A Quick Update on My Author in Progress Project

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The project is still alive! I haven’t forgotten about my plan to write and publish 52 short stories on Amazon so that I can share a new one each week. I’m also consistently working on my novels.

However, due to some personal issues, I haven’t published anything new for the past few weeks. For those waiting for the next release: I’ve already written 23 short stories, even though only 7 are currently available in the STORY52 project. I’m working almost daily to complete the remaining 29 stories in the series while also finishing my next novel.

Once all short stories are written, I’ll be able to maintain a more consistent publishing schedule — ideally releasing one every week next year. I’m still determined to complete the project in 2026.

Running Tests on Amazon

Amazon allows me to offer each Kindle story for free for up to five days within a three-month period. Since the first stories were published already more than three months ago, I could run some experiments with them.

In these, I set the price to free for the maximum of five days — without announcing it anywhere. I stayed completely silent on social media, my blog, and even among friends and family. My goal was to see how many downloads the stories would get through Amazon alone.

The results were disappointing: Normally, when I announce a free promotion, I get around 20–30 downloads. But when I didn’t tell anyone, the stories only received about 5–10 downloads.

As another experiment, I offered my last novel Forever for free over a five-day period — with similar results. So far, there have been only 31 downloads of the German version and fewer than five of the English one. When I ran a free promotion in July (right after the release) with announcements, I got more than 700 downloads.

What I’ve Learned So Far

These tests lead me to two main observations:

  1. My reach on social media and this blog is still limited — but it already makes a noticeable difference in download numbers.
  2. Amazon seems to promote newly published books more effectively than older releases. It’s possible that new titles receive a temporary ranking boost or better placement in the “Free” category through the algorithm.

There’s still a lot to learn about how Amazon works for indie authors and how best to leverage social media and my website. But with every test I run, I’m getting a clearer picture of how the system works.

Why Everyone Needs Philosophy

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I never studied philosophy. I wasn’t interested in it back in school. To me, philosophy always seemed like something pretentious that pseudo-intellectuals did in college while smoking a pipe. My only exposure to what I thought philosophy was, as a teenager, came from watching some stoners get high and wonder whether “getting high” would still be called that if you never came down again.

When I got older, I realized two important things: First, my idea of philosophy wasn’t philosophy. Second, if you don’t take the time to explore and build a real philosophical framework for yourself, someone else will impose theirs on you—without you even realizing it.

The Philosophy of Philosophy

The official definition of philosophy goes like this:

The use of reason in understanding such things as the nature of the real world and existence, the use and limits of knowledge, and the principles of moral judgment.

Doesn’t that sound like something everyone should care about?

The problem is, most people don’t. I didn’t either. But that’s largely because philosophy is often presented the wrong way. It is taught as something abstract, boring, and pseudo-intellectual, pursued by people who’ve never had a “real” job and don’t have to deal with real-world problems.

Yet philosophy is everywhere. It’s in everything we do. It is what we are.

What you eat for breakfast reflects your philosophy. What you wear, read, and watch does too. Whom you vote for. The job you have. The friends you attract. Philosophy shapes how you think and dream—it’s who you are.

And when we don’t take the time to define our own philosophy, we leave space for others to define it for us. They can shape us into what they want us to be—before we ever have the chance to become who we truly want to be.

The First Step: Ask Questions

Most things I do in daily life happen on autopilot—driving, brushing my teeth, eating, even parts of my work. The same goes for many people’s political beliefs, life choices, and everyday conversations. I’m not an exception. Sometimes I say things I haven’t thought through. Sometimes I believe things without knowing where they came from. Sometimes I make choices I can’t fully explain.

My interest in philosophy began when I finally asked myself: Why? Why did I do that? Why did I think that? Why did I believe that?

That’s where philosophy begins—with the question why.

The answer isn’t a complex definition from a dusty college textbook. The answer is what makes life better. Why do you believe that a specific politician deserves your vote? Why do you read that book instead of another? Why do you have these friends? Why do you work at the job that you have?

Most people don’t have answers for these questions. We are simply spoon feed the answers the system wants us to swallow via TV, public schools, colleges, religion, mainstream books, and even our friends and parents.

When we start asking questions again, we can define a philosophy that’s truly our own, not one created by others. Only then can we live the life that we want to live and not the one the system wants for us.

What Happens When AI Takes All the Jobs?

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Many people are scared. AI is taking over the economy — especially online. Computer science majors are complaining, writers are worried, Hollywood filmmakers have voiced their concerns, and countless other industries will soon be affected too.

Some are asking the big question: What happens when AI literally takes all the jobs?

Taxi drivers will disappear once self-driving technology is perfected — maybe even within this decade. Human doctors might become obsolete. There’s even an argument that psychologists are replaceable today, as their job is purely language based which AI can already do. The same could be said for teachers, copywriters, journalists, and many more professions.

