to read this novel? Have any readers criticized this novel? Why do some people not like this novel? Can you list 2 or 3 book titles by contemporary authors which have similar tone & themes? (Replace the prompt with a book of your choice and repeat!)

I have been using Copilot AI in the Windows Edge browser and found it very useful — especially for the book recommendations. Unfortunately I have not found chatgpt that useful or Google’s AI engine.

Indie Author Spotlight

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Under the Radar

Good To a Fault: A Novel by Marina Endicott (W). Endicott is a Canadian/British Columbian novelist . In this interview with her, Will Johnson writes, “Endicott’s work has emotional and moral complexity, and often explores matters of faith, whether she’s evoking a struggling contemporary family or writing about the vaudeville era.”

Green Grows the Rushes and Other Stories by William Meikle. Fantasy/ghost/monster series by a prolific Scottish author.

Disgruntled a Novel by Asali Solomon. African-American coming of age story. “A coming-of-age tale, a portrait of Philadelphia in the late eighties and early nineties, an examination of the impossible double-binds of race, Disgruntled is a novel about the desire to rise above the limitations of the narratives we’re given and the painful struggle to craft fresh ones we can call our own.”

Love without Gun Control & Other Fantasy, Horror and Sci Fi Stories by M. Christian.

Planet of the Creeps by Walker Long.

2 racy novels by Lisabet Sarai: Raw Silk and Hot Brides in Vegas. Her long running NSFW Beyond Romance blog features and reviews a lot of erotica/romantica titles. Her fiction appears in several erotica anthologies (and some free kinky stories are available on her Medium blog).

Haymaker in Heaven A Novel: by Edvard Hoem. (W) Small town Norwegians move to USA. “Unhurried passages delineating the fickle nature of late-nineteenth-century Norwegian courtship or the finer intricacies of saddle fabrication are in abundance…”

Celeste Ascending a Novel by Kaylie Jones (Author Website) (Video reading from her novel A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries).

Picador Book of 40: 40 Writers inspired by a Number (anthology). To celebrate Picador’s 40 year anniversary, it asked a dozen authors to write stories that involve a 40 element somewhere. Cool concept, more of a promotional anthology than anything one would ordinarily read.

Norman the Insurance Salesman and Other Stories by Michael Raven. 50 surreal, satirical and absurd stories in the Douglas Adams vein. (Author’s website and Youtube channel Illustrated edition).

Harry Gold a Novel by Millicent Dillon. Metafictional story about a biographer character following a Cold War spy. Dillon herself actually wrote biographies of Paul and Jane Bowles.

First Rule of Swimming a Novel by Courtney Angela Brkic. Well-received first novel.

Incredible Stories at the Bus Stop: A Flash Fiction Collection on Human Experience by Delenda Carthago.

Some of my Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir by Rosmond Bernier. Essays and lectures about living in France, famous artists, etc. Sounds gossipy and fun.

Finger: A Handbook by Angus Trumble. Odd and unclassifiable look at fingers and the role they play in the arts, commerce, language.

Everything Happens Today by Jesse Browner. (W) Single day in the life of a privileged 17 year old Manhattanite. Wow, lots of glowing blurbs for this author who translates a lot of European authors.

Lake Overturn a Novel by Vestal McIntyre (W) Youtube vid,

Cardboard Universe: Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank by Christopher Miller. Satirical novel about a Philip K. Dick like author.

Never Mind the Pollacks: Rock and Roll Novel by Neal Pollack. (W) An epic novelistic satire of rock history, told from the points of view of sleazy dueling music critics. (Author Website + Substack). Austin writer, funny guy; used to freelance for a lot of national mags and write humor pieces for McSweeney’s. I met him once or twice. He has quite a book catalog. He asserts his persona into a lot of his books — both in memoir and fiction. He writes for and edits the online zine Book and Film Globe.

by Joshua Max Feldman

Parking Lot Attendant by Nikki Moustaki. First novel by Ethiopian-American novelist. “Immigrant narrative, coming-of-age story, a dystopian fantasy and a political thriller.”

Wait, Blink a novel by Gunnhild Oyehaug (W)

But Come Ye Back: Novel in stories by Beth Lordan.

The Debt Collector: Lirium by Susan Kaye Quinn.

A Piece of Good News: Poems by Katie Peterson. (website, reading on Youtube),

Blood Orange by Troy Blackhawks. South African coming of age during apartheid.

Stich a Novel by Two novels by Richard Stern (W). Stich and a Father’s Words.

Translations from the Natural World poems by Les Murray. (W) Australian poet.

Concerning E.M. Forster by Frank Kermode. (W) Later book of criticism.

Doctor Criminale: A Novel by Malcolm Bradbury. (W)

Robin and the Rednecks by Todd Davis.

Super Sad True Love Story Novel by Gary Shteyngart. Someone called this dystopian novel an appropriate read for the new Trump age. (Say no more!)

