James Maxey
@JamesAllenMaxey
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A guy who writes stuff. Winner of the Asimov's Readers' Award for best short story of 2024, "Mere Flesh."
Hillsborough, NC
Joined November 2017
My catalog: A 🧵. I've written a lot of books. I'm not prolific, just old. Crank out a book or two every year or two and eventually you have a wall of books. I mainly use X to talk about writing and books, so I thought I'd use this thread to explain all the crazy stuff I write:
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Back in 1998, I took a class with Harlan Ellison that contained several very long rants against word processors. Pretty much everything he warned of came to pass. The slush editorscread decreased in quality as it increased in quantity, and every additional hour editors spent
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Any winning strategy you can build on KDP can get wiped out overnight by a tweak in an algorithm or some new policy. Some of this is Amazon trying to milk more profit, but a lot of it is because the sheer size of Amazon makes it attractive to scammers looking to game their
@CJSimone333 @BellaHagleyWood @AubreanReverie I think Amazon stopped organic promotion when they launched paid ads. It's been a pay to play environment for years, which is why I shifted away from relying on them for revenue. My writing income has grown as I rely on KDP less and less.
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Of course, the other hard truth is that you can publish an amazing book and still no one will know about it. Getting people to read a book has never been about availability. Selling books is a completely different skill set, and it's not one that an AI can duplicate.
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A good author has never depended on the scarcity of other books to become successful. A good author creates their own scarcity by supplying something that no other authors deliver. Unique voices and visions, insight and originality, that no one else can deliver.
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more books are published than the average person reads in a lifetime. A voracious reader might read 5000 books in a lifetime. That's probably a low-ball guess of how many books get released a day now. What does it matter if AI turns this into 10,000, or 100,00?
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When I published my first ebook, Amazon boasted that 700,000 were available on Kindle. A year later, millions, then tens of millions, and since about 2017 they stopped reporting the number of books available, but it's pretty much guaranteed that, in a typical week in 2025...
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Every technological advance since the quill has made it faster and easier to produce novels, and since the rise of electronic media the time devoted to reading has fallen as the output of books has grown.
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Before AI, Amazon had already enabled the release of thousands of titles every day. The days when novels might still possess value because of scarcity are far in the past.
@JamesAllenMaxey @AubreanReverie i disagree … with the flood of AI works hitting Amazon, it makes it harder and harder to get noticed.
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If a book club just randomly picked it, I'd expect to see sales in different formats... some grabbing the ebook, a few print copies, some audio. But, it's just the normal background activity for other formats.
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Extreme weirdness with ACX dashboard. I have 22 downloads in one day for Burn Baby Burn, the second book in a series that has been on Audible for 7 years and rarely sells more than 5 in a month. I'm baffled as to what explains this.
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@Whitedale_U @BellaHagleyWood @dustinhollywood My brain is a shotgun loaded with apostrophes and commas and just blast away at every paragraph and hope for the best.
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The thing about generative AI is that most people who use it will never make art because they don't have anything particularly insightful or unique to say. But I'm confident that creators will come along who can make us see the world in new ways with these tools.
@Whitedale_U @BellaHagleyWood @dustinhollywood Copying techniques was kinda the whole idea of apprentices and assistants, but I feel like this line of argument is unlikely to persuade anyone to be more open minded about AI. Instead, a better question is, was Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" art?
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Genetically engineered dragons hunt the last humans through the vine-draped ruins of post apocalyptic America in a dark tale of revenge. https://t.co/gPG0Qrc3yr
amazon.com
Dragons rule the world, united under their powerful dragon-king. Humans struggle to survive as slaves, pets, and prey. One man, the mysterious Bitterwood, strikes at dragons from the shadows,...
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Today, technology permits more crap than ever to flood the market. The old systems of finding the gems in the muck have failed. It might be 2075 before any really knows what the best books of 2025 were.
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2000+ years ago Greeks were griping about how shallow and derivative modern authors had become. They were probably right! 99% of the books of any era are mediocre at best and since those are soon forgotten it creates the illusion that the past was full of great authors.
@feelsdesperate Cervantes wrote Don Quixote (1605) to parody crap novels. Henry Fielding rants in Tom Jones (1749) about hacks flooding the bookstores with slop. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, mocks the heroine's taste in trash books. The final days of literature have lasted centuries.
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@feelsdesperate Cervantes wrote Don Quixote (1605) to parody crap novels. Henry Fielding rants in Tom Jones (1749) about hacks flooding the bookstores with slop. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, mocks the heroine's taste in trash books. The final days of literature have lasted centuries.
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I made these dragon lanterns for tonight's solstice walk and might have stumbled into a new revenue stream. I didn't spend a lot of time on them, planning to use them for just tonight... they're held together with duct tape! But a ton of strangers asked me about them.
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I'd include a link, but since X suppresses those, why bother? It's 2025. You know how to type a title into a search bar.
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My random book promo for today is Dragonsgate: Devils. Dragons fighting dinosaurs and robots and my most unhinged protagonist, Bitterwood, being driven by his demons further into his own darkness.
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