Here’s a quick post about my guest blog entry and long essay appearing in ClimateCultures, where I discuss what should define climate fiction. Big surprise: I also talk about The Steep Climes Quartet, my literary climate fiction series.

What is ClimateCultures?

“Creative Responses to Our Nature & Climate Predicaments”

ClimateCultures is an online space that Mark Goldthorpe launched in 2017 for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments .“We are a growing network of artists, researchers and curators across the UK and around the world working across many practices, disciplines and spaces,” is how he describes the effort.

Who’s involved? ClimateCultures casts widely, including within the community of novelists, short story writers, performers, poets, playwrights, painters, composers, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, sculptors, designers, digital artists, multimedia artists, gallery owners, online curators, creative producers, cultural activists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, geographers, environmental technologists, and climate researchers. Designed as an online space for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments. ClimateCultures is an approach to building creative conversations between and beyond different appreciations of what these predicaments mean, and of what they offer us as ways forward. It’s also a continuation of some of Goldthorpe’s encounters when working with the charity TippingPoint a few years back, where he helped bring artists and scientists together for creative climate change events.

Here’s more about ClimateCultures and Goldthorpe’s motivation in creating the publication and group, taken from the site’s “Welcome” page:

I’d always been interested in artistic responses to the problems but this was my first deep exposure to such a number and range of perspectives, enquiries and works-in-progress. Those events left a strong impression — with me, and with the artists and scientists who took part. ClimateCultures builds on this legacy, exploring the power of an environmental imagination to help us develop a sense of agency in challenging times, as I discuss in a short article I wrote in February 2019.

The post I’m in ClimateCultures Talking about Climate Fiction first appeared on David Guenette.

“They wanted to hold Exxon accountable. Then they got hacked.” This is the headline of recent Grist story, one published in partnership with The Guardian.

Gosh darn it, but I couldn’t be more pleased.

I’m not happy about the malfeasance of the dirty rotten oil corporation—that the article suggests, with excellent circumstantial evidence, may be Exxon Mobil—which hired a PR firm, which hired a hack-forward middle man, who hired actual hackers to get into accounts of various climate activists and organizations attempting to sue Exxon Mobil, as the reporting says, to hold the companies “accountable for climate change.” The story continues:

A few months earlier, a set of explosive media reports had revealed that the company’s own scientists determined as early as 1982 that the extraction and burning of fossil fuels caused climate change — but Exxon went on to fund climate denial campaigns anyway.

That part of the story is by now well known, at least in climate activism circles, not that there’s been many legal victories over the last ten years. I’m certainly not happy about that.

Why I’m suppressing a grin is that this news hits as Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet, is released into the wild. What’s wild for me is that one of the plot threads involves a huge hacking operation to destroy the electronic records of legal documents for about 150 different lawsuits against various fossil fuel corporations and associates, regulatory agency heads, and retired politicians. The substance of any of the lawsuits is not detailed in the book, but one of the through-characters of the series, Jimmy, now approaching middle age in 2035, is the IT lead at NoNolo, which is a legal document clearinghouse used by many of the legal teams involved in these court cases. This plotline is not central to the story, exactly, but one of several that present different aspects of the world fighting against climate change and the often banal evil that fossil fuel businesses cavalierly undertake.

My prediction reflected in this plot point is that the suits against the fossil fuel corporations—many underway already—will take a long time to wind through the legal system. That itself is not a prediction so much as a conclusion based on the historic record of civil lawsuits against big companies. The lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson, for talc and asbestos contamination of baby powder, started in 2009 and the reckoning continues to this day. (There are some very striking similarities between this case and the cases being brought—or attempted to be brought, anyway—against Big Oil.)

The third book’s prediction is that major and minor cases alike will finally get their proverbial day in court by the mid-2030s, with the Supreme Court largely rectified by a run of Democratic Party-dominated administrations and public sentiment having grown angry at fossil fuels and Big Oil’s efforts to keep their business not only relevant, but future-proof.

There are all kinds of nefarious deeds some corporations will undertake to protect their fortunes. Since realism is an important element in my fiction series, I’ve done research about corporations’ evil deeds. “Writing Villains on Both Sides in Climate Fiction” is an older post about portraying villains, although from any side of the aisle. “Murder, Oil, and Blood Money: Is the climate fiction plot line of fossil fuel interests murdering someone far-fetched?” looks at some research I undertook about what we know and suspect about businesses going bad, and what I found was unsettling, but at least my findings made the various villains in my series plausible. Fossil fuel corporations do have blood on their hands, although the vast majority of fossil fuel-related deaths come not from the barrel of a gun, but a barrel of oil.

The Odd and Twisty Road for the Series and Great Forecasts—or Not!

Dear Josephine, Book Two of The Steep Climes Quartet, was on track to publish in Fall 2024, and I’d assumed the Democrats wouldn’t lose to Trump, so, so much for my “Carnac the Magnificent” shtick (look it up). While the 2024 election was disastrous for climate progress in the U.S., it was bad for me because  I had to extensively revise the first book to reflect Trump’s ascendency. Since Dear Josephine is set in 2029, this book too needed revision, so a longer delay for publication since I first revised Kill Well, the first book published in 2023, but set in 2026.

Arrrgh.

Another weird set of coincidences in the second book’s storylines that would have seemed predictive if Dear Josephine had published on its original schedule, was that in Dear Josephine there was a massive hurricane, and in the real-world Hurricane Helene’s shocking damages came and went in 2024 as I revised the once-thought-finished manuscript. Dear Josephine also contained a character targeting Fortune 400 individuals with the hope of starting a movement grandiosely named Kill the Rich, so imagine my surprise when Brian Thompson, president of United Healthcare was shot, allegedly by Luigi Mangione.

My pique at Dear Josephine’s delayed publication until after these events is not my most admirable trait, nor my fantasies of being interviewed by the news because I had “anticipated” such events.

I would have loved the bump in book sales though.

