This is a quick ALERT for anyone who uses the international research paper dissemination platform ACADEMIA.EDU. The terms and conditions have changed, such that unless you opt out of the AI options on the platform, you are giving Academia extensive rights over your work, which is referred to as Member Content.
The terms give Academia.edu a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to “use” Member Content and personal information, and to “generate adaptations” in various media (the terms explicitly refer to a podcast as an example). That language is wide enough to allow them to produce audio summaries, synthetic narrations, or other derivative products from your uploaded text. They may use your name/likeness/voice. it isn’t only repurposing the words but also giving them rights over your personal metadata.
The current control is at the account level. If you have uploaded content to the site, you need to go into your account and toggle off the green switch in order to opt out of these new terms and conditions. The ownership, management and use of often publically funded research is now liable to move beyond any control by individual authors or their publishers. Presumably the spoken version, or written summary, of an academic paper will be offered for sale or packaged with other material for use by students, other academics, or anyone willing and able to pay for it.
Academia.edu hosts millions of works and has faced takedowns in the past from major publishers (e.g., Elsevier). Even if Academia.edu’s Terms purport to license content, a publisher with valid copyright can still issue takedowns or pursue enforcement under copyright law. The Terms don’t erase third-party copyright. However most academics with material on the site have uploaded their papers in good faith as a service to other researchers especially those without ready access to University libraries, and as a means of maintaining relationships with other researchers and making connections with others in their fields.
Whether it is defensible to continue to use Academia.edu is now the question. Even if you have opted out yourself, is it right to offer support to an organisation which would follow these predatory practices? At least they did notify people and give the opt-out option.
Microsoft just got into big trouble for seriously upping everyone’s membership payment to include their AI without any notification. They were forced to contact users and offer an opt out. If you use Word or anything else in the Microsoft 365 suite, check that you have chosen the “Classic” version so as not to incur the increased cost.
All these companies (as well as shareholders and the stock exchanges of the world) expect that the use of AI is going to be pretty much unquestioned and automatic and worth a fortune. Do you agree?
An AI generated image of predatory business practices sending academic publishing up in smoke.
I have struggled so much this year just to keep going that I haven’t really been following the AI horrorshow and the latest madness of late modernity, or whatever/wherever this is. But now I am paying attention.
I subscribe to The Atlantic magazine because very little published in Australia can now be regarded as well-informed or useful. The Atlantic has just published an accessible search engine for the new generative AI programs being developed by Apple and Anthropic, listing all the published works currently being “scraped”. So simple. I put my name in and in seconds up came the answer. Thirty six of my published academic articles and reviews, and two other fictional works, were already in the data-base. This led me to check the work of a couple of others close to me. My daughter Obelia Modjeska had been scraped for her main true crime series and one other book. I checked other writers I knew – Australian authors, with no US registered copyright, unless the publishers had filed for copyright on behalf of the authors. Had they? Did it matter? How would you know? And what about everyone who had published in journals or magazines or even online on their own websites?
I have used Chat-GPT several times, mostly about factual things, because its information is more comprehensive than what comes from a Google search. The personalised aspect of it is intriguing, and its responses to weird queries are pretty amazing. In less than a minute I learned all about the history of commercial rolled oats in Australia. It told me things in greater detail than I could have found out by myself without wasting many hours. The information seemed to be coming from other sources on line, including Wikipedia, company statements, newspaper articles and ephemeral sources. Fair enough. Seems helpful.
On the other hand I knew AI had been exploiting the work of creative writers. I had heard about the class action suit in the US to gain compensation for the thousands of writers whose works had already been used by LIBGEN. People in the class action suit were only eligible to participate if their works had been formally recognsed by the US Copyright Office. Australian writers are not eligible to register.
Some comments I have read by disgruntled authors suggest they think it means the companies can publish their books without attribution or payment. No, that is just piracy, which is prevalent and bad enough. It is not the books/stories as such but the actual inner structures of them, sequences of words and phrases for instance, which are fed into some kind of mish-mash machine and then used to generate something “else”, some other written piece.