At some point, a combination of AI and robotics might make human manual labor a thing of the past as well. Within twenty years, construction workers, plumbers, carpenters, and similar trades could all be automated.

Let’s assume this scenario unfolds, and all jobs are done cheaper, better, and safer by AI and robots. The question then becomes: How will humans pay for food?

In such a future, we must remember that all work would be done without labor costs. Human workers require payment — you have to give someone a few dollars to clean a toilet, or they’ll never do it. But a robot will do it simply because it’s programmed to.

The same logic applies to every other job. Robots don’t need monetary incentives; they just need the right code. Therefore, an economy without human labor would be an economy without labor costs.

As a result, products in that economy would become far cheaper — and many might even be completely free.

The real question, then, is not how goods and services are produced, but who gets access to them, and how the necessary resources are distributed. Robots could mine lithium and manufacture batteries at virtually no cost, but who decides how that lithium — and the finished batteries — are distributed?

The good news is that this might not be a problem for politicians or business leaders to solve. If AI and robots are more efficient at every job, they would also be better politicians and business managers.

Thus, in this thought experiment, it would ultimately be the robots themselves deciding the best way to distribute resources and products to humans (at some point even in a fully cost-free economy).

How Long Should Blog Posts Be?

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Short answer: As long as they need to be — and not a single word longer.

Long answer:
It seems that blog posts between 2,000 and 4,000 words tend to rank best on Google. So if you’re writing primarily for search engines, that’s a good target range. And it’s the reason the pro-bloggers write primarily posts of that length.

Of course, sometimes the topic naturally determines how long your article should be. If you’re writing an opinion piece titled “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie” you could end it in a single sentence:

Yes, and Yippee-Ki-Ya, motherfucker.

But if your article is titled “How to Write a Book,” even 4,000 words might not be enough.

My approach is to write for readers first, myself second, and search engines last. That means I focus on giving the reader exactly what the title promises — as clearly and concisely as possible. Adding unnecessary words or paragraphs just to please Google is counterproductive. So I keep things short and simple.

Take Derek Sivers, for example. I like his blog because he follows the same philosophy. Some of his posts are shorter than 300 words, yet they still deliver great ideas.

For the real-time biography blogging niche I’ve defined for my writing on this site, my goal is to give you a quick look into my work and progress that usually contains one idea at a time. Hence, short posts are totally fine, and even better than 1,000 words of rambling.

On the first day of every month, I publish a longer post titled “Progress Report.” It’s already grown to about 1,000 words per post — and naturally, it’ll become longer over time as my Author in Progress project develops.

However, posts like the one you’re reading right now usually range from 300 to 500 words. And I believe that’s enough to deliver what the title promises.

You tell me if I’m wrong.

Write What Makes You Proud

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There are writers who rely on industrial processes to produce their work. I’ve read that R.L. Stine uses an entire team of ghostwriters. Erle Stanley Gardner did the same with Perry Mason, and there are surely countless other famous authors who have teams of writers, editors, and creatives working for them—without us ever knowing.

AI will only accelerate this way of producing stories. It will also give rise to hustlers who see writing purely as a means to make a quick buck.

A while back, I heard about a guy who mass-produced short erotic stories for Amazon just to make money. He wrote two or three short stories on weekends and sold each for $2.99—a price apparently acceptable for short fiction in that genre. His stories were mostly about tall, heroic men saving damsels in distress, or about vampires and werewolves in steamy fantasy-erotica subgenres. One day, he started making YouTube videos, and it turned out he was an old, bald, overweight, divorced man in his sixties writing for the target demographic of bored housewives. If it sells, it’s fine, I guess.

But does it make him happy?

For a while, I actually considered copying his business model—churning out a few short stories in that genre every week just to make some easy money. But the moment I started, I felt awful about it. I hate writing those kinds of scenes. I don’t enjoy reading explicit fiction. And I couldn’t bring myself to charge $2.99 for 3,000 words of something I wouldn’t even read myself. As simple as it looked, it made my skin crawl. You could offer me a million dollars a year, and I still wouldn’t do it. I just can’t.

Yesterday, I wrote a short horror story about rats infesting a house. I’ll mostly give it away for free. On the days when Amazon won’t let me set the price to zero, I’ll charge less than a dollar for the 4,000-word story. It will never make me rich. It won’t pay my rent. I might make less than minimum wage for it over a lifetime. But I enjoyed writing it. And when I enjoy writing something, I’m pretty sure that some people will enjoy reading it too.

When you love what you do, you do it well. You want to look back at it and feel proud of what you’ve created. But when you write something you don’t care about—and would never read yourself—you’ll just do the bare minimum to get it done.

R.L. Stine clearly loves the genre he writes in. So did Erle Stanley Gardner. They both became successful because of that passion like many other authors. The hustlers will not. Some will make money here and there, sure. But none will be able to look back and say proudly: “I did that, and I’m proud of it.” And none will be happy with what they’ve created, just like the guy writing mass produced short erotica.