Robert Kroese

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.)

Anonymous asked: I recently ordered a signed copy of your book and have not seen it yet.

On Monday, I sent out all the copies that had been ordered via Priority Mail. You should have it before Christmas. If not, email me at rob (at) robertkroese dotcom.

Anonymous asked: Do you have an exclusive contract with Amazon? I sure wish you could also publish through Smashwords so I could read you on my Nook.

Almost all author-publisher contracts are exclusive. You can’t sell a book to Random House and then, after Random House has done the heavy lifting (market research, editing, cover design, marketing, etc.), turn around and sell the book to Simon & Schuster. That means as much as I’d like to, I can’t make the Mercury books available on the Nook.

As I’ve pointed out before, however, the Nook uses the Android O/S, which means that it there is no technological barrier to reading Mercury Falls on your Nook. B&N has deliberately crippled the device to prevent it from being able to run certain apps (including the Kindle app). This may seem like a Machiavellian move on B&N’s part, but remember that B&N isn’t selling a device so much as they are selling a way of buying things. Amazon is doing the same thing: they actually take a loss on every Kindle device they sell because they know that once you have the device, you’ll be hooked on the Amazon model. My personal opinion is that B&N doesn’t have a chance to win this war, which means that the purchase of a Nook is probably analogous to buying a Betamax VCR in 1980.

There is a third option, however: Buy a third party device that can display books in any format. For example, I often read on my Android phone, using the free Kindle app. The downside of this option is that you’re going to pay more for a comparable device, because a third party company can’t afford to take a loss on the sale.

The upshot is this: when you buy a Nook, you are buying into B&N’s content distribution model, and that model has no place for books that are published by Amazon. That’s something people should keep in mind when deciding what e-reader to buy.

Anonymous asked: Hi! I recently read Mercury Falls at the recommendation of my roommate, and I have a question regarding the Amazon Prime Lending Library. I really loved the book, and I wanted to know if you still get payment/royalties for my checking out Mercury Falls for free.

Excellent question, Anonymous. And thank your roommate for me. While I can’t go into the details of my contract with Amazon, suffice it to say that I’m perfectly happy with you borrowing the book from the Amazon Lending Library. And telling all of your friends to do the same.

Anonymous asked: So what's up with Christine and Mercury romantically??

That question (and many more!) will be answered in Mercury Rests, which should be available next fall.

Why I Fear Congress More Than I Fear Thieves

I would like you to do something for me. Go to Google and type in “Mercury Falls book free download”. Hit Enter and you should get a few pages of sites purporting to offer free digital copies of my novel, Mercury Falls. I haven’t checked the integrity of the files they are delivering, but it seems pretty clear that if you want to steal a copy of my book, you can do so fairly easily.

Let me be clear: Mercury Falls is not free. I worked for three years on that book and I own that content. I have contracted with Amazon Publishing to be the sole provider of that content, and because of Amazon’s customer-friendly pricing structure, the Mercury Falls is available in paperback and electronic form for a very reasonable price. If you are willing to screw me out of my royalties so that you can save $4.75 (the current price of Mercury Falls in the Kindle store), then you are a thieving asshole. And don’t give me that crap about not wanting to support Amazon or wanting to read the book in a format other than Kindle. If you’re boycotting Amazon out of some sense of principle, then be prepared to deal with the consequences of that boycott: namely, not having access to content provided by Amazon. Don’t steal from me and tell me you are doing it to stick it to the man.

HOWEVER, I do not need the U.S. Congress sweeping down to save me from pirates. The fact is that my sales are doing just fine, thank you. I have no hard data on how many sales I’m losing to piracy, but I suspect the number is negligible. Why? Because normal, generally honest people don’t have the time, technical know-how or inclination to steal books through pirate sites. People who use those sites are going to be devoted thieves and people with who rationalize piracy through a misguided and self-serving notion that all content should be “free.” These people are not going to be stopped by something like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). As with most anti-piracy measures, the people who are going to be punished are ordinary people.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence, in fact, that making content cheap and easy to download actually increases profits. Take, for example, the case of Monty Python increasing sales by 23,000% by releasing free videos on YouTube, or the case of comedian Louis C.K. releasing a DRM-free recording of his performance for $5. 

