Periodically publishing a paper book of essays used to be a good plan: Amazon’s royalties for self-published books used to be around 70% of the sale price. But now Amazon has decided to keep 70% for itself while number of people in the English-speaking world who read books on serious topics is continuing to shrink. Selling reasonably priced books now nets me only half as much as publishing a weekly essay on Patreon.com for subscribers only. Perhaps it is time for Club Orlov Press to diversify away from books and toward other pressable things such as cider or sunflower oil...
But it was fun while it lasted. Not only did I manage to put out my own books, but I also helped publish several books for other authors. Five were nonfiction titles that no mainstream publisher would dare to go near: Ray Jason’s The Sea Gypsy Philosopher, Rob O’Grady’s 150 Strong, Sean Kerrigan’s Bureaucratic Insanity, Piero San Giorgio’s Women on the Verge of Societal Breakdown and Greg Jeffers’ Prosperous Homesteading. Two more were novels: Jason Heppenstall’s Seat of Mars offers a dystopian but strangely optimistic vision for England while Stan Goff’s Smitten Gate is a hyperrealistic portrayal of elite American soldiering. For me, working with these authors was an end in itself.
As far as my own books, to cap off the series, I decided to give this last one a generic title: Collapse Chronicles. And since the four previous books of essays I put out also chronicle the still gradual but ever accelerating collapse of the West, and of the United States especially, I labeled it Volume Five.
Given the changed economics of self-publishing, the effort of bringing out this book can perhaps best be viewed as a public service. Web sites, especially paywalled ones like Patreon, are rather ephemeral. By purchasing a paper book, you get a hold of something physical: something that you can actually own for as long as you want, gift or lend to others, and make use of even if the lights are out and the internet is down, as they are likely to be just when you are in need of a quick refresher on the topic of collapse. There is also a good chance that, as the situation becomes more dire, my work will become censored and my internet presence shut down, but even if that happens my writings will survive within private collections in paper form.
Below is a list of all five books, together with their tables of contents.
Enslaved by Words
Faulty Tools
Military Defeat as a Financial Collapse Trigger
How can you tell whether you are a Sexbot?
Public Loathing as Deification
Maximum Uncertainty Principle
...By Their Fruits
The Magic Bullshit Decoder
The Limits of Gullibility
The Shape of the Future
Firewalls on Fire
How not to Write a Bestseller
The October Revolution and You
Into the Heart of Darkness
The New Subnormal
What Doesn’t Work
Why Kremlin Trolls Always Win
Eating One’s Young
Cryptomania!
Community: The Final Chapter
Deplorable Consistency
Poverty Minus the Meaningless Numbers
Thanks, Enemy!
Collapse Needs a Few Good Men
Sanctions, Shmanctions!
Gender Hysteria and its Discontents
What Color is Your Wrecking Ball?
Men: What Are They Good For?
Russian Jews in America and Russian-American Relations
How to Fix the US National Defense Doctrine
The “-ism” to End All “-isms”
Competitive Lying
Make Russia Great Again Through Negligence
Better Nukes for a Safer Planet
False Flags for Newbies
Killing Diplomacy
A Dry Run for Russian Democracy
Migrants Wanted—for What?
Kemerovo and the Circles of Ugliness
Provocations and Creative Imagination
The Importance of Looking Dangerous
Where is Russian Counterpropaganda?
A Fake News Triumph
End of the Era of Naval Empires
American Meddling
The World May End for the Stupidest of Reasons
Brain Parasite Gonna Eatcha!
Is Obama a Russian Agent?
How to Make America Great Again with Other People’s Money
You are not in control
The Real Nuclear Threat
From Hypocrisy to Cynicism
The guy who created the universe
The Demiurge and the Banality of Evil
Groundhog Day in Syria
The Mystery of American Violence
Obsolete Maps, Unfamiliar Landscapes
Revenge of the Polite Men in Green
Olduvai on the Dnepr
Venerating Stalin’s Ghost
A Walk in the Garden of Unintended Consequences
Collapse Mitigation Strategies
Past-Peak America
The Terrorizers, the Terrorists and the Terrorized
Are Humans Even Necessary?
Embarrassing Times
Nature’s Conquest of Man
Trump Trolls America
“Facts on the Ground”
The Great American Health Care Non-Debate
The Laughing Gas War
The Danger of Being Taken Seriously
The Nuclear Solution
American Foreign Policy Fiascos
Answers to Tough Questions
People on the move
Fact-Free Zone
Saving Face
Permission to Steal Everything
Propaganda and the lack thereof
How can you tell whether Russia has invaded Ukraine?