Alien Sex: 19 Tales by the Masters of Sci Fi and Dark Fantasy (anthology).

How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians by Rudolph Bell.

Desert Rites (Desert Trilogy) by Xue Mo. 1st volume of award-winning Chinese sci fi trilogy.

L.A. Success by Lonnie Raines. California comedy about a flabby Forest Gumpy LA anti-hero who gets sucked into a real estate mystery and a gig as a private detective.

Stork Mountain a Novel by Miroslav Penkov. A young Bulgarian living in USA returns to Bulgaria to find his estranged grandfather who had cut off all contact with his family. Fun fact: Penkov teaches at University of North Texas where my nephew goes to school.

None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer. 1994 novel about a lawyer who struggles between her marriage and her political commitments.

Library Purchases/Printed books

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Creative Commons/Freebies

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Literary Articles and Essays

Becky Tuch on Can We Talk about Narrative Magazine (about exorbitant submission fees). I have lots of opinions about this (and I think Narrative is doing a lot of things right), but the amount of fees they charge is certainly excessive. Tuch runs the influential Lit Mag News. I love the idea of lit mags and for a while I subscribed to a dozen of them at once. But here are the problems with litmags:

  • Submission fees make it very hard to regularly submit.
  • Most of them are subsidized by universities or grants from arts organizations (and not sustainable).
  • Print copies of these mags are very expensive. They were always pricey, but now they’re ridiculously so.
  • Their primary purpose is to help adjuncts and writers fill up their CV so they can get better jobs.
  • Their value in raising an author’s visibility is very small (except to academic hiring committees perhaps).
  • They are staffed mainly by unpaid grad students and low paid staff.
  • They pay next to nothing.
  • Their tastes tend towards the academic/literary type of writings, so that excludes multiple kinds of writing

I used to follow the litmag world fairly closely (and I used to edit my own litmag and had plans to start a new online one). But there were always problems. First, it is really hard to make an online zine work — especially if it featured more creative things like poetry and fiction. Second, monetization means having to make some really terrible tradeoffs. If you lock everything behind a paywall, then you have to spend a lot more time and money on marketing. Or if you put everything online, you have to chase advertising — and for that to work, you have to constantly be chasing eyeballs). Developing a monetizable website is not easy; it requires a lot of planning and technological prowess. I probably am better suited to do this than other people, but ideally you’d want a technical staff to be able to run it semi-professionally.

The only zine I’ve seen do it well is Conjunctions. But there are lots of caveats here. Conjunctions has a long-running history and archive and stable of subscribers and authors. They have received grant money for quite some time. A lot of people already know about them. It probably helps that they are close to New York City. Also, Conjunctions doesn’t put out issues on a regular schedule. They just do it whenever. Frankly, although their issues are very adventurous and thematically interesting, they have the organization, history and funding to solicit lots of high profile authors. And a NY publisher will likely be happy to offer you free content for the publicity alone.

(Fun fact: Older issues of Conjunctions are often discounted on Amazon. If you set a price alert for the editor Bradford Morrow, you can grab lots of old issues for a dollar each or so).

Rant

(In response to a forum question about why books and authors don’t seem to be as important as they used to be).

First, fiction writing has a much different role and cultural impact in the world today than it did, say 50 or 100 years ago. Nowadays a lot of writers go ignored and unread. Contrast with the 19th century where there was no TV or recordings, novels had proportionately more influence. Storytelling still exists, and it thrives in different mediums and genres. Also, fiction and writing is very language-dependent, but TV and movies and music don’t depend as much on those things.

What many people think of as book culture or the publishing world today hinges on the books being highlighted by cultural institutions and mass media. But I wouldn’t call the books that win a lot of attention (the prize winners, the best sellers) that interesting or special. Some look at books as having important political or social messages. The ideas and the conflicts reflected by an age’s fiction are important, but it is rare that society at large recognizes their importance quickly enough to make a difference.

That said, today’s books are cheaper than ever; you can get access to a rich supply of literature for practically nothing. This is good because it’s becoming harder for libraries to keep up with the torrent of books coming out. Budgets are being cut, and conservatives are trying to defund books with interesting messages.

Like the stars above, books and authors are still out there — too numerous to count — and yet their voices are growing dimmer and harder to perceive unless you are actively looking. Meanwhile the world offers all kinds of distractions that keeps us isolated and estranged from our past and blind to today’s most pressing problems.

Capsule Book Reviews

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Multimedia/Podcasts, Etc

Personville Press Deals

 I run Personville Press, a small literary book press where all the ebooks cost less than $4. Prices normally appear highest on Amazon, Apple, Kobo and BN, somewhat lower on Google Play Books and lower on the two DRM-free stores which are Smashwords and Payhip. Personville Press is committed to selling DRM-free ebooks and audio files directly from the Personville Press payhip store or from Smashwords. The prices listed here are the non-discounted price on Amazon. Check the links to see if they are discounted at the moment (it happens often).

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