Quote--unquote

More of this in Michael Ampersant's Green Eyes.

The fountain of Geneva --- reviews

We were supposed to put some meat on the last post and share our thoughts about the "The New Dark Age"---that's you and me and Donald Trump and the internet (which he invented)---as seen by the British author James Bridle, the writer who alerted us to the video clip of the previous post. Instead, we got a new five-star review of our novella, mercifully short, and since we forgot to talk about its first review we'll post it as well. Both are on Amazon.

Here goes:

Roma
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sexy, quirky and highly imaginative

Format: Kindle Edition

I adored this short story. Loved the poetic language with fun dialogue and vivid descriptions along with a cast of memorable, sexy fauns. A delicious, irreverent portrayal of Hadrian, all-powerful emperor and lusty lover of a boy lost.

James Beamon
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fun and tawdry bit of history

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

This was a really fun look at an aspect of the Roman Emperor Hadrian's time in Geneva, which amounts to one of the most zany sexual conquests I've ever read. Michael Ampersant delivers the story mostly through dialogue, which provides a very casual feel as if an eccentric neighbor is telling you this crazy wild happening in history while you were just minding your business. Grasping some of the surrounding details may require some Googling or a passion for history, but the core is very clear and concise. Well worth the buck just so you can know the story and can tell it to others!

For the record

Comments will follow...hint: this ends in tears:


x

Portugal (7) -- Can you see the surfer?

You can't, actually, not on the notebook display, where he's screened out by an ad for Ampersant's scabrous story about the Fountain of Geneva. So, here he is again...

...the Portuguese surfer Hugo Vau negotiating a 35 m high wave, already known as "big mama", on 19 January 2018---the Guiness Book of Records is pending as to the highest wave surfed on record. And all this happened barely nine moths ago in Nazaré, 100 clicks north of Lisbon, Portugal, a place we visited today. 

(And the reason for these super-waves? We quote Wikipedia: "Nazaré is a popular surfing destination because of its very high breaking waves that form due to the presence of the underwater Nazaré Canyon.[8] As the canyon creates constructive interference between the incoming swell waves, it makes their heights much larger on this stretch of coast.")

Constructive Interference, folks--we were always wondering. Next time you have an argument with your spouse...think of us.

Marry me!

If history "teaches" anything, it teaches irony...and so, here we are, with a set of "propaganda" posters distributed before the Sino-Soviet friendship frayed around 1963 (in those days both countries were "Communist"):

Ironic? Yes, because of the homo-erotic vibes, which, like the waves in Nazaré, anticipate gay marriage.

Quote--unquote

More of this in Michael Ampersant's Green Eyes

Portugal (6)

Yesterday we had almost--almost--posted this picture in our quote-unquote series (note the caption)...

More of this in Michael Ampersant's Green Eyes

...and then, today, we get this...

...with little Michael in the thick of it, on the lookout point of the cliffs between Figueira da Foz and Quiaios. Being a painting, the first picture, by the Turkish artist Taner Cylan, is fiction, but the second one is pure photography by Jason ("connubial bliss") Yoon, and it is real. Here: 

Scratch my back!

Portugal (5) -- Don Quixote

We're on our way to Portugal again, and Chang had the brilliant idea to put in a stop at Campo de Criptana in the La Mancha region south of Madrid, where Don Quixote fought the windmills. Here they are (the windmills):

Yes, folks, really, at least in the sense that one local tourist guide blandly assert that the Don fought the mills, while a second tourist guide suggests that these windmills must have "inspired" Cervantes in writing the pertaining episode. You say. We may have another post about this soon; there is something funny about these mills.

Quote--unquote

__________

More quotes in Michael Ampersant's Green Eyes

Back home --- a report from the trenches of global warming

(Another tourist-laden cruise ship on its way to Cannes)

Quote-unquote

More quotations in Michael Ampersant's Green Eyes

Just do it!

Back home

We returned to France today. This was Bürchen, kissed by the autumn, yesterday. Photography by Jason Yoon, as always.

In the meantime, Michael signed a contract for a German publication of the GREEN EYES.