No Predictions, Really

But really, I’m not clairvoyant nor have the gift of second sight, but rather I’ve just been following the zeitgeist. I’m not surprised to see such fictional stories come to life in the real world. We can expect stronger hurricanes to hit large population centers. We can expect the shame of wealth inequality to manifest in angry reactions. We can expect more and worse extreme weather, mounting economic stresses on households, growing incidents of chronic lung problems from wildfires and fossil fuel pollution, fiercer social discord from fraying public nerves and fears about the future, shocking food production problems from droughts, and mounting deaths from heatwaves. That’s not prediction, it is science and all too reasonable extrapolation.

I especially liked the Booklife reviewer’s comment below about Over Brooklyn Hills, because it captures what I’m trying to do with the series, which is to place climate change within the lives of characters who aren’t scientists or IPCC delegates, but regular people:

The cast, led by now-70-year-old artist/journalist Davin Caine, features a beleaguered town manager in a failing marriage; a freelance VR designer sleeping rough on Monument Mountain after Brooklyn becomes too hot; a climate activist building explosive devices for a domestic terror cell; and many more. Guenette… builds a plausible 2035 with a light hand—offshore sea walls, news outlets charging micro-payments, drone deliveries on the Appalachian Trail—and welcome focus on people’s lived experience. 

Too often, climate fiction fails to bridge planetary-scale crisis with human-scale everyday life. Climate fiction should focus on human stories that connect readers directly to our present challenges. Literary Titan’s review reveals this about Over Brooklyn Hills when it says:

I felt less like I was being shown a future world and more like I was being asked to notice the one already forming around us. That’s unsettling. It’s also the book’s strength.

Kirkus Review also noted this focus:

Guenette’s attention to the ways in which climate change may affect communities at the local level makes for a compelling read, and the writing is zippy and clean.

A reviewer on Goodreads may have put this best about how regular people experience climate change:

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its realism. Rather than depicting climate change as a distant catastrophe, the story explores its gradual but relentless effects on daily life, public policy, migration, housing, infrastructure, and community relationships. This approach makes the future portrayed in the novel feel plausible and deeply relevant.

The post Predictions ‘R Me first appeared on David Guenette.

Understandably, there’s one hell of a lot of hand-wringing that goes on in much of what I read about our challenge to minimize the future damage of climate change already embedded in our human soiled atmosphere. Given the stakes, this is understandable from an emotional perspective, but what I find strange are all the proscriptions for how to climate care one’s feelings, whether from the angle of climate optimists or those who plea that we must all gird our loins and march to the barricades tout de suite. For example, Jim Ball’s Climate Hope Together Substack, in a post titled “Let’s Make Climate Hope Happen Together,” with the subtitle “Climate Movement: How to Get Our Intensity Back! Part Two” raises the issue of how to boost the intensity of the climate movement.

The post starts this way:

In my previous post I documented what those of us in The Climate Movement know in our gut: as a movement we’ve lost our intensity. We’re floundering. From whence will come the passion to ignite intensity’s potential?

Ball goes on to describe “Ten Climate Movement Values” and while every one of these values is good, I’m left wondering why we must need this basic guidance about being a good human. Am I an old curmudgeon fixated on some idea that adults living a self-examined life know all this and that refresher courses on being intelligent—both intellectually and emotionally—aren’t the leading priority of the climate movement? But to my chagrin, Ball is likely right.

I know that our culture today is described as materialistic, consumeristic, and distracted (i.e., not reading beyond an Instagram post, tweet, or AI email summary), and that many feel socially isolated one from another. Ball’s Substack’s subject—at least of late—is about the climate movement and how to grow it, how to reinvigorate it. His first post came about a year ago. He’s been prolific and the Substack has solid organizational structure. I’m actually a fan of his work and think he’s got a lot to contribute. But maybe we should allow there to be more practical steps than boosting our mojo.

Practical Steps ‘R Us

Ball’s latest post just came out at the time I’ve been pondering why there seems to be little acknowledgement of the triumphs of climate action, and to be fair, Ball, later in his post, presents such acknowledgements. (For a running report on positive developments, there may be no better source than Sam Matey-Coste’s Substack, The Weekly Anthropocene.)

There’s a section of Ball’s post with the heading “The Good Stuff: A Just & Prosperous Sustainability,” which starts this way:

We are on the precipice of the transformation we’re calling for. We’ve got the tech right now to do what’s needed. And more is on the way every day.

I’m suggesting that there is far too much focus on how we feel about climate change and far too little about the practical steps available to all of us to do something about climate change. I mean, sure, human-caused global warming and the fossil fuel industry’s resistance to correcting it is freakout-worthy. Fortunately, there are plenty of things we can do about it and plenty of things we’ve already done.

Maybe we will benefit from spending less time working on why we feel the way we do, and more time spent on action.

The Practice of Knowledgeable Voting

There are practical steps to help push climate progress forward. I believe political action is the biggest lever available to address climate change and I don’t get caught up in worrying whether political action is possible. Why am I not fixated on the question of whether there’s the possibility of political action on climate change? The answer is simple: Because there has been a lot of political action to address climate change. The Biden administration and the previous Congress accomplished miracles in the form of the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), to name the two biggest examples.

Yes, of course, then came Trump, but this time of Trump is less about climate change and more about the threat to America’s democracy experiment, now in its two-hundred-and-fiftieth year. The current absurdity of Trump’s drive toward fascism and self-dealing is a political problem with a political solution, and this threat’s solution is to vote the bums out. We need to get America back to a full democracy if we are to have any hope of getting back on track with climate progress legislation. Restrengthening democracy is America’s biggest climate action solution. Therefore, the first climate progress practical step is a political step: voting. If I hear one more person mopey about climate change but not voting, I may have to be physically restrained.

