All right, so it’s been an interesting few months, and I have been swamped on pretty much all sides. As such, I haven’t been able to do much (read “anything”) with the website since the last short story post (Holly War) back in July. Frankly, things have been very mixed around here.

Among all of the garbage going on, I’ve run into some headwinds working on book two. This is compounding (or, more accurately, will continue to compound) with dealing with the fall-out of rising printing costs from earlier in the year, along with some of the solutions I have been discussing with my wife, among others.

Since it’s been a while and a lot has happened, this is going to be a much longer update than I would usually run.

General News

I’ll start with good news.

First off, my wife published her first book earlier this year. (Yes, I know that I am very, very late mentioning this.) Blackwood Hollow is a supernatural murder mystery written a style more reminiscent of true crime novels. Blackwood Hollow contains elements of horror, adventure, and drama that coalesce into a fun cover-to-cover read over the course of a few, quiet evenings. What begins for Connor Sullivan as a simple intervention in a domestic dispute soon turns a small, 1920s New Jersey town on its head. Over the course of a few cold, winter days and nights, Connor and his friends must figure out not only who committed the murder, but why the victim rose from the dead to seek the blood of the living.

Book 2 Delayed

I’ll be updating the front page accordingly, but I do not see Book 2 being released before end of year (2026) as planned. This is entirely my fault. Compounding errors and issues with the first two drafts has resulted in the need to not only overhaul but completely rewrite large sections. While I anticipated that this would happen, I did not anticipate the scale to which it would happen.

Again, this is something that is entirely my fault and results (mostly) from my own poor planning. Of course, it doesn’t help that my pace of work has slowed somewhat over the past several months. It’s a major project; but, for some reason, I’ve barely been able to get myself to average 1,000-1,100 words a day, actually writing. These are the two primary factors contributing to the delay(s). It’s just that simple.

Either way, assuming I can keep up or improve my present pace of writing, the third draft should be complete by the end of this year (2026). Then, it’s off to editing and finalization since I’m pretty much satisfied with the overall course of how the story is going. Hopefully book 3 goes a little smoother.

[NOTE: I think part of the problem is that I really didn’t take any time off between releasing book one and beginning work on book two. I think it to at least take some time away from at least the main-line work in the future. Who knows…]

Unfortunate News: Price Changes

This is where the actual bad news comes in. And, I’m going to kind of give a sneak peek into where things are and where I think they’re headed. [I may also opine on exactly why I think printing costs have seemingly gone through the roof in the last year or so, but that’s another point.]

Okay, so first off, I had been keeping my retailer discount through the printing service way too low (around 35%), which is a major problem because it means that retailers turn away at below a 55% discount. I’m not going to blame any retailers for this. I understand the decision. While it would’ve made pretty much zero sense 30 years ago, it makes perfect sense in the current environment. As you can guess from this statement, I moved the retailer discount from 35% to 55%. This expands my presence on platforms, something I was reluctant to have much of anyway, given the progress hangups in book two.

That is the first part of the issue, and something which could change in the future if market pressure on retailers ever changes. The second part, at least for now, represents a longterm shift in trends which has been progressing over the last 5-10 years and has been exacerbated by various factors in the last 2-3 years. That is, printing costs.

This is easily the part I have the least control of and is the core reason why I have had to completely terminate the “mass market” sized paperback…and why I will be having to increase prices effective 23 October. What happened is best given in an illustration. Below is a screencapture of the price and expected compensation of the hard cover edition of The Aos Si’s Gift before price adjustment:

Yes, you are reading that correctly. After adjusting for retail placement, I would have owed the printing service $2.85 on every sale. Could I mitigate this by leaving the retailer discount at 35%? No, I really can’t. If I want to be able to start talking with retailers about getting books in store, I’m going to have to up that discount. As such, the following price changes will be going into effect on the 23rd of October, 2026:

• The trade paperback edition of The Aos Si’s Gift will be priced at $26.99 US
• The hardcover edition of The Aos Si’s Gift will be priced at $39.99

As much as I’d like to avoid steep price increases like this, especially on the hardcover, I really can’t. Even with the price increases mentioned above, I’m only going to be making $1.00 to $1.50 per sale. Frankly, I do not see the trend of increasing costs changing, at least for the next several years.

As tempting as it is to blame the printing and distribution chain for this, I really can’t. Honestly, they are simply reacting to an entire chain of problems being caused by the gross stupidity fueling an AI bubble. The entire computing chain from facilities to individual hardware components has been disrupted so badly that I do not know how, when, or even if the broader economy will ever recover. (This is what happens when people are so convinced by ideas like Creative Destruction that they are willing to destroy even the consumer and distribution bases which support them.) Either way, the disruption goes all the way back to at least late-2020, which is when I started seeing rumors of GPT3 models being discussed openly on 4Chan. (Sorry, I don’t have the archive link(s) at the moment.) This happens to coincide with some the earliest rumors of hardware disruption, although that was easily covered over and exacerbated by economic disruptions related to covid “policies.” That being said, it’s only gotten worse since 2024 when AI supposedly got “good enough” to at least satisfy legions of scammers and grifters to create and market entire books.

