Ok, fess up! Which one of you wrote "Let Them Eat Tea"?

[ColemanMaskell]

5. Well we wrote it to influence people with our political ideas (shock!gasp!) not to make money

Yeah, you might notice it was published in the summer of 2012. We wrote it as an attempt to influence people with our political ideas (shock!gasp!) not to make money.

You know, one of my nephews, in the summer of 2008, was a big Barack Obama fan (his mom is mixed race, but they live among whites, so there is a parallel there), and he complained about the unfairness of his disenfranchisement -- He can't vote just because he's a kid? Not fair! and he was quite serious, and quite put out by it.

So I said to him, how about this: We shall volunteer to campaign for Obama door to door. If you can influence even ten people to go out and vote for Obama, that's the same as if you'd voted yourself ten times! Right? Right. He bought into it. I drove around assigned neighbourhoods a few times with him and his sister. I'd stay in the car and they'd run up to the doors with their leaflets and ring the bells. It was great. (That's a picture of him on the cover of my other great fiction work, also available through Smashwords, a children's book based on bedtime stories I used to tell him.)

By the time the next big election came up four years later, the appeal of going door to door had lost its lustre. Writing a book was something I could do in my spare time at 3 a.m. without much physical effort, at no expense; and if the book could influence anyone at all to get out and vote Democrat, well, consider it a campaign contribution. I had a co-author, and we collaborated via email, so he too could do it in any convenient spare time he happened to have. We made it a free ebook for various reasons, but mainly because free ebooks get more downloads.

Also I have to say Smashwords is the easiest way I could find to publish -- Smashwords is great, or at least it was then. If you've published some things already yourself, as you said in your post, then you know what an ordeal it is to publish anything. Using Smashwords is almost painless. If I get around to publishing anymore books, I expect to use Smashwords.

BTW, I think anybody can logon to Smashwords and write a short favorable review of any book there which might increase downloads. I'm not sure the messages in that particular book are relevant to the current election, though; The main issues now seem to be sanity, plutocracy, racism and misogyny. So I don't think the Eat Tea book has much value as campaign literature this time out. . . . For this year I don't have any ideas for anything entertaining and relevant that I could churn out in a month or so, in time to influence my aforementioned "even 10 voters". In this corner we have Science, Fact, Sanity, Empathy; in that corner, we have seething anger and hate frothing up from the worst depths of the unconscious; How will it end? So, then, what -- cue Superman? Deux ex Machina? Armageddon? (Maybe end with a get out the vote scenario?) . . . Anyway, thanks for the kind words.