It would be helpful to have clearer resources about candidate positions on climate action, perhaps in the form of a one-stop clearinghouse, but there are plenty of relevant resources. Here’s a partial list, sourced from a simple Google query, but there are plenty more—just not any great fully-comprehensive lists for one-stop shopping:

1. Run on Climate https://runonclimate.org › candidate-resources
2. The climate movement needs to demand more of candidates than just platitudes.
3. Western Resource Advocates https://westernresourceadvocates.org › climate-question …This election year, we have the opportunity to vote for climate leaders all the way down the ballot. The candidates who are elected will make critical decisions …
4. League of Conservation Voters https://www.lcv.org › 2024-climate-candidate-guide
5. Want to vote for candidates who will protect people and the planet? Search here to find endorsed climate candidates in your local, state and national races.
6. Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund
7. Releases specific environmental scorecards for major state and federal races, grading politicians on key biodiversity and climate change platforms.
8. Climate Cabinet https://climatecabinet.org › candidates
9. We support pro-climate candidates in high-impact elections across the country. We back competitive local candidates in overlooked races. We help high-impact local leaders run, win, and legislate on climate change.

In my recently published Over Brooklyn Hills, the third book in my literary climate fiction series The Steep Climes Quartet, there’s Climate Covenant, a clearinghouse for comprehensive local, state, and federal candidate climate action ratings. By 2035, which is when the action of this book takes place, Climate Covenant has been playing an important role in elections for years. The practical step here would be to move this fictional service into the real world.

Any takers?

Understanding the Progress Underway and that Doing Nothing Is the Far More Expensive Choice

While people bemoan their climate-crisis-induced fragile emotional or psychological states, attending workshops on self-care or subscribing to the “Woe is Us” school of thought, what is often not considered is that the past decade has produced amazing progress in fighting climate change. I mean, sure, it would have been far better if we’d started this work when the consensus emerged about human-caused climate change three-and-a-half decades ago, but unless someone has a handy time machine, bemoaning the past isn’t all that helpful.

What might be helpful? One thing I’d love to see is the correction of the biggest failure for climate progress, which is ignoring our bullshit pricing of oil. Fossil fuels should carry the costs and consequences of their production, protection, and use, or what are referred to as “externalities.” Thanks to sneaky indirect subsidies, fossil fuels escape accounting for and paying the damages its product causes, an exceptional condition among businesses that usually include the cost of their product in the market price.

So, let’s learn to talk about the real costs of fossil fuels. Let’s try to get this talk into the political discussion, especially at this time of affordability as an election issue.

Fossil fuels are actually very expensive. The price at the pump doesn’t cover the actual costs. Here is an AI Summary table that addresses actual cost of a gallon of gas at the pump. Before you jump on me for providing something generated from AI, please understand that I know the sources and the arguments and that the exact and precise numbers are too complex to pin down to anything other than a range. Still, the table is convincing:

Pricing Scenarios: Current vs. True Cost

The table below highlights how different economic frameworks alter what you would actually pay at the pump to clear these hidden debts.

A Tax on Carbon Makes Sense, Socially

One way to bring out the true cost of fossil fuels is to put in place a tax on carbon, along with an accompanying dividend to offset the regressive hit for poor people. The tax on carbon has been long overdue but is especially appropriate now that we have real alternatives to fossil fuel use in transportation and the heating and cooling of our human spaces. The clean energy alternative is not only real, but economically competitive with fossil fuels, plus typically faster to build. If you want a good overview of where we are today and where we are heading, check out Ember and their annual slide deck, The Electrotech Revolution, from Kingsmill Bond and the Ember Futures team. Each year they unpack how electrotech “is rewriting the economics and geopolitics of energy.” Keep in mind that the current slide deck was published in September 2025, and it’s likely that the new one, no doubt in process, will present an even stronger picture of clean energy today and where it’s all heading. The clean energy transition is a viable and beneficial replacement of fossil fuels. We are on our way.

Of course, we can be on our way less or more fairly. Social justice is an important goal when it comes to climate change, but there are two important perspectives to keep in mind and these points are intertwined. Sacrificing climate action on the altar of social justice—the sort of “perfect being the enemy of good” condition—sometimes delays or blocks positive climate action. Often there’s a NIMBY element in opposition, where placement of, say, a community solar/BESS facility ends up in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood. It isn’t that the all-too-frequent complaint of such onerous project placements in poor areas is wrong, because this occurs absurdly too often. The counter to this, however, is that any project expanding the transition to clean energy should be supported, not blocked, because the clean energy transition provides significant benefits to all. Energy access and affordability is one such benefit, and there are location-specific health benefits in getting rid of polluting sources of fossil fuel electricity generation and road traffic. Any project that moves us away from fossil fuel generation is intrinsically a social justice victory.

This doesn’t mean there should be no consideration of other factors that may affect social justice, but rather that we all must balance such issues of fairness with the larger goal of supporting a world that supports life—it doesn’t get more basic than this issue. There’s a clock running, after all, and the Global South is already bearing an unfair share of the burden of climate change consequences, so any and all climate progress work is social justice work.

When Bill Gates published his absurd diatribe suggesting a problem with a singular focus on climate change progress priorities, he rightly got hammered. I joined in with “The Headlines are Full of Bill Gates’ Latest Wisdom—It’s Hysterical!” He was wrong to talk about disease eradication and economic uplift as competing priorities not because these are not important, but because fighting climate change itself answers these priorities. You want to eradicate disease? Maybe a good step is to reduce the causes of disease proliferation and the climate change-induced body stress conditions that weaken people. Want to lift more people out of poverty? Clean energy systems can leapfrog centralized grid barriers to provide electricity far more widely, cleaner, and quickly than anything based on fossil fuel-based electricity generation.

It isn’t that Gates is wrong about the need for better world health and shared wealth, but he is wrong to underplay climate actions reducing barriers to pervasive solutions for better world health and shared wealth. And, no, I’m not saying there is no place for public health aid, research, and services. I am saying that as climate change consequences damage our environment, all other types of aid, including those that seek to support improved health and economic justice, will be addressing far more overwhelming problems in the world that is not intensely pursuing climate progress.

Maybe the Clean Energy Transition is Simpler than We Think

There are lots of stories and data points showing the emergence of clean energy is not only real, but unstoppable.