In my own case, I sold roughly 4,000 copies of Mercury Falls for $.99 through Amazon’s Kindle platform. I originally priced the book at $4.99, but then dropped the price to $2.99. The result? Sales more than doubled, so that I was actually making more money (and reaching far more readers) at the lower price. I then dropped the price to $.99 (the lowest price Amazon will allow) and sales once again more than doubled. At $.99 per copy I was making more money and reaching five times as many readers as I was at $4.99. If I could have given away Mercury Falls for free, I would have (and in many cases, I did). Frankly I would have been thrilled to find my book being offered as a free download on a torrent site, because I believed in my book and I knew that the more people who read it, the more people would buy it.

Now that Mercury Falls has been picked up by a publisher (AmazonEncore), do I feel differently? Sure I do. I’m no longer just an unknown author throwing content into the void, hoping to be noticed. AmazonEncore has to pay for marketing, publicity and overhead, so it’s unreasonable to expect them to give away their content. Now it’s a liability to have Mercury Falls popping up as a free download on pirate sites. But how much money am I losing because of those sites?

The simplest way to calculate lost profits would (theoretically) be to multiply the number of pirate copies downloaded by the profits I stand to make per legal purchase. By this measure, if a thousand people download pirated copies of Mercury Falls and I am making $2 per book*, then I have lost $2,000. But this is a vastly misleading number. Here’s why:

Scenario 1: Joe Freeloader is browsing through a pirate website when he comes across an interesting book he has never heard of before, entitled Mercury Falls. Rather than looking for a legal way to buy the book, Joe illegally downloads the book free from the pirate site.

Scenario 2: Jane Nomoney doesn’t have a dime to her name. One day she is browsing through Amazon when she runs across an interesting book called Mercury Falls. She wishes she could buy it, but because she has no money, she ends up going to a pirate site and downloading the book illegally.

Scenario 3: Jim Jerkwad has plenty of money, but he’s a jerk who doesn’t mind screwing authors out of royalties. He finds Mercury Falls on Amazon, decides he wants it, and then downloads it from a pirate site.

Note that only in Scenario 3 am I actually losing any money. Joe never would have heard of Mercury Falls if it weren’t for the pirate site, so you can’t include his lack of purchase in my total potential sales. Jane was never going to be able to buy the book, so I’m not losing any money there either. Only Jim, who deliberately uses Amazon to find books and then goes out of his way to get them illegally, is actually hurting me in any real way. And it’s my belief that people like this (1) are relatively rare and (2) will find a way around any piracy restrictions. This doesn’t justify the thievery in the first two cases, of course; my point is only that I’m not actually losing any sales in those cases.

Additionally, there is the possibility that the downloader will like the book enough that someday they will buy a legal copy, or recommend the book to their friends. Scoff at this if you want, but it’s word of mouth that sells most books.

These facts are overlooked in blog posts such as this one by author Karen Ranney, which also hilariously states:

Oh, by the way, they’re going to take your credit card number and steal YOU blind. And you’d better run your virus protection right away, because you’ve probably been infected with malware or another virus.

Which is it, Karen? Are these short-sighted opportunists who are using your books as bait to get credit card numbers and spread viruses or are they a serious threat to your business? I mean, if selling books illegally at cut-rate prices is such a great business model, wouldn’t these sites want to keep their customers coming back and encourage them to refer their friends? Stealing credit card numbers and spreading viruses is a sign of desperation, not the hallmark of a business that’s going to give serious competition to Barnes and Noble or Amazon. If piracy sites really were as overrun with scammers as she indicates, then no one would use them. At least not more than once.

The real threat (to the extent that one exists) is not sites that are using content as bait in some virus/credit card scheme; it’s sites that deliver exactly what they promise: free (or vastly discounted) illegal content. But again, given the three scenarios above, how much money does any given author stand to lose from piracy? Very little, I suspect — and piracy might actually result in a net gain for the author.**

And the price for protection against this marginal group of content pirates? What Google’s Sergey Brin calls “measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.” Is it worth the price? Absolutely not, and people like Karen Ranney should know it.

*Not actual numbers.

**Of course, the higher a book’s price, the greater the temptation there is for people to pirate the content. Publishers who insist on selling e-books at $10+ each are frankly asking to become piracy targets. Fortunately, AmazonEncore prices my books very reasonably.