I began to realise what this means when I asked Chat-GPT if it could write a fictional text for me. Sure, it said, and gave me a few suggestions for guidelines. It could even write a novel. I recollected the many howls of protest from self-published authors on various Facebook chat groups who noted some authors were publishing three books a day or something like that. I didn’t take it any further, obviously, but I am trying to understand what this means for writers currently trying to publish their works, whether fiction or non-fiction. Will everything immediately be fed back into the AI interface/program/platform? Has copyright now disappeared? The Australian Society of Authors is making submissions on this at present and has published Guidelines with clauses to use in publishing contracts. This covers AI licensing and use as well as advice for web content and self-published work. But it seems from some recent decisions or assertions that powerful companies are arguing against the imposition of any such controls. Is there any point in writing anything any more?
I ‘m only writing this to register the existential shock I felt when I realised that so much of the work which I and others close to me have been doing for years and years as writers and researchers and creators and knowledge synthesisers now has no actual protection. But it goes far beyond that. Generative AI is now transforming the idea of “writing” and “creation” and “authorship”. Everything is available for access in an automated mashup bucket which anyone at all can use to produce something else under their own name. Although, ironically, if you get ChatGPT to write your novel for you, it does not have any copyright protection because ChatGPT is not a person. Go figure.
A PERSONAL NOTE FROM ME WHO IS A REAL PERSON AND IS ACTUALLY WRITING THIS:
The Generative AI program now attached to WordPress asked me if I’d like it to create an image for me to use in this post. I said yes. I didn’t tell it what to create, it read my post and then described what it thought I wanted it to do.
Create a highly detailed, sharp-focused image illustrating the theme of “Understanding Generative AI’s Effects on Writers.” Feature a distressed writer surrounded by stacks of books and a glowing laptop displaying generative AI text. The setting should be a dimly lit, cluttered home office with a window showing a blurry modern cityscape outside, symbolizing the clash between traditional writing and technological advancements. Use soft, dramatic lighting to highlight the writer’s expressions of concern and contemplation. Ensure the image is high resolution and captures the intricate details of the environment and the emotional weight of the subject.
Writer in Pain: captured by AI
So AI now understands what kind of image I might like to use to illustrate my thoughts on this topic, complete with setting, environment, gender of writer, and even “his” emotional weight. Had I asked AI to write the piece in the first place it would have been able to construct the illustration at the same time. I might try to do my own description and have the image created by Canva, which also has a visual generative AI program.
The Register of the Real seems to have evaporated almost entirely.
I have had occasion recently to review my own book of short stories, Revolutionary Baby. There was a suggestion that it might be serialised on a literary/writing platform currently gaining popularity. Some people still like reading and writing old-fashioned stories which reflect life in a pre-digital pre-influencer pre-Trumpian world, dwindling though this number might be. In this process I received some rather surprising feedback: my stories were accused of “man-bashing”. I was taken aback. As far as I was aware, my stories had been written from a ordinary female viewpoint and reflected an awareness and consciousness which any woman of my era would share.
None of my male characters were vicious or evil or deliberately cruel. They certainly were not violent or criminal or sadistic, unlike a high percentage of male characters who now occupy the fictional arena in ever-increasing numbers, thank you Bret Easton Ellis. If they displayed unkindness, self-obsession, lack of awareness or a failure to understand the women they were involved with, this was nothing remarkable. They, too, were creatures of their time. I feel fond of all of my male characters, in different ways, but I did need to convey the impact that their often thoughtless behaviour had on the women in my stories. In some cases they hardly connected with women at all and mainly hurt themselves.
It occurred to me that before considering any kind of serialization I should write an analysis of what happens in each of the stories and insert a trigger warning or even an apology for any misunderstanding that a male reader might experience as a forward. But on the other hand, there is no obvious evidence that any men have actually read the book, so perhaps that would be entirely superfluous.
This led me to ponder the fragmentation now occurring in literary and even more so popular fiction. Many of literary women of my acquaintance, most of whom would describe themselves as feminists, make a point of not reading books written by men. The question of the gender identity of the author, and ditto of the audience, has become a sore point among many commentators online, in literary magazines, in articles on book prizes and awards. There seems to be emerging a kind of gender-ghetto mentality where each identity is writing for others who share it. The striking emergence of queer fiction is an example. Some of the most interesting writing is coming from authors inhabiting a distinctively queer identity world. Is everyone reading this? Or mainly others similarly self-identified? I noted that women writers are mainly read by other women. No doubt there are exceptions today in strictly literary circles. But what is actually going on here? Does anybody know? Is anyone keeping track of these questions?