Herein comes the problem:

Book printing requires technical infrastructure, and a lot of it. It requires servers, all of them including SAS. This means RAM, server CPUs, high-end HDDs and SSDs, power supplies, boards, and so on. It also requires extensive network infrastructure (e.g. managed switches and firewall appliances). All of these things have increased significantly in price to irrational degrees. For example, DDR5 RAM way more than doubled in price by the end of 2025. I bring this up to say this: not only has the cost of individual server and network elements more than doubled in price, but the flood of AI “books” has touched off a need to more than double the server capability and network hardware needed to support it. This has drastically increased the costs of operating any web-based service while also driving lead times to insanity. In short, it now costs any printing service more to provide the same service while demand for their services is being artificially driven through the roof.

So, yeah. The short version of this is that I have to increase my prices because it’s gotten much more expensive for services like IngramSpark to operate at all. What the longterm economic result will be is just about anyone’s guess, but I don’t see it being a good thing – though I do see it being the latest GoodThing(TM) we’ve been routinely tortured with since the dotcom bubble burst.

The good news is that the eBook remains at the same price it has been at since it was released. So, there’s that at least.

Discussion of Solutions

Either way, enough pissing and moaning about problems and likely causes, none of which I have any control over.

First off, the writing issue. If I’m really just tired, which might be the case as stressful as this year has been, I might try to take a week off, assuming I can get myself to do so. At the very least, I might try to take a week to do something other than write for a bit. I’ve been trying to do some things that seem to help (exercise, regular fire pit use, cutting back on some of my bad habits, reading more, and improving my prayer life), but the hard part is maintaining consistency going forward. Either way, we’ll see if I can’t talk myself into taking at least a little time off before getting back into it full steam ahead.

Second, in response to changes in pricing and printing costs, my wife and I have been discussing some solutions. I’ll go ahead and put these out there, along with foreseen hurdles:

• Physical Sales Through This Website
  • This is something which I would actually like to do since it allows me to do things like including a signature, either on request or at random because I feel like it.
  • Again, this is a mitigating action, not a solution. I still cannot sell below the Amazon rate without screwing myself over on multiple fronts. It sucks, but that’s the way it is. The biggest issue is that I simply do not have the space for volume inventory. I would probably only have space for 20-30 books at a time, maybe a little more. Shipping is also a bit of an issue.
  • Bottom line, lots of hurdles to overcome with this one.
  • Right now, managing physical book sales through my website would be a non-starter. For an inventory of only 20-30 books would run me somewhere in the ballpark of $400-600. I simply don’t have that kind of money right now.
• Electronic Sales Through This Website
  • Selling the eBook directly through my website doesn’t solve the pricing problem completely. It does, however, mitigate the impact of increasing printing costs, retailer discounts, and so on.
  • This is something I’ve been planning for a while anyway. The big hurdle is setting things up with a payment processor so that I can receive payments. This is going to also require some fiddling around on the business side of things.
  • The downside remains that I can’t sell at a rate below Amazon ($7.99) without screwing myself on the platform which still makes up the majority of book sales.
• Divide Book I in Half
  • I really don’t want to do this. Like, I really really don’t want to. Just doing some back-of-napkin math, a single $26.99 book would probably become two $13.99-14.99 books, screwing part 1/2 buyers out of $2-3. That just sucks, even if it would allow me to bring back mass market paperbacks. I really just don’t like where it leads to, especially with current publishing trends of throwing multiple different covers together for a single book that hasn’t even been out long for nothing more than aesthetic purposes. I would much prefer to have printing costs go down, but I just don’t see that happening in the near future. As such, I’ll do what I can to mitigate the damage for now.
  • Will Require Two New Covers
    • Dividing the book in half will mean that I’m going to need a new cover or two. While this is something I should be able to do independently, it’s going to take a while. I already have a long backlog of “things I need to do” on that front.
    • This may require more than just two new covers, since I may also have to consider similar treatment for the hardcover. I really don’t know on that front, because hardcovers have always been vastly more expensive than the paperbacks.
  • Will Require (at least) Two New ISBNs
    • This is pretty obvious. Each title will require an ISBN. At present, I have three ISBNs remaining available after publishing The Aos Si’s Gift and after assigning further ISBNs for my wife’s debut novel, Blackwood Hollow, which you can find further information on through her website. Accounting for the additional 3-4 ISBNs needed to publish the follow-up to The Aos Si’s Gift, I would need another 2-4 depending on whether or not I decide to break up the hardcover as well. It’s no biggy, ISBNs aren’t that expensive.

Either way, these are some of the efforts and solutions on the table for how we are going to deal with the costs of printing going forward. Unfortunately, this means that I will have to be making some significant changes here and there, but we’ll see what happens.

Concluding Remarks

Altogether, things aren’t going too badly. I mean, yes, it’s been mixed, and this year has been very stressful for me and my wife. Generally speaking, however, most of the hurdles being faced are nothing insurmountable. Overall, things are improving, even if not as quickly or smoothly as I would like them to.

Either way, I can’t really think of much else to add here.

Thank you for stopping by, and God bless you.