How to start a war and lose an empire
Twilight of the Oligarchs
Happy talk about the climate
Minimum Viable Sociopathy
Defeat is Victory
The Imperial Collapse Playbook
2015: Grounds for Optimism
Peculiarities of Russian National Character
Whiplash!
No Escape
Masters of Parallel Universes
Extinct—Extincter—Extinctest
Financial collapse leads to war
Chaos: Practice and Applications
Financial Feudalism
License to Kill
Communities that Abide Revisited
The Limits of Propaganda
America's Achilles' Heel
No, you can't go back to the USSR!
Crazyland
The Magical Content Tree
Pop goes the Bubble
The Care and Feeding of a Financial Black Hole
Financial Nonsense Overload
So you say you don't want a revolution?
It's really very simple
Dance of the Marionettes
Perfectly Comfortable
The Wheel of Misfortune
Trained for Success, Bred to be Eaten
A Modest Health Care Proposal
Shale Gas: The View from Russia
Down the Skyscraper
Sustainable Living as Religious Observance
Fragility and Collapse: Slowly at first, then all at once
Our Brave Experiment
Peak Oil Oppositional Disorder: Neurosis or Psychosis?
Politics of the Unconscious
The Most Interesting Driver in the World
Suicidal Services
Le Vieillard Gros
In Praise of Anarchy, Part I
In Praise of Anarchy, Part II
In Praise of Anarchy, Part III
The Limits of Language
Due to circumstances under control
Meanwhie in Ireland
The Practice of Anarchy
A Royal Pain in the Ass
Meanwhile in Russia
Escape from the Merry Christmas Zone
The Image of the Enemy
The Ecology of Hell
Pray for an Asteroid
Monkey Trap Nation
Understanding Organizational Stupidity
The Rationale behind the Boston Psy-ops
Meet the Chechens
Look for loopholes to avoid extinction
The Sixth Stage of Collapse
The Story of “Er”
Blessed are the Idiots
In Praise of Nomads
How To Time Collapses
“American” exceptionalism
The Good Life: Mobility, Anonymity, Freedom
Reichstag Fire in Kiev
The Madness of President Putin
Moneybag logic
The Five Stages of Collapse
The Collapse Party Platform
Questions for Economists
When All Your Best Employees are Going Broke
That Bastion of American Socialism
Hunger Insurance
Caution, White People
Selling Climate Change
Products and Services for the Permanently Unemployed Consumer
Industry's Parting Gifts
Collapse Competitively
The Great Unreasoning
Lost Leaders
Checkmate
Thinking in Straight Lines
Miserable Pursuits
How (not to) to Organize a Community
A Survey of Unlikely Voters
The Limits of Incompetence
Everyone Poops Debunked
Financial Totalitarianism
Dead Souls
Living on Stolen Time
Mind the Ruins
Dance of the Marionettes
The Wheel of Misfortune
Fundraising in Extremis
Making the Internet Safe for Anarchy
The Strange Logic of Dreams
Stages of Collapse Revised: "Joined at the Wallet"
5 comments:
RE books vs. essays: Americans attention spans seem to be somewhat attenuated these days, what with so much live entertainment going on daily in the political sphere producing grist for the essay mill. Great work Dmitry! Keep 'em coming!
So - if I wanted to buy a package of the five books from you (I have some in Kindle but physical sounds good), how do I go about it?
there are other book sale websites than amazon Dimitri, but I guess you know that. I like books for all your stated reasons. A half-way solution may be downloading the book as a pdf or something, as even if the 'net is down hopefully people should still be able to access their hard drives or floppy discs....(i'm old I guess). We have crap internet here, so don't do the cloud thing.
Nowhere -
You are right. I've done a lot of tweaking over the years, and the perfect length for an essay targeting a "modern reader" is around 1000 words. Anything longer, and people start skipping through the text and walk away with half an understanding. Problem is, most nontrivial theses are impossible to spell out in 1000 words or less. As far as book-length treatments, they are only good for works of fiction.
Veronica -
Do it through Amazon.com. Like it or not, they pretty much own this space and there is no way to compete with them.
Grant -
I've looked at all of the options and chose the best one. I've tried various things before, such as ordering boxes of books directly from a printer and shipping them myself... while living on a boat and using the marina office as a shipping center. The people at the marina were nice enough to put up with that. That was too much like having a real job, though! Maybe some day I'll have to resort to printing my books using moveable type and a press, and distributing them by bicycle, but for now there's Amazon.
Dmitry: You might look at Ingram Spark as an alternative to amazon - they offer both print and ebook publishing. I have used them for printing in the past and was quite satisfied (but now simply publish my stuff as ebooks only on my own website).
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