Global Climate Change: The Coming Catastrophe

The United States has a very long history of refusing to deal with looming problems until the problems grow to a point where they can no longer be ignored. Naturally this means the resolution of such problems always costs us more money and results in heavier consequences than if we simply admitted the coming problems and dealt with them logically ahead of time in a calm and orderly fashion.

from http://phys.org/news/2011-07-oceans-late-tide.html

The biggest problem is that so far the US has gotten away with this attitude toward dealing with issues, because no issue has yet been so huge as to overwhelm us. But that is about to change over the next century with the looming catastrophe of rising ocean levels due to global climate change.

Take a look at what is happening to Europe right now with the refugees coming out of Syria. Europe is panicking over what is a very small crisis compared to the number of refugees we can expect to see from rising ocean levels over the next century. Magnify the number of refugees to a global level and numbers as much as hundreds of millions and then try to imagine what will likely happen. Folks living inland aren't likely to spread their arms in welcome to help those who knew they lived in the danger areas yet kept stubbornly living there anyhow.

from http://environmental.lilithezine.com/Rising-Sea-Levels.html 

America could do the right thing and actually start working on this problem now. We could create millions of new high-paying jobs for engineers, planners, electricians, carpenters, and so forth by laying out new cities inland and building them, and then offering growing incentives to start moving people away from the danger areas well ahead of time. Will we do that? History says no. History says we will do almost nothing and wait until it blows up into a crisis that may very well take down our country.

Final Tallies for My Advertising Push

My last post told you about my first use of Bookbub, the big ebook advertiser. Now I have the final totals of what The Immortality Game sold during the time-frame of my ad. Note that I was selling one to two copies per day even before the ad, but that is a small number so it is still interesting to see what I actually sold this past week. Also note that I wasn't selling much at all on any of the other sites, so the numbers for the non-Amazon sites are all due to the advertisement. Finally, there were bumps in sales for all of my other books during this time, but I'm not going to worry about those numbers here.

Amazon ebook: 1134
Paperback: 5

B&N Nook: 232

Kobo: 12

iTunes: 60

GooglePlay: 28

So it's easy to see that Kobo was the site that brought the fewest number of sales. B&N did better than I expected. I had only sold 2 copies total on iTunes before this sale, so 60 is a pretty good number for them. Likewise I had only sold 2 copies in total on GooglePlay prior to the ad.

My First BookBub Ad

I'm pleased at how well my first Bookbub advertisement went yesterday. I had been hearing about Bookbub for so long, that they were the only truly worthy site for getting a lot of traction for your paid ad, so it was nice to see the returns be worth the money.

Waking up this morning, you can see that I hit #116 overall on the Amazon store and #1 in both Cyberpunk categories, as well as #3 in Technothrillers. And it's #9 overall in Science Fiction!

And my book is in some great company there! Maybe today it will push even higher.

And how about on non-Amazon platforms? I sold 120 copies on B&N yesterday. And I'm doing okay on Kobo as well, sitting above John Scalzi, one of my favorite authors!

Have any of you tried Bookbub before? And look, I get the cool orange Amazon icon indicating #1 best seller! (Sorry I am so excited, but such things don't happen so often)

Happy Back to the Future Day

You've probably seen it all over Facebook already, but in case you haven't, today is the date that Marty travels to in the second Back to the Future movie. Yep, the future is now!

I see lots of articles pointing out how few of the technological advances depicted in the film actually came to pass. I don't find this strange at all. I've argued for a long time that writers tend to be overly optimistic in their timelines for when they believe advances will happen. Funnily enough from what I observe, the more inaccurate such sci-fi writing is, the more popular it tends to be. From Snow Crash to Blade Runner to Back to the Future and so many more, the writers depict near-future situations as if almost everything will massively transform, when we all know the reality is that only a few things change dramatically while most things change fairly little. Don't get me wrong, I love these stories, but it does bug me a bit just how far off they are.

So when I write my own science fiction I tend to give more realistic timelines for the technology that I wish to depict. I feel that the story of The Immortality Game is what I consider to be near-future, but I still chose a date of 2138, because I wanted to be sure that we actually had a realistic time frame for the changes that I wanted to show.

By the way, this week (until October 26) I have The Immortality Game on sale for .99 (from the normal $3.99 price). Please let your friends know!