I’d say that this represents a ton of mojo.

Big Oil’s days are numbered, although there’s plenty of hard work ahead to get the number of those days down, and fast. Climate change is already wreaking havoc, so the work here is to speed up the transition: the faster we stop greenhouse gas emissions from rising and the more quickly we bring these emissions down, the better.

We have the technologies and the economic arguments to accelerate the clean energy transition and those technologies and economic arguments keep improving. Maybe the transition we should be concerned with now is to shift our attention toward naming the enemies of the transition and supporting the friends of the transition. In other words, focus on the political changes needed to further encourage and support the transition and the legislators who can push the transition forward.

Sure, the person sitting in the Oval Office is a huuuge enemy to the clean energy transition, but fortunately, he and his cronies are so heavy-handed in their attempts to suppress clean energy that the hand they’re dealing is ever more obvious to the body politic. Fortunately, the issues of cost and affordability have become positive ones for clean energy. The politics—apart from the abuse by those bought by Big Oil—seems ever more interested, even eager, to pursue the clean energy transition. But, of course, the coffers of Big Oil are huuuge and the headwinds strong.

Still, there is a growing understanding that Big Oil is in trouble, with court cases around the world poking and prodding, trying to find a way in. By 2035, as I present in Over Brooklyn Hills, the days of legal reckoning of Big Oil are getting underway after decades of delay. In 2035, in the changed political environment of that time, Democrats are less corporate-inclined and more service-minded. The Supreme Court has been rectified and that purchased defense of Big Oil is evaporating. Hey, there’s a nice plotline about a widespread hacking job to disrupt the legal document management systems of dozens upon dozens of law firms and State Attorney Generals offices to further delay judgement, but you’ll have to read the novel for more on that.

There Are Plenty of Resources for the Climate Change Curious… and There Are Plenty of Climate Change Convinced

Although the mainstream media is failing, with the mass exodus of climate reporters just one symptom, some of the very best journalists covering climate science, technology, and policy are now found on the Web, and more specifically Substack. There are the stalwart, too, on Substack: David Roberts is one such example, where his podcast, Volts, provides current guidance on what good people are trying to do to push the energy transition forward. And then there’s the longtime climate warrior, Bill McKibben, still dispensing climate news round-ups of high utility, not to mention a moral perspective on the whole of climate change issues. If you follow these people—or, really, any of the excellent climate change and clean energy transition writers—you can’t remain too mopey.

Ball’s recent post reiterates a growing awareness that a hell of a lot more people are climate active than is commonly perceived. He points to the need to break what he calls “the Climate Talk Taboo” as being as important to the clean energy transition as direct work. For most of us, one of the last hurdles to overcome is to let our friends, family, colleagues, and other members of our community know that we are also interested in the work of the clean energy transition.

Pursuing climate progress is simple: we have the means to cut a big part of the GHG emissions and the means of doing this makes plenty of sense. We simply need to talk to each other about it, so turn that frown upside down and start talking to others about the clean energy transition.

OMG, am I a climate optimist, too?

The post Over-Complicating Climate Change Progress first appeared on David Guenette.

There’s been quite the hub-bub about AI as the author, but this post is about AI being used to scam authors. Since publishing Over Brooklyn Hills in June, I’ve been the recipient of many book marketing offers and the best I can figure, these emails are AI-generated.

Of course, these seem rather scamish, and what makes me think the emails are generated by AI are all the similarities among the nearly dozen emails from different people. I’ve spoken with other authors of recently published books and have learned that some authors receive several of these sorts of scam emails a day.

So much for my feeling special.

It is also clear that none of the email correspondents have read my book and that the sense of the book is drawn from reviews that I’ve gained and which are available online. It may be that many of these individuals use an AI marketing platform designed for purpose or, at the minimum, the same specific AI platform to generate the pitch email, considering the shared the language of the pitches. It may even be that some or all such emails come human-free, at least for the pitch generation. I assume that any cash sent in response to the pitches will eventually be deposited by humans.

Goodreads and Bookclubs

There’s a particular predominance of these emails tied to Goodreads, and these are the most likely to have real people behind them. The offered service, which is to put the book before qualified readers (definition unclear) on Goodreads, comes at a variety of rates, so if you want to spend less on being scammed, shop around.

By the way, Goodreads is not a book marketing platform, although having your book listed is important, according to the plethora of online ebook experts who have at least a six-month internship at a literary agency in their pocket. Unfortunately, the likely relevant Goodreads groups for my book, a literary climate fiction series, are few and several seem largely inactive, but that’s another story. Oh, and self-promotion is frowned upon for authors participating in Goodreads groups.

Since starting this post there’s been another dozen or more similar emails and there are many online stories about the sorts of emails I’ve been receiving being scams. Looking online at the senders, I was hard-pressed to find real people behind the names used in these emails, although some percentage has discoverable people and some seem more legitimate. One variety of these scams claims that my book is just right for their bookclub and offers the opportunity to participate in a club meeting discussing one’s book, and what author doesn’t want to do that? All one needs to do is send in $75, $150, or more, to help defray the costs of running the book club. There’s few signs of such book clubs online, but, hey, maybe they need the money to hire an SEO expert, right?

AI Scrapes Reviews in the Nicest Ways

The overall impression from the book promotion solicitations is that each pitch uses much of the same language. That’s because these descriptions come from reviews and jacket copy, likely compiled by AI.

This email is one example of the Goodreads scam variant, and then there’s an example of the bookclub scam that follows:

From: [Name and email redacted]
Subject: Thoughts Over Brooklyn Hills
Message Body: I hope you’re doing well. I recently came across *Over Brooklyn Hills*, and I was impressed by its compelling vision of a near-future world shaped by climate change, social upheaval, and the resilience of ordinary people. Through its richly developed characters and thought-provoking exploration of environmental, political, and personal challenges, the novel offers readers an engaging story that feels both timely and remarkably plausible.