I love this piece. It seems like a simple narrative but there is so much deepwork here. He writes about his own writing. He knows his topic. He is trying to write something that doesn’t want to be written. He is in a Citadines apartment in Paris, near Les Halles, all set to direct his errant creativity, until the occurrence of an inexplicable body horror: an eruption, a carbuncle, a papule which swells and grows without explanation on his inner thigh. He describes his confusion, trying to seeking medical care in a place where you don’t have the normal supports. You can feel his rising anxiety as the Thing throbs and expands until it bursts in a surge of blood and pain. And pus no doubt.
It was 2023. He was trying to finish a novel which he had been writing and rewriting, each time reaching a certain length (137 pages) until he had to throw it away and start again. Only after his grisly wound was drained was he able to return to his writing which suddenly became something different. His novel, Minor Black Figures, emerged,due to be published in October 2025.
I spent six weeks in Paris in 2024, staying in an old rental apartment. The entire city was going mad in preparations for the Olympics. I was working on a half-drafted novel, a kind of auto-fiction about my experiences in Paris in the early 1980s. It was about woman stuff and the post 70s painting scene and the rise of anti-theory and the “New Philosophers”. But I was too sick to write it, or it was making me sick. I was dizzy all the time and felt constantly confused. I couldn’t manage the stairs and corridors of the metro. The book I had planned refused to co-operate. Too many characters appeared and kept on doing contemporary things, like try to work out how to buy a travel pass from a digital dispenser in an apparently abandoned metro station. Instead of writing my novel I had a major panic attack in Le Petit Palais, a glorious art gallery full of lesser known paintings from the past three centuries.
Le Petit Palais, Paris, May 2025.
There were endless corridors of incredible old paintings. This was one of my favourites. I stood in front of it, wondering at how in the 17th century a virtually unknown painter had produced this picture from his own imagination (since there were no photographs then, remember, no image libraries, no Pixabay) and here it was four centuries later in Paris and so was I, and I couldn’t step away from it.
Allaert van Everdingen. L’Orage (The Storm): oil on linen, 1650.
But suddenly I knew I had to lie down, and there is nowhere to do that in Le Petit Palais. I started to panic. My partner shepherded me around with rising anxiety. I said we had to leave at once. Outside, a set of metal barriers had appeared and no vehicles were allowed to stop in front of the building, or anywhere near it. Police were patrolling up and down. Where to go? What to do? I panicked even more. After what seemed like hours we managed to get back to the apartment. I decided I had to just stay home for a while and not go near that book I had come here to write.
It definitely did not want to be written. It was full of my usual preoccupations about mothers and daughters and trauma and inter-generational rivalries. After a time I decided I had to find a doctor. It was so easy! An amazing midnight home visit by a local doctor provided a diagnosis of a mystery virus and consequent high blood pressure. He gave me a script for some magic pills which were procured next morning from the Green Cross pharmacy across the square. I felt better but still couldn’t write anything other than my diary.
After that, I went back to Sydney and thought maybe my book should be about having a panic attack in Paris. It could still be about that early 1980s era, but instead of a “normal” novel it would be a memoir of the present superimposed on a certain past which may, or may not, have existed in its recollected form. I realised I could salvage my original title, Paris Vertigo, which was perfect for this purpose. It could be any length: a Substack piece, a novella, a novelistic memoir. Not a poem, though.
It would probably push aside my daily diary writing, which in any case is no longer daily, and never has anything very interesting in it because I never have time to write it properly. I am so over-committed. So why not add one more probably unachievable task? Brandon Taylor’s Paris story inspired me to think it might be possible.
BELOW: The lobby of the Hotel de Nice, where some of PARIS VERTIGO takes place.
On various writers’ sites it is suggested that one should self-tether to a regular writing schedule to produce, let’s say, a thousand words a day. This routine is recommended so that the current work might be finished some time before the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (I think at least one of them is here already, but I diverge). As it is, I write at least a thousand words a day before breakfast in diaries, notebooks and Word files and on Evernote, generally in response to my reading during the 3.00 am Insomnia Shift. Or to incessant Nietzschian nightmares of the Eternal Return (the ghost of some book I tried to write years ago but abandoned). These words don’t count though.
Just once did I try this recommendation. It was late 2023 and early 2024. I wrote one thousand words first thing each day for Book One of a new series. I couldn’t believe how effective this strategy was. The words piled up quickly and a complete manuscript appeared. The author didn’t seem to be the same “me” as the previous incarnation and undoubtedly needed a new name. What would it be? Before that could be decided I had to pause because I had neglected so much else (having pressed the “hold” button so firmly) and then I was sucked into the usual vortex. The book, and the series, have languished since.
