Robert Kroese

Announcing... The Kroese Cruise! (Pronounced "KROO-zee Krooz") →

Get Mercury Rises for $2.99! →

Anonymous asked: What do you think of the color salmon for a man's oxford style shirt?

I think that calling that shade of pink “salmon” is like calling red “human.”

Come see me in London on June 9!

I get asked a lot how the hell I managed to make a shitty novel like Mercury Falls into a Kindle bestseller. (OK, that’s not the exact question people ask, but that’s what I hear.) After trying to answer that question a few dozen times, I finally decided to write up everything I know about self-publishing and marketing and release it as an E-Book. The result was Self-Publish Your Novel: Lessons from an Indie Publishing Success Story. I never planned to make any money on Self-Publish Your Novel, and man, has that plan come to fruition. My payment has come in the form of having a ready answer to aspiring authors seeking publishing advice: “Have you read my book on self-publishing?”

Then I got a very nice email from Rebecca Swift, the director of an organization in London called The Literary Consultancy, asking if I’d be willing to come out to the UK to speak about my self-publishing experience. Would I be willing! Look, I know I should pretend to be blasé about such things, as if I’m invited to speak to six conferences a month, but I’m sorry, I’m SUPER-EXCITED. I’ve never even been to the UK before. I’m thrilled to have this opportunity and very thankful to Rebecca and TLC for taking a chance on me.

Modesty aside, I did learn a lot with Mercury Falls about what it takes to make a self-published book successful, and I think I’ve got some good pointers to share with aspiring (or traditionally published) authors. As Ms. Swift admits, the UK has been a little behind the U.S. in the self-publishing movement, and I’m happy to be part of helping them bridge that gap. The UK has a wealth of phenomenal writers, and the self-publishing revolution will not be limited by geography!

If you’re in the area, here’s the schedule of the conference. I’ll be speaking on June 9th. Hope to see you there!

Mercury Rests (and so do I)

Mercury Rests, the final book in the Mercury trilogy, is finished! This time, Lucifer has his sights on the destruction of Heaven itself. With Mercury MIA, only mild-mannered forensic analyst Jacob Slater and jaded but plucky religion reporter Christine Temetri can stop the Prince of Darkness from carrying out his diabolical scheme. They soon realize, though, that they are way out of their league. Will Mercury return to save the day once more, or will he be stranded forever in a strange land, a reluctant spectator of the Ultimate Ping-Pong Match at the End of Time? Find out in the most thrilling Mercury adventure yet!

Mercury Rests will be available by Fall of 2012.

Anonymous asked: Hi Robert, I'm currently reading (and thoroughly enjoying) your "Force is Middling.." book while I await the next Mercury book release and I'm wondering if you still sell the What happens in Jupiter, stays in Jupiter t-shirts? Karen

You can actually still get them: http://www.printfection.com/mattresspolice

intelligenceandaloadedpistol asked: Hello Robert! I just finished reading Mercury Rises and I think I might be feeling something very close to withdrawal symptoms. A bit sad, a bit anxious, a bit fidgety, and generally kind of pissed off. I really want to know what happens next! I also wanted to ask you, is there any way to get both Mercury books signed by you? I would love the pair (and trio when the time comes) Thank you so much for your time!

Well, you’ll be happy (or at least less pissed off) to know that I’m planning on sending the final draft of Mercury Rests to the publisher next week.

As far as signing the books, that depends on where you are. Maybe I can swing by your house sometime. 

Ron Paul is too crazy to be President

As a libertarian-leaning conservative, I’ve been exulting over the recent successes of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. It seems like every time I post something on Facebook or Twitter about Ron Paul, however, someone mentions that Ron Paul is “crazy.” I decided to look into the matter, issue by issue, and I was shocked to find just how crazy Ron Paul really is. Observe:

Position: Ron Paul wants to go back to the gold standard.

Actually, Paul isn’t particularly enamored of gold, but he does believe that money should be backed by some sort of hard asset, as the U.S. dollar was before 1973.

Why this is crazy:

Money is not supposed to be based on anything. A dollar is worth a dollar because people believe it is worth a dollar, and that belief shouldn’t be rooted in anything other than trust that the Fed won’t print vast amounts of money, drastically devaluing the dollar.