I help organize a private Goodreads reading community where readers actively discover and discuss meaningful books across a wide range of genres. We’re currently preparing our next Goodreads Reading Challenge, and I believe *Over Brooklyn Hills* would be an excellent addition.

Our members enjoy literary fiction and speculative novels that spark meaningful conversations about society, the environment, and the human experience. I believe your book would resonate with readers who appreciate character-driven storytelling alongside thoughtful explorations of climate change, community, and the choices that shape our future. Many of our members also leave thoughtful reviews on Goodreads and Amazon after completing books they genuinely enjoy.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, I’d be happy to share the available promotional options and discuss what might work best for your goals and budget.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

[Name redacted]

From: [Name and email redacted]
Subject: Over Brooklyn Hills, Book Three of The Steep Climes Quartet David Guenette
Message Body: Dear David Guenette

One of the most compelling aspects of Over Brooklyn Hills is its exploration of how individuals and communities respond to profound change while striving to preserve their humanity, purpose, and connection to one another. Through its richly imagined near-future world, the novel invites readers to reflect on resilience, leadership, adaptation, and the choices people make when confronted with uncertainty. These themes deeply resonated with our readers.

At [name of book club redacted], we intentionally curate books that inspire thoughtful reflection, meaningful dialogue, and a deeper understanding of the forces shaping both individuals and society. Your work stood out during our selection process because it skillfully blends compelling storytelling with timely questions about community, responsibility, innovation, and the human capacity to navigate challenging realities.

Our community of engaged readers and lifelong learners often gravitates toward books that examine the intersection of personal experience and broader societal transformation. Over Brooklyn Hills naturally creates space for conversations around resilience, journalism, governance, human connection, and the role individuals play in shaping a hopeful future amid complex circumstances.

We would be honored to spotlight your work within our reader community through an author conversation, reader Q&A, or virtual discussion centered on the ideas and inspirations behind the novel

If this opportunity resonates with you, I would love to explore next steps and discuss a format that best fits your schedule.

Warm regards

[Name redacted]

Well, of course Over Brooklyn Hills deserves the readership suggested in the pitch email below, as any proud author will think. I’ll admit to liking how AI reassembling of book information and review copy can make for snappy language, and don’t be surprised to see that I’ve cribbed lines for marketing copy. By the way, these emails came through my website contact form and the contact form has a word limit, so you’ll see at the close of this example [the rest of the email cut by the limit of the contact plug-in on my website]:

From: [Name and title redacted]
Subject: David, “Over Brooklyn Hills” Deserves a Readership Equal to Its Climate Prognostication, Slice of Life Scene Craft, and Process Oriented Thriller Heart
Message Body: Hi David, Let me start with this: Over Brooklyn Hills is exactly the kind of singular, clear eyed near future novel the climate fiction world needs right now.

In an era where readers are hungry for stories that show not disaster as spectacle but disaster as routine, where in 2035, addressing climate change remains a one step forward one step backward jig, with battles over climate policy and new legislation continuing alongside the march upward of average global temperatures, and in the courts finally some very real legal threats to the fossil fuel industry fighting for its future against the advancement of clean tech, is exactly the kind of prognostication meets process oriented thriller, governance and activism and technological shifts all in play premise that hooks readers who love deeply grounded climate fiction, where Davin Caine is at last on Medicare and getting a modest Social Security check each month but still works with Berkshire Interactive, busier in his studio with sculptures in galleries in the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley, his solar batteries and VPP membership keeping electricity bills down, his three house sharers helping with expenses as housing remains scarce, with Marsha queen of the big vegetable garden after nearly a decade with Housatonic House on the Hill, Charlie the nigh on perfect house sharer often away on business or holed up in his third floor bedroom working, and Be the newest house sharer, a ceramic artist who helps with the first floor Airbnb apartment and who has just claimed a corner of the studio and could easily claim his heart if he is not careful, is exactly the kind of rich characterization, slice of life scene craft, people trying to keep a home in a changing world tension that keeps readers turning pages, and where as summer approaches a stunning heatwave settles over New York City, west to Lake Erie, and south into parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, driving people to escape into the relatively cool hills of the Be

[the rest of the email cut by the limit of the contact plug-in on my website]

Here are some excerpts from other pitches. I like the first one, in that it acknowledges the Kirkus review. The second excerpt is a comforting reminder that readers are, indeed, waiting for my book. The third excerpt, like the previous one, use some identical language, i.e., I came across the description for Over Brooklyn Hills and something stopped me. The last excerpt (oh, but I could go on) declares being impressed by the admirable novel, but the conditional tense: for what appears to be a remarkably thoughtful and immersive contribution to climate fiction, kind of gives the game away.

From: [name and email redacted]
Subject: Building Momentum for the Steep Climes Quartet
Message Body: Hi David, What caught me about Over Brooklyn Hills is how ordinary the future feels. Kirkus specifically praised your attention to how climate change plays out at the local level, and details like offshore sea walls, micro-payment news outlets, and drone deliveries on the Appalachian Trail sound like a world reached through daily life rather than spectacle. Literary Titan put it well, saying it reads less like being shown a future and more like being asked to notice one already forming…

From: [Name and email redacted]
Subject: Your book Over Brooklyn Hills and the readers waiting for it
Message Body: David, I came across the description for Over Brooklyn Hills and something stopped me…

From: [Name and email redacted]
Subject: A climate fiction novel like Over Brooklyn Hills deserves a much larger stage in the literary fiction community
Message Body: Hello David, I came across Over Brooklyn Hills and something stopped me…

From: [Name and email redacted]
Subject: Impressed by the Scope and Relevance of Over Brooklyn Hills
Message Body: Dear David Guenette, I recently had the opportunity to read about Over Brooklyn Hills, and I wanted to express my admiration for what appears to be a remarkably thoughtful and immersive contribution to climate fiction…

Is This Post a Scam?

This post raises the question of how well AI can be applied to the task of flattering authors into forking over money.