In fact none of my grand projects is ever really finished. Some almost achieve line honours but fall because I can’t stand doing yet more edits or I have found a new angle I want to put into Chapter X or something requiring extensive research has inserted itself into my consciousness at the very moment I was opening the edits file.
I am sick of my own unfinished books, and this means I am sick of their author as well, I want to shut her up and move forward into new scenarios which I can feel shaping themselves through various still incoherent images. They suggest to me a space far more appropriate than this merry-go-round posthuman nightmare dominated by nostalgic and anemoiac hangovers. (This observation led me to consider the appropriate cocktails for this condition, leading to the development of the FORLORN NOSTALGIA and the RAISETHE ALARM – see forthcoming Cocktail Post).
In the meantime I decided to bring these almost-finished projects to an end and gave myself a deadline of the end of summer (this is Australia, so that is around February) after which I would totally devote myself to my my futuristic post-apocalyptic picaresque adventure/thriller/romance series.
But the effort of finishing old stuff feels insuperable and pointless. It is like trying to complete a very complex piece of embroidery on a linen tablecloth you inherited from your grandmother. You promised you would do it, but now your grandmother is dead and so is your mother and nobody is even vaguely interested in embroidery and who uses linen tablecloths anyway they would only get filthy from the takeaway juices dripping through the cardboard box you now eat from after the food is delivered in a paper bag by some anonymous person who leaves it at the front door. You don’t even need to pay by credit card anymore.
So you won’t need a ladies’ reticule to keep your credit cards in.
Lady’s Embroidered Reticule: English Public Domain Media Search
I guess my question is: is it a waste of time to keep going on the old stuff? Or should it be put aside somewhere on a USB stick in a plastic box where it will be forgotten and ultimately sent to the tip leaving no trace anywhere in the sentient universe? At least if these various blocks of narrative turn into “books” they might live on for a while in a library – maybe. Thus do I console myself for all these years of wasted effort.
Dear Readers, this is just a quick note to let you know that if you looked me up on Google you very likely came across a compelling photo of a stunning women with a penetrating, somewhat sad gaze. As the text below it says “Annette Hamilton” you may have been misled into thinking either that I was committing a very heinous sin of disguise, presenting my persona in an entirely misleading way, or that somehow I had undertaken a full head and neck transplant which as far as I know even Drs Dubrow and Nassif could not manage (if you are a fan of Botched you will know who I am talking about).
No, this is a photo of writer Anna Wiener (37) author of Uncanny Valley, a book I strongly recommended in a post in March 2020 (see Posts).
I still recommend her book as a wonderful example of auto-ethnography, but with everything that has happened in the US over the past 4-5 years it can’t help being a bit past-the-moment. She now writes for the New Yorker as a tech correspondent – her latest pieces are “On video game engines” for The New York) and “On office memoirs” for The New Yorker. The photo above comes from her website.
There are plenty of photos of Annette Hamilton on this site and I think you’ll agree there is no mistaking the two.
As a possibly irrelevant aside, you may come across reference to an Annette Weiner (note different spelling). Annette and I did in fact share a number of elements of personal experience which would make this mistaken identity far more cogent.
Annette Weiner, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts, NYU
Annette Weiner was an outstanding and well-known anthropologist; born 1933 in Philadelphia, she died in 1997 in Greenwich Village, of cancer, at the age of 64. She had an extraordinary career, as Kriser Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, chair of the department and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. She wrote a dissertation on the contribution of women to the economy of Trobriand society.
Annette Weiner was a very generous, kind and fun-loving soul who allowed me to stay in her New York apartment on several occasions. We also met up in Paris, but things did not go well between us there and our friendship collapsed under the weight mainly of my bad behaviour. But, as they say, that’s another story! Perhaps to be told in an upcoming auto-fictional memoir, Paris Vertigo, although that’s not on the immediate writing horizon. I have always regretted what happened between us, although it was probably inevitable. How much of “the truth” I can tell in that book remains to be seen. But please do not mistake me for Annette Weiner either!
(From International Association of Literary Journalism Studies)
As mentioned I have been thinking about inserting the odd Feuilleton here, mainly because I keep finding myself contemplating some strange or remarkable facet of contemporary culture and society which defies inclusion into any other kind of writing I do. By calling it a Feuilleton I hope to indicate that it is a passing phenomenon not of any great social or political importance in itself, although I may be flirting with the Zeitgeist or capturing the temper of the times. My Feuilletons are not about literary culture or contemporary writing or the Kindle or the role of reviewers in the Internet age. But they are not entirely frivolous or meaningless either.
