Righteous Indignation

I just finished Righteous Indignation by Andrew Breitbart which details the authors conversion from a complacent lefty to an active righty.

The book is a quick read which provides the inside scoop on the culture wars in the media and Hollywood.

As for the genre of political conversions, I still prefer the compelling story of David Horowitz in Radical Son which provides a deeper compelling conversion of an active Marxist to Conservative.

Mr. Breitbart is a happy culture warrior who drew some blood in the last election cycle. The launch of the site bigGovernment.com helped defend the tea party against false accusations and helped bring down the corrupt ACORN fraud machine.

For a quick read, the book provides some good insights into the intellectual corruption of the left wing media and makes a compelling argument for citizen journalists to stand up and start reporting on the corruption that the main stream media systemically ignores.

Chapter 6 provides a very quick overview of the radical foundation of the modern left as the dialectics evolved through Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and was popularized in California by lost souls like Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.

I am really happy that Breitbart is having success a culture warrior. Though as I read yet another political conversion in a long stream of political conversion essays, I can't help but wonder if Breitbart has realized that switching from left to right does not actually defeat the dialectics.

Karl Popper's work "The Open Society and Its Enemies" is a deep criticism of the dialectics, but the Open Society Institute that bears the name of this work preserve in tact all of the intellectual corruptions Popper's work exposed.

Breitbart is doing a great job using new media to counter the tactics of the left. The tactics themselves are not sufficient to dig us out of the swamp of Marxism.

Righteous Indignation is a fun short read that might shock some people out of complacency. To actually pull of a restoration of the American experiment, the defenders of liberty need to engage in a deeper fundamental discussion about epistemology and the history of ideas.

First Day Sales

My first two days of sales are in. With a little bit of forum spamming and blog posts, I was able to scare up 50 clicks to the the Kindle Version of Brainwashing. From those 50 clicks, I managed to sell one copy of the work.

Okay. I was the person who bought the copy. I thought it would be worth $.99 to see how the work rendered in the Kindle Software. Buying a copy means I have statistics for the book.

The Amazon upload did not paginate or do the table of contents in the same way as the copy I compiled with the software from MobiPocket.com.

The one sale put my book at position #134,524 in the Kindle Store. A weeks ago, my sister published a short story for young adults called Bouncing Brad. She is in position #116,613. My guess is that she sold two copies (me being one of the two copies).

Both works suffer from the lack of an editor.

I suspect that, in the long haul, the large quantity of unedited works on Kindle will destroy it as a potential revenue source for unpublished writers. (Unless, of course, people develop an appetite for raw writing ... which is possible).

Were I to design a Digital Text Platform, I would include editing functionality. A writer could upload their writing as raw. People who enjoy improving writing could make modifications to works they like. Editors would end up getting a cut of the sale price of books.

As for Brain Washing. I wrote the book in the 1980s. I did a major edit in 2000. IMHO, There was sufficient time from the writing to the publishing for a self editing session. I added the section headers and made very minor corrections for the Kindle edition.

Anyway, my Kindle book was a test of Amazon's DTP.

I think will do a little more spamming. I gave up on the goal of recouping the $10.99 I invested in the project (I bought a $10 stock photo for the cover). My new goal is to get 50 more clicks on the title.

Kindle Stuffer

One Day Late for Christmas, I am pleased to announce the Kindle edition of Brain Washing.

This is a $.99 short story sold through the Amazon Digital Publishing Program. It is the tale of a philosophically inclined apprentice janitor.

The plot line was that a person works his way through college working as a janitor. He graduates in a recession and continues on as a janitor feeling bad about his social status.

He hooks up with a master janitor. After a series of triumphs and defeats, the master janitor goes through a self cleansing which is so thorough that the master janitor achieves nirvana (the highest state of being) and transcends.

You can read the story online.

The primary reason that I republished the story on Kindle was to test the Amazon kindle publishing format.

I uploaded the story a week ago. I originally clicked the 70% royality button. The lowest price I for an eBook on the 70% option is $2.99 (which is too much for a short story). So, I changed to the 35% option and republished. It took Amazon several days to encode the change ... so, I missed the Chirstmas market.

There might be people who just bought a kindle (or who got an Amazon.com gift certificate). So, I might get a few sales.

Moneywise, I spent $10 to buy a stock photo titled Commercial Cleaning by Pedro Castellano. I also bought a copy of the book to see what it looks like. I should be making about thirty cents per each book sold.

If I can sell 40 copies, I will break even. I doubt I will sell that many. But there might end up being a small market for dollar books as people with Kindles might buy such books to use up the loose ends of gift cards.