What’s too bad is that any sincere appeal from a human to help promote or market a book—a valid service—gets lost among the storm of scams. I’d gotten obsessed with how such scams would play out, so I had some correspondence with some of the emailers, and uncovered a couple of people who actually addressed the specific challenges for Over Brooklyn Hills, and those challenges basically come down to choosing the best book categories and applying the type of keywords that put the book in front of people who aren’t expecting climate fiction to be a story of apocalypse, but rather want well-drawn characters and real world depiction far more than fast plotlines and action.

I’ve seen a bump in sales over the last couple of weeks after I improved the metadata about the book on my own, but sales remain modest. One reason for the modest sales is that Amazon’s KDP publishing platform, while offering good royalty rates (especially on the ebook side), is actually designed to take your royalty money and more back, because if you want searchers to actually find your book, you best use Amazon Ads and Amazon Ads can run up billing. The level of book description (categories and keywords) within KDP is weak, unfortunately for authors of any book short of hyper-genre novels, but wouldn’t you know, you can radically expand keywords—both of the regular sort and the very helpful “negative keywords” sort—through Amazon Ads, which is an ad bidding program. Talk about scams.

But if you’ve read this far into the post, at least I got to show you some very nice things said about Over Brooklyn Hills.

My god, did I just scam you?

The post Nice Things AI Has Said About Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

Climate Revolution Now’s recent post, “People Get Ready,” is entirely unignorable, not least because of the screen grab from one of the later Mad Max movies, with Tom Hardy’s character, mouth-guarded and grimacing, strapped at the front of one of those stupid vehicles.

Of course, the sub-title of this Substack post is equally alarming: “The end is nigh.”

Thomsen-Cheek breaks people into three categories when it comes to climate change, as follows:

(1) The people who don’t “believe” in climate change won’t act personally or politically because… nothing ain’t happen and what are you global-warming-panic-attack freaks all het up about? Fair enough.

(2) The folks who know that the climate is changing aren’t convinced it’s dire don’t revolt because they think the answer is a “transition” to a “new green economy” featuring “renewables.” And they are trusting the process.

(3) The people we call “doomers” won’t rise up because they’re convinced the danger is insurmountable and don’t see the point.

The first group she calls “What Me Worry?,” and I’ll always appreciate any literary allusion to Mad Magazine. The second group is “It Won’t Be That Bad.” Group number three is “Doomers.”

The second group is the group that interests me and is, obviously, the likeliest vector from which climate progress comes. Group 2 seem to be her peeps, but in her opinion, “Group 2 is too sanguine. I am not for a moment convinced that there is any meaningful ‘transition’ or that any currently serving politician has any intention of upsetting the apple cart enough to make real change to energy and infrastructural policy.”

Who’s Sanguine?

“Sanguine” is an interesting choice of adjective, since it means “to be cheerfully optimistic, hopeful, or confident, especially in a difficult or uncertain situation. It is a slightly literary or advanced vocabulary word, often used to describe an upbeat, resilient outlook on life,” according to Gemini AI Summary.

I’m not sure how many of Group 2 are sanguine. There are those Climate Optimists, for example, but as best I can figure, such efforts are more along the line of self-care, except instead of applying skin care daily or taking enough time to stretch one’s hamstrings, it’s more an effort to keep centered or calm enough to avoid pulling off one’s head so that attention to climate change and the mechanisms to fight it can be continued.

Thomsen-Cheek agrees that we have time to prepare, although she seems awfully like the doomers in her belief that politically not much is going to happen to make climate progress a top agenda item. At least without a revolution or national strike or “…if one million people showed up on the National Mall this November we could stop Washington DC dead in its tracks. We could make demands. We could force change. We could call for accountability, and accept nothing less” in her hope that Groups 1 and 2 can rally, rise up.

Right on, sister, sincerely. I’ll meet you on The Mall, but I also think there’s plenty of other efforts to be made to fight climate change.

I’m a Member of Group 2a, the Semi-sanguines

What bothers me with Thomsen-Cheek’s piece is the dour tone of despair, short of total revolution, anyway. It is clear that there are forces of self-interest loose amongst the world and Big Oil is one such. Here in the United States a bunch of big money self-interests have decided to threaten American’s imperfect but glorious experiment in democracy and depending on the particular news cycle they look close to winning.

But pessimism isn’t likely the best framing and “revolution” sounds like a too-high bar. Furthermore, Thomsen-Cheek skews her reporting. Here’s an example:

Group 2 probably expected to see emissions go down because of all that green new economy jazz. It is demonstrably clear that that outcome did not happen. Emissions are rising. France and Spain are burning down. Group 2 should be easy to motivate to revolt now because they feel cheated, abandoned, and lied to. I know I feel that way.

The hyperlink reference is to a Guardian article about data centers leading to an emissions rise, mainly from new data centers, with Microsoft and Google loosening their already largely theoretical net-zero goals. Yeah, carbon emissions are still rising, and under Trump’s stewardship, America is producing more emissions. But let’s not forget that there are plenty of examples of an accelerated clean energy implementation even here in the U.S. And let’s not forget the tremendous achievements of the Biden Administration, with IIJA and IRA, creating the most ambitious climate action legislation in the known universe bar none. Yup, and then came Trump, but what’s coming next? The 2026 mid-terms and the 2028 election. Place your money and make your bets. These days the smart money is on clean energy, not least because it wins in the marketplace and” affordability,” at least when Trump et. al.’s thumbs aren’t on the scale.

China, the recent world champion of emission production, seems likely to have leveled off and the shockingly fast rate of clean energy infrastructure development will make for a downward emissions trend. Non-petrostates and countries of the Global South seem to understand more clearly by the second that clean energy is the way to bring life-supporting electricity to populations previously underserved or never served. The Pakistani miracle of massed individual efforts with solar to provide electricity apart from that country’s national grid infamous for poor reliability and high prices, has in two or so years time built clean energy capacity to rival the capacity of the old grid.

