Showing Tag: " book" (Show all posts)

Micro-reviews (March 2019)

Posted by Paul Samael on Monday, March 11, 2019, In : Book reviews 
Show Them What They Won, The Book of Strange New Things, The Sparrow



Show Them What They Won by Sean Boling

Ever wondered how many people have to die before gun-enthusiasts in the States start to question whether the easy availability and widespread ownership of fire-arms in their country might be part of the problem?  Somehow though, the latest mass shooter incident always seems to get turned on its head, with the gun lobby managing to deflect blame by deploying absurd arguments about how the ...

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Google ate my story!

Posted by Paul Samael on Sunday, December 18, 2016, In : Random thoughts 




According to a report in The Guardian, Google has recently attempted to improve the language capabilities of one of its Artificial Intelligence programs by feeding it over 10,000 free ebooks downloaded from Smashwords (out of a total of well over 50,000 free ebooks).  Apparently the idea was to help the AI produce more natural-sounding sentences.

Being The Guardian, the report was a bit po-faced about the whole thing and the journalist seemed to think that the authors ought to have been remune...

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Free Book Beast

Posted by Paul Samael on Monday, January 28, 2013, In : Self-publishing 




Although there are quite a few sites devoted to indie authors, I haven't come across that many which focus on free fiction.  Free Book Beast aims to do just that - and whereas some sites seem to feature free (or low priced) books purely as a way of generating ad revenue, this one appears to be trying to provide some useful content alongside them, so I hope it succeeds.
 
I've just contributed a guest post on where to find free fiction (other than on Amazon) and where to find recommendations/rev...
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Feedbooks - better than Smashwords?

Posted by Paul Samael on Thursday, May 17, 2012, In : Self-publishing 



UPDATE 5.2019:  Sadly, Feedbooks has recently closed down its self-publishing platform - see this post.  Which is a shame because, in its heyday, Feedbooks performed quite well in terms of downloads (see below).  If you are looking at this because you are interested in self-publishing platforms generally, I would still recommend Smashwords - and for some other suggestions, take a look at my guide to self-publishing.

Just uploaded couple of short stories to Feedbooks, to see how they do - and w...
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My secret life as an undercover agent

Posted by Paul Samael on Tuesday, August 2, 2011, In : Self-publishing 

 

 The first few chapters of my novel have been on the peer review site, youwriteon.com, for a few weeks now and I have so far had 6 reviews - mostly quite encouraging but with a couple of not so good ones.  It was a not so good one which prompted me to post the following in the biographical details section of the site (which I had left blank up until then):

"After a spell in the SAS, I worked undercover for the CIA on a mission to infiltrate a vicious gang of Colombian drug smugglers and drive...

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About Me


Paul Samael Welcome to my blog, "Publishing Waste" which will either (a) chronicle my heroic efforts to self-publish my own fiction; or (b) demonstrate beyond a scintilla of doubt the utter futility of (a). And along the way, I will also be doing some reviews of other people's books and occasionally blogging about other stuff.
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