Avatar

H. Salmon

@salmonandfox

Author/Artist/Ace/Parent https://linktr.ee/Xaotl

Book Summary

THE FOX EATER:

Shavn, former soldier in the imperial army just wants to go home and retire in peace without being aware that the strange pearl he's carrying from his last battle is an item of incredible power that puts him firmly in the crosshairs of those seeking it.

It will reveal secrets and intrigue beyond his previous imagining and challenge every resource in his reach to stop the Fox Eater from destroying everything he's spent his life trying to protect.

Book Summary

THE FOX EATER:

Shavn, former soldier in the imperial army just wants to go home and retire in peace without being aware that the strange pearl he's carrying from his last battle is an item of incredible power that puts him firmly in the crosshairs of those seeking it.

It will reveal secrets and intrigue beyond his previous imagining and challenge every resource in his reach to stop the Fox Eater from destroying everything he's spent his life trying to protect.

Random mansion generator

The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:

Oooooh! Saving this

That’s fun

Hey, but don’t fall asleep on this Medieval Fantasy City Generator   

There’s also a very helpful Village Generator.

Totally normal historical battlefield experience

The sensation lasted less time than a single heartbeat, but it was pure vertigo, hunger, age, and power. Something alien to his own mind that tasted that hint of blood and remembered it, wanted more. It promised to deliver any weapon in its grip if only he’d take it up and provide more.

            He felt, as much as heard the pause in the life of the place, clenching his hand tightly and stepping away from the patch of grass. Behind that picture of offered weapons he’d also felt the bones, so many bones. Uncountable and rotting.

having anxiety is like being given permanent unwanted custody of a halter arabian. like okay buddy is it panic time again. cool you probably need more exercise and an apple and then maybe you'll calm down.

taking my stupid walks for my stupid mental health with my stupid hypervigilant brain horse

thoroughly enjoying the notes on this post because it's equal parts people with anxiety going "yeah that's what it's like" and people with arabians going "yeah that's what they're like"

Scroll through the images for the full blurb! Full list of content warnings are on the ARC sign up page.

I expect to send out ARCs via email in the first week of May. Honest reviews are greatly appreciated~

If anyone wants a slow-burn exploration of warring religions & gods told through mortal elves with so…so many issues, I’ve got you covered. (I hope.)

ARCs have officially been sent out! Happy reading everyone! I hope you like it; I’m very nervous and extremely embarrassed lol.

You can still sign up with the same form, though I won’t be sending out the next batch of copies right away.

If I thought I had time to properly arc read stuff I'd be all over this but hey, check this out.

Heads Up Seven

   Thanks to @lacantuauthor for the tag! I don't think I know enough people to tag so consider this an open tag if you want to participate!! <3

These are the first seven or so lines from chapter 38 of The Fox Eater (WIP)

      “Alright, count me curious… where are we going exactly?” Shavn called to Alden’s back as they rode. He was no longer able to see the caravan behind them or hear it. Field and stands of trees had given way to stranger growth, bent trees and skeletons of trees. The ground is so thickly carpeted in moss and marsh grass, and patches of wild rose and some other climbing plant that scents the air in a strange mix of petrichor, mud and thick floral perfume.

            There’s a strange feel to the place, an energy that trails stickily across the skin. Cobweb feeling. Is there literal magic in the air, so thick that he, still incapable of wielding it, can almost touch it? Or more likely is there just an abundance of spiders taking advantage of the hunting. There’s no satisfactory answer, just another prankish grin and a deep bubbling chuckle of delight.

Avatar

ALT

don’t forget during the WGA strike that animation is not covered under the WGA deals and as a result animation has gotten the shortest possible end of the stick in under-staffing, under-paying, and generally turning the field into gig employment.

please sign the petition here for Disney to recognize animation production workers as a union and reblog this post!

Yeah I wasn't kidding about Disney not being our friend, even if they are going to run DeSantis through the meat grinder.

Support the Strike!

If you want books to exist, stop pirating them.

This sounds like drama, but it's not.

Not only is it well documented that pirating contributes to publishers not buying more manuscripts from an author (Maggie Stiefvater's experiment being the most famous), now we have evidence that Amazon's Kindle Unlimited algorithm is registering pirated copies of books online as the book being "offered" somewhere else, and punishing the authors for it.

And I don't know how much you know about Kindle Unlimited, but the thing is, if your book is in KU, you have to check a little box that says you're not offering the book anywhere else for sale. At all. So when the algorithm is finding the pirated copies, it's pinging it as, Oh! The author lied! The author misrepresented their sales strategy! ACCOUNT DELETION FOR AUTHOR. NO ROYALTIES FOR ONE THOUSAND YEARS.

Miette jokes aside, that's actually what's happening to very popular self-pub authors. Ruby Dixon just had her account deleted, her 15+ volume popular KU series taken down, and Amazon fighting her over the KU Pages royalties she'd already earned on those books. Now, Ruby's got her account back because she's popular enough that people shouted at Kindle executives very, very loudly, but what about other authors? This could ruin someone's career.

Well, why not publish wide, I hear you saying. Why stick to Kindle Unlimited? After all, Amazon sucks.

Here's the thing. Whether we like it or not, Amazon has a massive corner market on books, and for authors who are self-publishing, it is by far the most accessible and cost-effective method, PLUS, it's a great way to be discovered by new readers.

Because readers don't have to pay for individual titles under KU (they pay for a subscription, and then Amazon pays out authors based on how many pages of the book someone read), they can give new authors a try. They can take a chance on a book they're not sure they'll like. And Amazon tends to promote KU titles more aggressively because it's good for their business.