The Conflicting Climate Change-Human Perspectives

Climate change occurs on a different time scale than human lives. Perhaps the most shocking thing about climate change is how fast it is developing, considering there’s only been 200-plus years of ever-growing volume of fossil fuel use, but still, comprehending the large Earth systems at work in climate change presents a far-different scope than our day-to-day lives. Thomsen-Cheek is unfair in how she describes Group 2, and I believe that she is severely underestimating the level of understanding of what’s at stake with climate change and the determination of vast numbers of people to do something about it. The fact of the matter is that major economic systems need to change and it’s going to take all these people to gain any possibility of such system changes. Let me be less fanciful than “system changes,” since most needed changes are not rocket science: legislation to encourage the use of clean energy and legislation to discourage the use of fossil fuel energy. The arguments—economic and environmental—support such change and the growing record of people and countries making such changes is impressive.

It’s not the time to suggest it may be too late if we don’t join a national strike tomorrow (even if such a strike might help) or that erecting guillotines should be part of the climate action playbook. The biggest help of all today may be to acknowledge the progress being made and the second big help would be to present next steps and political actions clearly.

A central theme of The Steep Climes Quartet—Book Three, Over Brooklyn Hills, has recently published—is  the conflict between the need to address climate change and the human scale of the lives of those who must act. Even the most committed climate scientist or activist is going to worry and think about the next mortgage payment or how junior’s acting out in school or a dear friend’s recent diagnosis—that’s life. Climate action develops within each of our personal lives and in the many ways as different as we are from others. Politics is one of the major ways out personal lives interact with larger issues and critiquing one’s closest allies is hardly politic, especially as the knowledge about climate change spreads with every news story of extreme weather, and especially since we’ve seen—here in America—the most ambitious climate action legislation (and, no, not perfect) become law, only to be gutted through unlawful branches of government. It is easy enough to be pessimistic, and Trump—President Big Oil Stooge—makes this ever more likely.

It is also easy to despair when we look at how we build things today. In my neck of the woods there are far too many small bridges waiting for years for replacement construction that seems to take forever, but that’s not an intrinsic limitation. America has had large-scale infrastructure happen fast, with just one example being the rural electrification act that brought electric distribution out to millions; another is the TVA, or the huge dam projects like Hoover Dam, or, for that matter, the lightning-fast military industrialization in America during WWII.

The threat of a warming planet is ever more in front of our eyes and mobilization against it is the key.

Call to Action

In the end, it looks like Thomsen-Cheek is also a member of Group 2a, the Semi-sanguines. We know that we have damaged the Earth’s systems enough to have allowed ongoing climate change, but we also know that actions today and in the near term can make the difference between a world of 2 degrees Celsius or one of 3 or 4 degrees above what had been for centuries the global average temperature, so hardly full-throated happiness, but a call to action, certainly.

Let’s pay attention to 2026 and 2028 in such calls and not make fun of those who place their trust in “renoobles.” Jeff McFadden, who Thomsen-Cheek quotes, may be the source of the “renoobles” crack, but urging ourselves and others to pay attention to how the world works and nonetheless push for progress is another thing of man that is renewable.

Can the work of climate progress happen faster? Yes, that would be great. Put me in that group.

And vote, goddammit.

The post In Defense of Group 2 first appeared on David Guenette.

Another solid post from The Eco-Revolution. The title is “Stop Talking About Net Zero: How the right wing is weaponizing climate costs to scare voters and how to combat them.”

Definitely worth the read.

The Net Zero argument is an aspirational one, but from a practical perspective it raises a lot of questions and, as the above-referenced post points out, net-zero has been weaponized as an attack point on the affordability issue. “If only you didn’t have a net-zero mandate,” the argument goes, “things would be less expensive.”

Of course, we want to get to the point where we have far lower GHG emissions. The point is, as this post argues, that the energy generation and use sectors can be shifted to clean energy today to stop producing GHG emissions. This is the obvious and most direct solution to addressing climate change. By the way, we can expect continuing progress on the hard-to-mitigate industrial sectors, too. All the other approaches—carbon capture and offsets and other schemes—are sleight of hand maneuvers and surprisingly expensive ones at that.

Shifting to Clean Energy is an Investment

But here’s what we climate progress/clean energy proponents don’t talk about: the shift to a new energy system is expensive. Sure, in the longer-term, clean energy is the least expensive energy production system human’s have come up with, and less expensive by an impressive margin. For example, capital costs—the money needed to build—is similar for a solar farm to the cost of building an equivalent electricity output natural gas generator plant, but gas plants represent much higher operation costs, mainly because you have to keep buying natural gas fuel over the plant’s operational lifetime, plus other operational costs are higher, since gas generators have higher maintenance and operational personnel costs.

What isn’t more expensive, from a capital cost basis, is an existing gas generator plant versus building a clean energy electricity plant, because, of course, the capital money for the existing plant is already spent. The problem of costs comes to the fore when building new clean energy production systems (i.e., solar, wind, BESS, digital grid and demand and DER management, etc.) to replace existing (and global-warming producing emissions) fossil fuel energy production systems. Long term, clearly, renewables are the better deal in all sorts of ways, including reducing the amounts of direct subsidies to fossil fuel corporations by governments around the world through tax, accounting, and other legal mechanisms, along with outright grants. The bigger hidden costs addressed by replacing fossil fuel generation systems, however, are fossil fuel externalities, which is all the money spent each year to address fossil fuel pollution health consequences and climate change consequences caused by the production and use of fossil fuels. These externalities, according to the International Monetary Fund, have the world paying to address the negative consequences of the production and use of fossil fuels, and, together with the direct fossil fuel subsidies, reaches somewhere in the $5-7 trillion range, every year. These “indirect” subsidies are costs largely hidden from the public understanding, mainly through long-standing industry and special interest efforts keeping these costs from public knowledge and political debate.

Still, most people intuitively understand that building out new energy production systems to replace fossil fuel-based energy production systems represents additional costs, at least over a relatively short time, although replacement clean energy production systems prove cheaper over time since we stop the ongoing purchase of fossil fuels and have lower spending addressing externalities because of lowered emissions. But most people think of costs on short-term bases. The future investment argument, while very compelling, isn’t what most of us think about when faced with higher costs upfront.