The term Feuilleton comes from French and means something like “little leaf”. Originally it was a small item at the bottom of the literary section of a newspaper, often providing a critique of popular theatre, but in many cases it grew to have its own page. By the 1840s the term roman-feuilleton described a serialized novel published in newspapers, something like today’s internet novelizations, but paid for, not for free. I mean the readers bought the newspapers and the newspapers paid the writers. [Now we barely have newspapers and people publish their writing for free all the time, which seems counterproductive]. The term was used in English by 1845, in the Atheneum.
The term was also handy to refer to small one-page advertisements, like handbills, which might be handed out in the street to encourage consumers to visit suppliers, as in this advertisement for a delicious lunch venue the like of which sadly no longer exists.
If that all sounds cheery and familiar, we must pause at what Hermann Hesse had to say about it in The Glass Bead Game, regarded as the first and only science fiction novel to win the Nobel Prize (in 1946). He was writing against the decline of humanistic culture brought about by “feuilletonism”, which he saw as the antithesis to true writing, and lampooned viciously. His master-work, The Glass Bead Game, was on the Must-Read list of myself along with almost every other proto-boho-intello in the 1960s, and describes the life of future intellectuals living in a cloistered community trying to circumvent the excesses of the age. Thanks to Huxley for bringing the Feuilleton into the present time as another object of knowledge. (https://huxley.media/en/the-feuilleton-era-we-live-in/)
Hesse described the Feuilleton, printed widely in newspapers and magazines, as a source of “mental pabulum” for readers hoping to soak up culture but unable to actually do so due to the lack of education and motivation, and of course being too busy and far too important to sit down and read actual books.
He said:
Among the favorite subjects of such essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as «Friedrich Nietzsche and Women’s Fashions of 1870,« or «The Composer Rossini’s Favorite Dishes», or «The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans» and so on.
Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as «The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries» or «Physico-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather» and hundreds of similar subjects… we feel surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute and of decent education should have helped to «service» this gigantic consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly, «service» was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the relationship of man to the machine at that time.”
Good heavens! This is exactly the flavour of the endless parade of pablum from our own Machine, the Internet, much of which we now call “clickbait”. But Feuilletonism goes so much deeper than trying to persuade people to buy stuff they don’t need from people they don’t know manufactured by unspecifiable techniques at places which don’t exist. The Age of the Feuilleton is completely dominant today, ever more so with the consequences of AI development and universal internet access on every phone – the mastery of the Machine indeed.
I don’t see my contributions to the Age of the Feuilleton as necessarily despicable, as Hesse might have done. By proposing to include a few remarks under the heading of a Feuilleton, I am going with the diverse flow of contemporary knowledges, and playing a little with the scary bizarritude of the fragments flowing through the ever-open channels of our time. It is true that there may be an academic flavour to the analysis, but maybe that is a necessary correlate of talking about anything in modern culture at all, rather than just participating in it. And a rich and full array it is.
So in my occasional Feuilleton I will remark on various ephemeral incidences, moments or events, usually conveyed in media, sometimes in performance. I notice things as I trawl through my reading and writing. Someone, generally much younger than myself, draws my attention to something I have never thought of before, and didn’t know existed. Or I am struck by some change in the discourse and behaviour in the everyday world around me. Often these moments are so peculiar in flavour and signification that I am reminded of my old father’s frequent exclamation: “Well blimey, you just wouldn’t read about it”. Now, these days, it turns out he was plain wrong. We can read about it, and moreover see it, all the time, every hour of every day. By adding a little more to it I hope to do no harm. I will identify those pieces which belong in the Feuilleton category, so you can skip over them altogether if you like.
Check out Stoddard Martin’s essays, with insights from the old and new literatures of several countries – aesthetics, musicology, mythology, philosophy, poetry, politics, and psychology.
Monstrous Century: Essays in ‘the Age of the Feuilleton’ Paperback – October 15, 2016
Insights from the old and new literatures of several countries jostle for space in this work – not to mention aesthetics, musicology, mythology, philosophy, poetry, politics, and psychology. The subjects, even when unsympathetic in themselves, are viewed in the round, and judged with humanity (from the publisher’s blurb).