The Fountain of Geneva -- now out as Kindle book on Amazon

Ever wondered about the Fountain of Geneva, the world's foremost liquid monument? Michael has all the answers you need, now out as quick read on Amazon:

"Click"

"Grab your copy of this fun, sexy, and very cheeky short story featuring our dear Emperor Hadrian." --- JP Kenwood

"This is a really fun look at an aspect of the Roman Emperor Hadrian's time in Geneva, which amounts to one of the most zany sexual conquests I've ever read. Michael Ampersant delivers the story mostly through dialogue, which provides a very casual feel as if an eccentric neighbor is telling you this crazy wild happening in history while you were just minding your business. Grasping some of the surrounding details may require some Googling or a passion for history, but the core is very clear and concise. Well worth the buck just so you can know the story and can tell it to others!" --- James Beamon

This Is Heaven -- for the record (2)

For context see previous post. He're another ad:

More quotes in Michael Ampersant's This Is Heaven

This Is Heaven -- for the record

We've started some sort of add campaign for This Is Heaven on LustSpiel, much of which is NSFW. He's one post that's OK (dunno why it's blurred here):

More of this in Michael Ampersant's This Is Heaven

Inkitt (3) --- Bestsellers, Amazon sales rank, and much more

James Beamon has already reacted to our letter of yesterday about Inkitt, and here's his answer:

Your theory and discussion on Inkitt's underlying drivers with their touting of AI is definitely worth merit, to the point that I may write a follow-up post covering your analysis.  Oh, and to fill in some of the gaps of where their "bestsellers" lie, I present to you the Kindle Sales Rank Calculator:

https://kindlepreneur.com/amazon-kdp-sales-rank-calculator/

As long as you don't put in commas, this thing will convert the current sales rank to how many books they're selling per day.  Virtually EVERY book I put into from Inkitt's best seller rank was selling less than 1 per day.  To put it into working context, anything higher than a Amazon rank of 100,000 will be less than 1 book.  One book, Eric Olafsson: Midshipman, is at 407,416.  Egan Brass, the guy I interviewed for "The Bright Side of Inkitt", has a series called the Esper Files and the first one is at 321,238, the second is at 650,597, and the third is at 891,640.  At that rate I imagine Egan hasn't sold a single copy of Book 3 in months.

James Beamon

Now I haven't looked at every book in their lineup, but the one book I did see that was doing worthwhile numbers was Chosen by Lauren Chow.  Her rank is 55,707 which translates to her moving about 5 books per day.

Inkitt (2) --- Inkitt and AI---are Inkitt's sales so bad that they have to keep their numbers under wraps?

Inkitt has defined itself as a publisher "without an acquisition department." It invites willing authors to put their manuscripts on its platform and promises to publish the best-performing ones as fee-yielding books. Performance, it claims, is measured by an AI-inspired algorithm. 

James Beamon

In January this year, James Beamon, one of these authors, engaged in a dialogue with the platform about said algorithm which yielded little but obfuscation and gobbledygook Inkitt-wise. I thought about this and sent him the following letter (mildly redacted): 

I have posted two or three stories about Inkitt and had a chance to observe the phenomena that you describe in your post (regarding the relationship between reading behavior and their analytical engine).
Before I started to write fiction, I taught Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam, the discipline whose name Inkitt invokes as its unique sales proposition (“our algorithm is AI”).

My hunch is that this algorithm is mostly ballyhoo.

Why?

The algorithm supposedly links reading behavior to sales success, so it either (a) knows, or (b) has learned how reading behavior predicts book sales.

(Ad a) Imagine that you are the programmer, or the team of programmers hired to code the algorithm. You will have some hunches as to how the reading behavior re successful novels differs from reading behavior re less successful novels (and, perhaps not coincidentally, these hunches surface in the answers we get from Inkitt (“readers unable to put the novel down”)). There's some obvious plausibility to this, but initial hunches are not Artificial Intelligence. They represent the natural intelligence of a bunch of kids (mostly/usually), who spend their nights with a cold pizza on their lap hired to write the code. In other words, Inkitt’s AI-touting sales proposition does not hold, or at least: it did not hold at the outset.
If Inkitt has an advantage NOW over traditional (human) intelligence (agents, editors), it would be on the data side. Agents or editors don't have data about the reading behavior of a manuscript that hasn’t been read by anybody except them, whereas Inkitt, 2.5 years into its existence, can claim to possess such data.