Free Kindle Books and Random News

Next weekend (August 1st through 3rd) you can pick up Baker's Dozen and Lucky '13 for your Kindle, absolutely free. You're welcome, America.

The plan to bring The Hammer to an end at the end of this year is still very likely to happen. It really just depends at that point how much time and interest I have. Obviously there hasn't been much content lately, for a variety of reasons related to work and general morale and motivation that would sound too self-pitying if I got into it.

And what content there has been seems to revolve around the rather exhausted theme of fat-cat bashing. A few wealthy people are running the world, and your life and my life, and there's not much any of us can do about it. Fine, you get it already. There's only so much more beating that dead horse can take before it disintegrates.

All of which is to say that while I'm not hell-bent on shutting this thing down outright, I'm also not interested in keeping it going just to keep it going. So we'll see.

Anyhoo, as far as the Kindle thing goes, it's been a fun experiment, which I plan to continue as much as possible. There will be another year-end retrospective, as well as an Assholes of the Year mini-book, to release first week of January 2015. Sometime after that, probably in March or April, all six will be bundled together into one package, and sell for probably $1.99 or so.

I'd like also to do a full 10-year retrospective, but to do it right, it should probably be something like picking one post from each month, which obviously is an enormous undertaking. Please let me know in comments if any of this sounds interesting to you.

While the books move some units here and there, none of them ever really had substantial volume, sort of like how this blog itself, while it has very steady, decent traffic, never cracked into the higher levels of fandom. Long-time readers will recall that this was something that annoyed me somewhat back in the day, but I stopped worrying about it quite a while back, at least 5-6 years ago.

Things either click or they don't for a variety of reasons, but the leg-humping necessary to try to convince large numbers of people to check something out is just something I've never been comfortable with, beyond occasional open-thread pimpery at some of the posher joints. So it goes.

Anyway, two free books for your perusal, August 1-3. Grab one, leave a review if you're inclined, etc., etc. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Free Downloads Tuesday

Folks, if you want to show some support for our humble efforts here, and not spend any of your hard-earned cash in the process, do me a solid and grab yourself some free downloads this Tuesday, April 1. All four Hammer e-books for Kindle will be available for free download, as will all six Purple Tiger Guitar books (available on the AStore page in the upper right sidebar).

So take a second, drop in and grab some free reading material, leave a review if you're inclined, spread the word, yada yada. As always, your participation and support are appreciated.

[Update 4/1/14 11:15 PDT: Well, that was something. I suppose I could and should do some statistical analysis on this phenomenon, perhaps later in the year with a larger sample size. But today's little free download experiment ran the gamut from sublime to ridiculous -- the 5 main PTG books (the 6th book is actually a 99-cent sampler of one of the other 5) were downloaded over 2,000 times each, with Practice Power going over the 3,000 mark. (To give you an idea, generally a free download day will result in a given book being downloaded roughly 100-120 times that day, around 150 or so on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.) The grand total was just a shade under 12,000 books for the day. Pretty fucking cool.

At the other end of the spectrum, none of the four Hammer books (admittedly, they are dated even before they are published, in terms of content and even titles) even made it out of double digits. There was a time when I would have taken it personally and gotten butt-hurt about it, but frankly, as the two or three people who have checked out Lucky '13 found out if they read far enough into it, this blog will probably close up shop at the end of 2014. There are multiple reasons for this, many of which I've gone over in here from time to time. But the bottom line is a combination of lack of time and lack of response -- in other words, if there were more response, I'd make more time, but as today showed, a guitar site I started less than two years ago, and post to less frequently than I have here for nearly a full decade now, just moved about 200 times as much product. For free.

When you can't even give it away anymore, maybe that's a sign. Maybe I should have put stories and photos of my pets in the Hammer books. We'll touch a bit more in depth on this particular dynamic down the road at some point. I am still hoping to close out strong with three final Hammer books -- an Assholes of 2014 shorty, a 2014 essay compilation (with new intros), and a huge retrospective encompassing the entire decade of the Hammer's run (I'd really like to throw some of the comment dialogues into that last one, one thing that has made this blog stand out over many others is the quality of so many of the regular commenters here). We'll see how the rest of this year goes, but whatever of those I actually do, I will be promoting early and often.

Lucky '13 Free Download Ends Tonight!