My little $0.99 short story, Swelter, is on Kindle Unlimited, and I can tell you that a good 85% of my royalties from it come from KU pages, not from people buying it. And that's for a story that costs less than a dollar and is not a big investment and has pretty good word-of-mouth in the f/f reading community.

Self-publishing is expensive, and time consuming. I'm getting away with it pretty cheaply right now because I am also a professional editor, and I have friends in the business who are willing to trade in kind rather than be paid. I have a really wonderful friend who is doing my ebook formatting for free because I beta read and do proofing for her. But if I were paying for all the services that I'm trading for, as most authors have to do? I'd be well over $1500 sunk into this little ebook coming out in a week that is going to cost $3.99 and be free to read on Kindle Unlimited. And that's not counting marketing. Because yeah, you have to pay for marketing. Hell, I had to pay $35 upfront to a popular site to be considered for their marketing campaign, and would've paid another $65 if they'd accepted me. (They did not, so I'm out that $35 without even a marketing campaign to show for it.)

And the thing is, I'm currently gainfully employed. I'm salaried. My spouse is also salaried, so I have enough disposable income to spend what I've spent on this ebook (which is still about $600, even with all the things I'm trading for). Most authors? Especially most self-publishing authors? Don't have that.

So Kindle Unlimited, for all its flaws, is a way to get more diverse voices in the business because you don't even have to buy an ISBN. Amazon assigns you an Amazon Sales Index Number (ASIN) and you're good to go, as long as you're not listing it on any other sites. Hell, they even have tools for you to make your own cover art if you don't want to pay someone to make it for you. They do a lot of their own internal promotion on Kindle. Readers can try you out for little-to-no personal investment on their part and maybe discover that they love your writing, and you've gained a whole audience. It's a great return-on-investment for self-published authors.

So that's why a lot of self-pub authors choose Kindle Unlimited. And a lot of authors will do a limited run on KU in order to get some early word-of-mouth and discovery readers, and then publish wide later. (That's my current strategy with Welcome to the Show, if it does well. If it's not doing well, I probably won't sink the money and time into expanding its availability.) But if this happens, if Amazon shuts down their account over "KU membership misrepresentation," then even if the book has been published wide and is available on other platforms by then, Amazon is going to dispute their KU Pages royalties and try to take them back.

So by pirating books, not only are authors losing "potential" sales (I know, there's a whole argument there), they could be losing real, actual sales that they've already sold.

In conclusion:

1. Don't pirate books.

2. If you see someone requesting where they can read a book "for free", speak up.

3. If you see someone providing links where people can read a book "for free" (if it is not provided by the author for free), speak up.

Thanks, and have a good day.

4. If you want to read free books, go to the library.

If the massive corporation took the hit, that would be one thing. But unfortunately the massive corporation has ways of making sure that the only hit is taken by small businesses and individuals.

THIS. ALL OF THIS.

I totally understand that people are having a hard time affording things right now but that's literally another reason why some of us want to be able to offer through KU too. Pirating books (and god even getting arc readers is rife with danger because imagine giving someone a free copy so you can improve your book with their input and -hey they steal it from you and get you kicked off of KU-...

We want to share our stories with you.

Please don't do this to us or we can't.

Avatar
In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can’t find any answers. A simple search for “best pc for gaming” leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to work-arounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google’s flagship service now sucks.
And Google isn’t the only tech giant with a slowly deteriorating core product. Facebook, a website ostensibly for finding and connecting with your friends, constantly floods users’ feeds with sponsored (or “recommended”) content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant. And as journalist John Herrman wrote earlier this year, the “junkification of Amazon” has made it nearly impossible for users to find a high-quality product they want — instead diverting people to ad-riddled result pages filled with low-quality products from sellers who know how to game the system.
All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users. And instead of trying to meaningfully innovate and improve the useful services they provide, these companies have instead chased short-term fads or attempted to totally overhaul their businesses in a desperate attempt to win the favor of Wall Street investors. As a result, our collective online experience is getting worse — it’s harder to buy the things you want to buy, more convoluted to search for info

Cory Doctorow has a similar concept of enshitification:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: Enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other.

To add to this, I believe Tumblr has evaded some of this because of it having always had a niche audience and an abundance of porn. But the first steps of enshitification on Tumblr are the 2018 porn ban and the release of Tumblr live. Let’s be loyal to the community and not to the platform.

it does feel a little bit like being gaslit that the internet is slowly getting worse in barely perceptible ways- it’s validating to see an article that says, “yes, it’s not that you’re getting old and somehow losing your google proficiency, GOOGLE IS WORSE THAN IT USED TO BE.”

Amazon literally shows you fewer search results if you sort by user reviews instead of “Amazon recommended”, and I remember that it didn’t used to do that

Just so we're all on the same page with the writer's strike.

If during the strike, it's announced about AI generated shows. We are not watching them. Not even out of curiosity. Let them fail every AI generated show they try make.

The human voice can not be replaced by AI. Don't let them try.

I'm at 58k words. I was on a serious roll but then someone knocked on the door and I lost my groove.

Shavn though is now standing in muck and moss with water seeping into his boot and wondering if he's going to get into a tangle with a snake before he figures out what people are trying to show him.

He is not pleased.

Do you like stories that aren't so much about saving the world but about the right for people to live the way they want to? Fighting the desire of someone in power to push a religious monolith for their own gain? ]

Do you like ace protagonists?

Found family?

Finding out that victory might not look the way you wanted it to at the start but can still be victory?

That hope and kindness are powerful and that even when we feel deeply alone there are others out there who are rooting for us and supporting us?

That's the Fox Eater <3