Also, if the dollar was based on something, it would prevent the Fed from printing vast amounts of money to bailout banks, as it has done over the past three years.

Ron Paul wants to “end the Fed.”

Ron Paul wants to get rid of the Federal Reserve, the organization that oversees U.S. monetary policy. This position goes along with #1. If money was based on hard assets, the Fed would have nothing to do. An intern named Dave would simply print as much money as the U.S. has in gold reserves and then go home.

Why this is crazy:

It’s important to have a central agency comprised of wealthy, unelected bankers overseeing the banking industry and the economy as a whole. Without such an agency, banks would act in wildly irresponsible ways, potentially crashing the economy and causing widespread financial losses and unemployment.

Position: Ron Paul won’t attack Iran.

Ron Paul doesn’t want to engage in preemptive wars against countries that may pose some future security risk to the U.S., like Iran.

Why this is crazy:

This sort of policy would have prevented our cost-effective, humane and wildly successful adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those countries would not be the paragons of stability and democracy that they are today, and the U.S. might have turned into a police state where basic civil liberties are routinely violated in the name of combatting terrorism.

Position: Ron Paul wants to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget.

Ron Paul wants to make massive spending cuts, eliminating the Education, Energy, Commerce, Interior and Housing and Urban Development departments.

Why this is crazy:

Without a central federal bureaucracy telling teachers how to do their jobs, America could easily fall behind many other industrialized countries in the quality of its public education – countries like South Korea, Finland, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Estonia, Switzerland, Poland and Iceland. And most of these countries are no larger than a good-size U.S. state like New York or Minnesota. Can you imagine New York or Minnesota overseeing their own education system without the help of Washington. Two words: Cray zee.

Without the Department of Energy, we might become dangerously dependent on foreign oil while failing to invest in more sensible renewable energy sources, and states like California might experience routine blackouts as their strained electrical grids buckled under demand.

Without the Department of Commerce, we could see a big dropoff in whatever it is that the Department of Commerce is supposed to be doing. Without a Department of the Interior, we might need a whole other agency to protect the environment (maybe call it the “Environmental Protection Agency”). And without a Department of Housing and Urban Development, we could see massive over-building of overpriced homes while hundreds of thousands are homeless.

Clearly we cannot afford that sort of insanity.

The most terrifying book I’ve ever read

I just finished reading James Rickards’ book Currency Wars, and I’m torn between telling everybody I know to read it or going to CostCo to stock up on canned food and bottled water. I wish I were joking.

Rickards starts with a historical tour, highlighting the near-catastrophic results of two previous currency wars — the first of which led to the Great Depression and World War II, and the second of which led the malaise and stagflation of the 1970s. In each case, governments desperate to bolster domestic employment vastly increased the supply of their currency (by printing money or through other means) in order to prop up exports. In some cases this tactic worked to some degree over the short term, but over the long term it resulted in competitive currency devaluations with disastrous social and economic consequences.

Delving into the current world financial situation, he explains how the Fed, the U.S. Treasury and the IMF are responding to recession and unemployment with the same tactics that decisively failed in the past, and shows how the current situation is in several key ways far worse than other past crises. With Obama’s stimulus having failed to accomplish anything but vastly increase federal debt, consumers in debt up to their eyeballs, and a third round of “quantitative easing” on the horizon, the powers-that-be are rapidly running out of sleight-of-hand maneuvers to rebuild confidence and get people spending. Rickards sees a wholesale collapse of the dollar — and, by extension, the global financial system — looming ahead. He roots his arguments in recent developments in complexity theory, which seem to indicate that current policymakers vastly underestimate the risk of a systemic collapse.

He proposes some common sense reforms to forestall that collapse: breaking up “too big to fail” banks, outlawing most derivatives (which increase complexity while masking risk), and limiting the involvement of banks in risky trading and underwriting — and one more controversial move: going back to a gold-based currency. This last may seem extreme, but in Rickards’ view we are likely headed back to a gold standard (or something worse) whether we like it or not, and it would be better to adopt this standard in an orderly, reasoned manner than to wait until the dollar simply collapses, leaving gold as the de facto standard.

This book is a well-written, shrewdly argued, balanced and concise account of the predicament we find ourselves in at the beginning of 2012 — and what we can do about it. You must read this book.

(I’m heading to CostCo.)