iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Current list of things to focus on getting out: one novella, one short story, two essay collections, one short story collection, one RPG chapbook, one RPG essay collection.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

One of the nice things about the looming threat of unemployment was the kick in the pants it gave me to gather together all the half-done writing projects.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The real curse of doing a long stint of freelancing is finding a reasonable answer to "please give us a list of referees who you reported to directly over the last five years"

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A redundancy when you can line up another gig and use the payout to clear a bunch of debt is actually not so bad. A redundancy when you have nothing else and have to live on the payout is...not so great. At the eleventh hour, yesterday, it started looking like I'm getting to go with option A...

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Judging by the most recent round of Author Spam, they've relaised pretending ot be a high profile editor making contact from a GMail address is...suss. Instead they're going for that luster of authenticy that comes from using AOL instead.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

(My panic responses are fucking weird, and I understand that. What I'll actually do is keep applying for regular jobs and writing stuff I enjoy writing. I do like to daydream, though)

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Officially at the stage of impending unemployment where I convince myself everything will be fine, and I'll just write 26 books a year until I brute force my way back to a sustainable income.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Me: I've been sick for a week. I'll ease myself back into drafting. Also me: Writes a 2,000 word essay in one sitting.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Good morning to all my fellow gamers still old enough to remember THAC0. How are your joints doing today? Did you also injure yourself by standing up too fast?

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

If you've never read Theadora Goss's story "The Rapid Advance of Sorrow", you really should.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

When I inevitably retreat from social media, it will be because I can no longer deal with indie authors being slightly bewildered to discover that Amazon isn’t in their side.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Quitting time for the day job today. Looking forward to the weekend writer sprint.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hey fellow writers. My coffee mug just gave me a useful reminder. Perhaps it would be useful for you, too?

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

And while I applaud the intent, social media is an entertainment platform. We go to the places where there's an audience. Platforms need to build a critical mass of users, and my first question of any new platform is "how are you going to do that."

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Thinking about this a lot today, because I keep seeing adds for a kickstarter hoping to develop a "new, innovative, artist friendly" social media platform that combines the best features of three or four different platforms.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

And then they quietly imploded and went away, because they had a promise but no plan to move through the three chokepoints that was based in reality.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

They dreamed big. They launched. They lured in a bunch of writers with big promises and potentially locked up publication rights that could have been leveraged better.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Almost all the brave new disruptors of the era I worked for the Australian Writers Marketplace never got what Substack understood, though.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

(Friends still don't let friends start a Substack, though. Even if you get past the no porn/yay nazis "free speech" issues, it's an increasingly enshittified platform that shouldn't be a hug of your online presence)

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

They recognised the value of the audience and legitimacy establlished writers brought to the platform, and compensated them for it.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It's one of the reasons why I have begrudging respect for Substack, even though I loathe the platform with a passion: they recognised the cost of acquiring an audience, and threw money at writers to use their platform and build up the initial readership.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Any new internet-based platform that doesn't start with "here's how we're building a readership so writers will follow" instead of "we need writers to build an audience" is fighting an uphill battle.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

In practice, attracting an audience in a crowded marketplace is hard, and writers will follow the options that seem to have the most to offer them.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

They needed the authors to create the audience, instead of creating an audience and asking writers to join. This is both the power and the trap of the internet in this chokepoint paradigm. In theory, the internet has democratised distribuiton. Anyone can put something online and attract an audience.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Many of the folks who wanted to mimic Amazon's success (and for some reason, 3/4 of them figured "serialisation" was the answer) tended to fail because they had a distribution system no-one was using.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Because there were readers hungry for content in the new distribution channel, and the established publishers weren't eager to fill it due to their distrust of Amazon's increasing dominance of the industry, we had a context in which self publishing could flourish.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The reason the kindle worked is because it started with the first two in mind: they invested in the technology as a loss leader (financing) and sold it in huge quantities to create a new distribution platform (kindle), then Amazon went searching for content to fill it.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

There are chokepoints in an entertainment business like Publishing. A successful company needs Content, Financing, and Distribution in order to flourish.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Many of them failed to understand why we listed them in the paid author services advertising section (commonly known as "here be dragons" around the office) rather than in the unpaid publisher listings.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Heres the problem in a nutshell. They had an idea and a platform, they just needed authors to use it so they could attract readers and the disruption could begin.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

At worst, these pitches were a "bold new" approach to running a vanity press. At best, they were genuine attempts by people who simply misunderstood what Amazon had done and why it worked.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

So I managed the Australia Writers Marketplace around the time Amazon revolutionsed self publishing and digital reading through the launch of the Kindle in Australia. Which means I saw a lot of "we're going to disrupt publishing" pitches for people who wanted to be listed in AWM.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It's been a good week on the book recommendation front. One of my Call of Cthulhu group has been reading Morning Glory Milking Farm. Another is reading The Reverse Unicorn's Guide to Surviving Life After AI. Turns out, if you bang on about books enough, people eventually get interested in them.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Time to break out a manuscript and come up with an alternate writing schedule.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Ergo, I've not written much since the redundancy was announced. This is helped by my Laptop being at deaths door, and struggling to hold enough charge for a one-hour commute each way, but it's not like there aren't other options.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

A huge chunk of my writing time is now bound to my morning commute on two different busses. Due to impending redundancy at the end of the month, I'm driving to work in order to facilitate looking for a new gig around work hours.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I'm a grump this week, and answering questions about writing-while-working-full-time on threads yesterday largely helped me figure out why.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm very much of the opinion that social media doesn't sell books the way most people hope. On the other hand, Threads has sold so many of these mugs over the last three years its fucking embaressing.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I have hit the "time to shave off the beard" phase of searching for a new job.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

There is nothing like revisiting book layouts and cover designs you did at the start of your publishing career, some twenty odd years back, to remind you of just how far you have com

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Reposted by Peter M. Ball

Angela Slatter 📚 @angelaslatter.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Ooooh, look, Fitcher's Bird at @barnesandnoble! Members get 25% off their pre-orders. Just saying... @https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fitchers-bird-ag-slatter/1149137042 #agslatter #fitchersbird #barnesandnoble #titanbooks #preorders

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

So I may have convinced other people in my Call of Cthulhu group to read Morning Glory Milking Farm. I await the sounds of SAN checks being made.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Good morning to everyone else who just fielded a queries about a series you wrote back in 2005-2006, even if the response is "crap, sorry, those files aren't in a publishable form anymore"

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Reposted by Peter M. Ball

Kurt Busiek @kurtbusiek.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

RT if you've never had a tab of ChatGPT open, period.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Genres that should exist, but don’t: Heyer-punk.

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Reposted by Peter M. Ball

Greg Jericho @grogsgamut.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Thing about technology that actually does make life better is you don't need to write 1,437 different op-eds to try to persuade people that it will make your life better.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

My general rule of thumb: once you see courses about “how to find your readers/sell books on x”, it’s a sign that the days of organic reach are over and rapid enshittification is about to start. I’ve seen two ads for Substack courses this week. Do with that what you will.

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Peter M. Ball @petermball.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

That's a very different paradigm than pulp writers wrote within, and I'm curious to see how some of the more prolific examples would have played things if used in the modern market.

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