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I’ve seen a lot of popular books use word clouds, so thought I’d have a go. The book is available on Amazon.

They nuked us with their dark orbs, yet still we fought.

Anastasiia also animated the cover for book two. What could Yamuba be up to? How will Dragan respond?

I’ve started writing Bane War: Warlord again. I care about the story, characters, and overall series message too much to stop, even if I’m the only one who ever reads it.

Yamuba, our antagonist, is a Daz (god of death) cultist hailing from Crameia. She loves walks in dark alleys, knives, katanas, ritual sacrifice, dark spells, and tasty meats. She’s capable with weapons or witchcraft, and clearly irate with Dragan. Wow, their medical garbs are torn and bloody. What could’ve happened? Anastasiia drew this cover.

The back cover is AI generated with Midjourney, showcasing Svathora, sacred mountain of Drenaglen’s barbarians, home to clan Kryludi, water domain warriors. A shrine sits atop, containing spoiler stuff, so won’t get into it for now 🙂

The book is about 60% done, though I’m not happy with the overall tone. It needs darkening and more suspense. So I’ll spend some time cleaning up what I have, then finishing the gaps. My writing style is all over the place. I like writing chapters, switching to other parts of the book, and coming back later. It keeps my ADHD brain happy.

May freedom’s wing carry you.

Amazon charges a whopping 0.15 USD per megabyte delivered (converted from British pounds in Amazon’s example). When I first read this, I thought it meant gigabyte, but no … it’s megabyte. Imagine having to pay 15 cents everytime you downloaded a small photo. Sound unreasonable? I agree.

What does it actually cost Amazon to deliver these precious megabytes for ebooks? One need only look at the cost of Amazon S3, their cloud storage service, to see the true cost and why this is 9000% overpriced.

First, we examine the storage cost. According to Amazon, it’s $0.023 per GB per month stored. Converting to megabytes, we get $0.000023 per MB per month stored. Essentially free for an ebook that’s several MB big.

With storage eliminated as a cost factor, now let’s look at transfer costs for S3. Just making a request costs money, apparently, and it’s $0.005 per 1000 requests. Converting this to a single ebook request, we get $0.000005 to initiate a request to download an ebook. Again, essentially free.

How about for the bandwidth used? Amazon shows $0.09 per GB downloaded. Converting to megabytes, we get $0.00009 per MB downloaded. Now observe the absurdity of the delivery charges for a 3 MB ebook.

Cost to download 3 MB ebook from kindle: $0.15 * 3 MB = $0.45

True cost to Amazon for delivering the ebook: $0.00009 * 3 MB = $0.00027. Essentially free.

Imagine trying to sell an image heavy ebook on Kindle. Impossible.

But wait! Amazon has the 35% royalty option without delivery fees, you might say. Yes, this is true, technically, but a 35% royalty is hilariously low. And that 70% tier? It’s more like 40-50% when you factor in the delivery fees. I’m shocked this hasn’t come up in an anti-trust government case. Amazon’s clause forbidding selling books at a lower price on other platforms at least has, though it doesn’t extend to the delivery fees.

In summary, this is what happens when monopolies grow unchecked. They can charge whatevery they want and extract every drop of money from their users (content creators and customers alike) because they can. Capitalism at its finest. Now you know why Jeff Bezos is so filthy rich.

What does Jeff Bezos do with such funds? A picture is worth one thousand words.