The headline says it all, folks -- here's the simplest free way to support our efforts here at The Hammer (besides checking out our sponsors). Just head on over to Amazon before midnight tonight and grab a free (Kindle only) download of our 2013 retrospective, Lucky '13. It's a collection of greatest hits from last year, with a new introduction and new prefatory remarks for each essay. There's been some good interest and activity so far, so grab your copy, tell some friends, and enjoy!

Free Download Weekend

Hey kids, do your part to support this thing and grab a free download of Lucky '13 this weekend. As always, it'll make your whites whiter, your colors brighter, your dick longer, etc. Impress your neighbors and annoy your friends with the baroque talking points of the previous year's posts here at The Hammer. Lucky '13, as of this post the #1 ranked free book in the Political Humor sub-category -- check it out now!

Lucky 13

Been sidetracked with a metric fuckton of work and family issues lately, but the promised 2013 retrospective, Lucky '13, really is just about done. I'm shooting for this weekend, we'll see if it actually happens. It will launch with several free days of downloads. Holla in comments if you give half a fuck.

Health Care, Housekeeping, Cyber-panhandling, Notes and Errata

Here's something fun:  for my first paycheck this year, I got a nice surprise -- every two weeks now, I get about a hundred bucks more deducted for my basement-level health plan. Happy New Year, right? Considering I not only have decent health insurance, but am a member of a manager-level public-sector union, I can just imagine what others are dealing with.

 

The easy snark would be to drop some #thanksobamacare smackdown, but of course there's more to it than that. You'd think with a variety of corporate-owned media entities jabbering 24-7-365, someone would step up and talk about what "Obamacare" really is. But it doesn't seem like they have.

 

So let's be more clear about this, since the media (and indeed Obama himself) have failed to do so -- what we call "Obamacare" is really an amalgamclusterfuck of industry-written regulations, mandating health care not so much to insure people who can't get insurance, but to ensure that when indigent people visit the ER and skip out on their tab, someone (that's you 'n' me, bunky) covers the tab.

 

So I'm well aware of what I'm being forced to pay for now, something I rarely if ever use. If it wasn't this, it'd be something else -- the hallmark of bureaucracies in general and post-industrial societies in particular is that, since you have more people with less to do, but everyone needs to look like they're doing something, what remains of the American middle class has to get used having someone's fucking hand in their pocket at every turn.

 

Can't ask the .1%ers to pay a little extra taxes, since they're job creators, right? (Just not here.) And by definition you can't ask the indigent and unskilled to pay for it, since they're barely eking their way through life. (And yet, there are people who earn a better living than I do, advocating for the rights of the disenfranchised. Awesome. Where do I get one of those folks to advocate for me being nickel-and-dimed to death?)

 

But I don't have an extra $200 a month to throw at bullshit either. I drive a 20-year-old car to work. Already I'm going to spend the rest of my life paying down interest on $200 textbooks, for a degree that should have come in two-ply. And now this, so that some bloodsucker can optimize their fucking stock portfolio on everyone else's back.

 

Anyway, I don't really care to hit folks up for money, because I know things are tough all over. But here are a few ways you can help a brutha out, with very little (or no) money and time:

 

1. Check out our sponsors. Whether or not you buy anything, it helps.
2. If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow any of my books for Kindle from Amazon for free, and I still get a royalty.
3. Spread the word. Nothing is more valuable than word of mouth.
4. My political books are all lower than $2.99 in price, so if you want to buy one, they're really not that costly, and never will be.
5. If you play guitar, or would like to learn, check out my Amazon Store at the top of the right sidebar. If you buy through that portal, I get the royalty and the sales commission. Most of the guitar books are $2.99 or lower, though a couple of the longer ones are $3.99, and they all have enough material to keep just about anyone busy for months.

 

The new Hammer book, Baker's Dozen, is available for download, only 99 cents. Starting Sunday, the book will be available for free for 72 hours. It's the Assholes of 2013 list, essentially. Grab a copy for free, take 30 seconds and write a review, and tell a friend at one of the kewl-kid blogs. Easy enough, doesn't cost you a dime, and you're out maybe 15 minutes of your day.


I had hoped to release the 2013 collection, Lucky '13, at the same time, but due to a multitude of other commitments and projects, I'm still working on formatting and cover design. Should be ready to drop next weekend; considering I didn't get Mockalypse and 12 in '12 out until April, I can live with mid-January for these new ones.

 

As always, thanks for your support.