«THE GLASS BEAD GAME». FRAGMENT FROM THE WORK
«We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather «chatted» about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors.”
Having a kind of fun experimenting with different ways to let people know this book is out now and available to buy as a paperback or download as an e-book. Experimented with making reels or vdos using the images above which were AI generated. Seems lie MP4s using AI images on Canva won’t download to Instagram. No idea why.
Turns out also that Amazon reviews written by readers in the UK don’t show up on the Amazon pages for other Amazon sites. To get a review to show up on Amazon.com it needs to be loaded by someone in the US using a .com account, The whole Amazon ecosystem is so US focussed. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, there isn’t anywhere else in the world really. I don’t think my video can be posted here either, but I’ll give it a try.
Feeling super frustrated about the use of social media as it is now. Used to be people following you saw whatever you posted. Now algorithms determine everything and each individual gets things the algorithm thinks they want. Presumably this is to encourage paid advertising on the social sites, which has now become a deluge. There doesn’t seem to be any community or collective environment left any more except in Groups, and there you get kicked out if you try to “advertise” without a commercial account. The immutable logic of the system forces everyone into a straitjacket with $$$$$$$ signs on all sides.
Reviews can be posted on websites, but then only those following the website already can see them. But if you’d like to post a review anyway, positive or otherwise, use the Contact form on this site and I’ll put it up on the Book page.
Although I share the general anxiety in the publishing world about the impact of AI, I have to say experimenting with AI images has been rewarding. Amazon’s KDP allows authors/publishers to include quite expansive materials on their book pages. The question is, what to use as the basis for the content?
When the book is a collection of short stories, like Revolutionary Baby, this give an opportunity to give some visual clues as to what some of the stories are about. Brief text-based summaries on the back of the book amount to not much more tha a Table of Contents. In an experimental spirit, I spent a lot of time this week seeing what I could come up with to give some better visual presentation of the narratives. The A+ content also allows the creation of one kind of module with text to go with a set of images, so that is what I have submitted. Whether or not it is accepted is another matter.
Meawhile, here are the three examples I am hoping to use as the visual clues on the book page. They seem to have transferred well using the preferred pixel size recommended by KDP.
If it works out on the Amazon book page each image will have a brief text below it. I chose to paraphrase some of the actual writing from the stories. Some of it could be used verbatim but with condensation and re-expression it became a lot better. It called for a different kind of editing.
Now to find some other ways to circulate these thumbnail narratives.
“I believe that books build better humans, and I am on a mission to help everyone find the book they didn’t know they were looking for.
I created Shepherd to add magic and serendipity to online book discovery.
When I look for a new book online, it feels soulless. Online bookstores sell books like toothpaste or powdered gravy mix. Something about that is profoundly wrong.
Books are magic.
Books are imagination fuel.
Books change how we see the world.
Books change the direction of our lives.
Books transport us across time and space.
Books let us see the world through another person’s eyes and emotions.
I believe they are one of the biggest net positives in the world. “
I was one of the authors contacted by Ben, invited to contribute to the “three favourite books” of 2023. The Shepherd project aims to provide a new way to help readers find books they otherwise might not come across, using the usual digital approaches eg via an Amazon search. But the Shepherd project aims to be much more than that. Check out the website at shepherd.com and follow the various links on the site. Ultimately, this book discovery site should enable a much richer mix of possible book-searches and the discovery of all kinds of new and exciting writing from an unlimited variety of sources: traditional, independent, online only via a website, and others. Click below to see my three book choices.
I found it very hard to decide which books were my favourites. I have very eclectic tastes, obviously, and the choices I ultimately made reflected some of my reading practices during 2023. This was a difficult year for my own writing, trying to do final edits on Revolutionary Baby, to make decisions about whether or not to publish Radiant Sands, who to send the final draft of my memoir Regret Horizon to, and other issues I was wrestling with. I realised I had read well upwards of thirty books during that year, including quite a few paperbacks from Australian authors published by Australian publishers. Then there were the very many books I dipped into thanks to my membership of Kindle Unlimited. I found it very hard to finish most of these. In part, I joined Kindle Unlimited to get a sense of what the contemporary indie writers were doing. I will write a post soon about what I discovered, if I have the heart for it.
Meantime, I am supporting Shepherd as a financial member, although you don’t have to do this to use its program, as I think anything which will re-open the wide world of books and writing beyond the current restrictions imposed by Amazon algorithms and such must be a Very Good Thing!
Annette Hamilton - Writer 