SurrealPolitiks S01E045 - Book It!

I am proud to announce that your favorite Podcaster has just published his first of what are sure to be many books!

Most of you will be familiar with the text of the work published. It is the transcript of the monologue I titled "Beauty Revisited". At a mere 26 pages, it is shorter than I had expected my first book to be, but if you are as I expect familiar, you can be certain its quality is not in question.

The Kindle eBook is currently FREE until February 15th. After that promotion ends, it is $0.99 or you can read it free with your Kindle Unlimited subscription. You can pick up a paperback from Amazon for just $5.75, and I'll note that these make great gifts for prisoners, and loved ones outside the walls alike. If you would like a signed copy, you will have to purchase this directly from me. I cannot sign books before they are shipped from Amazon. These will be prominently featured at https://SurrealPolitiks.com/shop by the end of the day, but I will not be able to ship them right away because I do not actually possess any copies myself just yet. This will be for pre-order and I will ship your copy just as soon as I get them. Please note in advance that I have terrible handwriting, and it seems a pity to mark up such a beautiful book this way, but I'll do it if you wish.

The announcement of this publication is less significant than the broader implications. I had looked into having a book published back in 2019, and as I spoke to various publishing outfits it appeared to me that this would be a fairly significant investment if I was not able to get a publisher to take on the expense themselves, which seemed the most likely scenario. Amazon makes this remarkably easy, with zero up front costs to me, and though I despise the company in many ways I feel foolish for not taking advantage sooner.

With the ease and affordability of publishing this way, I do not have to be quite so concerned about the expected sales volume for what I publish. I had not wanted to make a significant investment and store books on a shelf if I had no certainty of how many would sell, and I wanted whatever I made that investment in to be nothing short of a masterpiece. Amazon prints to order, and delivers eBooks to Kindle readers quite easily. With this tool at my disposal, publishing collections of selected writings with a bit of fresh commentary is a very viable project.

There is a folder on my computer titled "My Book Projects" and several works are in various stages of completion, with thousands of pages of text more or less ready to go.

Among them, last night I blew the dust off something I am calling "Adventures In Libertarianism". This is a compilation of much of my old libertarian stuff, including never before seen emails from, among other things, my run 2010 run for the US House of Representatives. It vividly illustrates my ideological trajectory from Bill O'Reilly superfan, to radical constitutionist, to anarcho-capitalist, into the Alt Right movement. The final post shared (spoiler alert) in the compilation is a post titled "Why I Consider Myself Alt Right" which I published just prior to turning myself into Virginia authorities in August of 2017.

There's still significant editing to do on this work. If I were to simply publish all of my publicly available blog posts until that time, in 12 point font on 6"x9" paper, the text would be over 3,200 pages, without added commentary. Apparently the page limit for a paperback published to Amazon is 828 pages.

There exists no shortage of utter garbage in that compilation which I must prune substantially prior to publishing. I have many more pages of emails and drafts to add. And I do wish to add meaningful remarks as one traverses the timeline. I put several hours into this last night, and find myself motivated to invest more time in it in the days ahead.

As another example, though would have to consider the implications, I have many old love letters as well. These make for very interesting reading. 

 My blog posts from May 2012 to October of 2019 amount to 5,430 pages in 12 point font on 6"x9" paper. I've produced 1800 pages at 8.5"x 11" since my release from prison alone. 

This does not include podcast transcripts, which, as I noted on the New Year special episode of the uncensored production;

Not including my other brands, just the Radical Agenda, I’ve produced no fewer than 648 episodes including this one. Assume that’s 2 hours an episode, we’re talking 1,296 hours of audio. I recently had all of those episodes transcribed by an AI application. Working with one sample transcript that came out to 29,242 words, let’s round down and say 29,000 words an episode, that’s 18,792,000 words.

The average single-spaced book manuscript typed in the 12-point font has roughly 500 words per page. That’s 37,584 pages of text in my audio transcripts, just from the Radical Agenda. The average adult non-fiction book is somewhere between 250-400 pages, according to Penguin Book Writers. Going with the high side of that, we’re talking 94 books in ten years. Not bad…

I've solicited assistance with this project a few times, to little avail. If, having seen me actually get a book on Amazon, you might care to assist me in sorting through some of this, I'd appreciate the help, but even without it you can expect to see much more from me in this fashion very soon. 

For the first year since I was released, I did almost nothing except work on these productions. This had the effect of burning me out if I am entirely honest with you. Since mid November, I have made a point to take some time for myself and try to work on life outside of the shows. That was much needed, and has been rewarding. I don't think I could have kept up at the pace I was keeping for most of 2023, and the last thing any of us want me to do is crash and burn.

This prospect is very exciting to me though, and I have gotten some things out of the way I needed to deal with in the last few months. Expect to see much more of me on Amazon than my Wish List from now on. 

There's plenty more to get to, of course. I did not watch the Super Bowl last night. I still have not seen the ads. How about some live reacts? 

Somebody tried to shoot up Joel Osteen's Church. Politico says it's a woman. Fox News knows better. Formerly known as Jeffrey Escalante, the Hispanic transgender nutcase had "Free Palestine" written on his rifle. He is dead, which one expects was the goal all along. 

Trump says he'd tell Russia "to do whatever the hell they want" to NATO countries who don't pay the bills, and people in the habit of failing to live up to their obligations are apparently outraged.