The effort to establish the Electrotech Revolution means gaining the public’s interest and support for the Electrotech Revolution and that means we need to own the argument that this is a great investment, with lower costs over time, as one outcome. But we also need to be clear that the transition will impose short-term higher costs as we replace the dangerous and expensive fossil fuel energy production systems with more buildout of solar, wind, BESS, etc., as we decommission the polluting old systems as soon as possible.

These days, the best argument is to keep from building new fossil fuel energy production systems and only build renewables-based energy production facilities and to exploit the digital management technologies that expand the efficiency and capacity of our current electrical grids and distribution infrastructure. I imagine that once these clean energy systems are more ubiquitous the lower-cost arguments will be more widely understood as advantageous mainly through lower energy bills, but this takes time.

I’d love to see much of the cost of decommissioning fossil fuel energy production placed upon the fossil fuel corporations and their shareholders, but, of course, that presents the challenge of stranded assets for the companies themselves and the institutional investors such as retirement funds. I’d love to see this burden placed on the fossil fuel corporations, but I’m guessing that if people’s retirement funds take a sharp hit because of lost value due to stranded assets, this very active voting bloc will be made unhappy. Therefore, the more compelling argument to large investment funds is for these institutional investors to move away from new fossil fuel investments such as fossil fuel generators. This is the real threat of net-zero mandates to Big Oil: if a new gas plant violates a net-zero mandate, then the likelihood of the new gas plant being build fades.

Externalities ‘R Us

There is also the very real issue of fossil fuel externalities being put back on the fossil fuel corporations as public awareness grows about how much nations—and us, through taxes and assumed personal household costs—cover these businesses’ avoided expenses, whether through these corporations’ sweetheart leasing deals, extraction shortcuts (just the methane leaks alone!), plethora of deregulations, intrinsic refinery-related pollution, court battles against being named liable parties, and all the other forms of externalities.

Unfortunately, the clean energy movement has been largely unable even to get the issue of the cost of externalities to be part of the public discourse. I wrote a post about this issue titled “The Challenge of Conveying Climate Change Information in Climate Fiction,” which starts this way:

I think this is the exact quote: “You have thirty mentions of externalities! Cut that by at least half!”

I will keep the name of this beta-reader to myself, so to avoid an uncomfortable paparazzi-crushing lifestyle change for him, thank you very much. He was talking with me about Dear Josephine, my second book in the literary climate fiction series The Steep Climes Quartet. He was referring to the number of times the term that stands in for all the external costs the use of fossil fuel shifts to the public and thus not counted among the producers’ costs in fossil fuel production.

Externalities: You know, things like health problems that are attributed to pollution and particulates.

The post goes on to define externalities and discuss fossil fuel subsides and then the issue of conveying climate change facts within climate fiction.

Let’s Take Ownership of the Arguments on Energy Affordability

We’ve been letting the fossil fuel industry—Big Oil—dictate the terms of discussion, including their attempted ownership of the affordability issue, even while clean energy actually owns the argument of more affordable electricity. Substackers like The Eco-Revolution, Bill McKibben, Sam Matey-Coste, and David Roberts continue to educate us on this larger discussion.

The remaining problem to address is the short-term costs for clean energy investment. It’s a challenging argument because most people are worried about next month’s rent, not the promise that energy costs will indeed come down in a year or two or three. Most of us have difficulty with long-term investments for the future.

But no one is saying that the clean energy transition is easy, as far as I know.

A lot of people are saying its goddam important, though, and my hand is up, too.

The post The Short-term Costs of Clean Energy and the Long-term Affordability Advantages first appeared on David Guenette.

Yeah, I know. It is a losing game to push back against one professional or editorial review, especially when there are several others that are glowing, or at least glowing-adjacent. But let’s look at the bigger issue behind my hurt feelings. I can always cry another time.

An editorial review means that the book will get reviewed without foregone conclusions, unlike, in all probability, the Amazon review you extort from your mother. An author knows going into an editorial review that it could come up sevens or snake eyes or somewhere in between. You roll the dice and take your chances. (See the recent post Reviewing Reviews, or The Strange Little Business of Feeding the Marketing of Novels for more on this topic.)

A fourth editorial review of Over Brooklyn Hills came from IndieReader, and that review was ambivalent about the book. The problem was that Over Brooklyn Hills got reviewed as an Action/Adventure title because “Literary Climate Fiction” was not a category option when submitting the book for a review. I guess I should have chosen the “literary fiction” category, but maybe I was too nervous imagining the legions of writing program MFAs overwhelming that category. Unfortunately for the reviewer, who seemed eager to review an Action/Adventure novel, Over Brooklyn Hills is not an action/adventure genre title, even if it has some snappy plotlines. The book also has a lot of characters who are deeply drawn, which the reviewer found distracting as she looked for the action and the adventure. Well, live and learn, right?

Categorically, “Literary Fiction” is Left in the Cold

Sometimes a book gets put into an inappropriate category—an error that can be, in the case above, attributed to the author. Sometimes a book ends up in front of the wrong reviewer because the categories available during the review submission process don’t include the right categories and the book is thought to be one type of book by the reviewer, while intended to be a different type of book by the author.

The lesson to learn here is to be careful to select the right category for the book submitted for review. Unfortunately, there’s no such category for “literary climate fiction,” and that applies not only to book review platforms, but to basic BISAC:

BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) is the US publishing industry standard used to categorize books by topic and genre. These alphanumeric codes determine where books are physically shelved in stores and how they are indexed in online retailer databases like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The BISAC system is maintained by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and encompasses over 50 major categories and nearly 6,000 individual subject codes.

Honest, I looked. Between “FIC004000 FICTION/Classics” and “FIC043000 FICTION/Coming of Age,” there’s no “FICTION/Climate.”

480 Sub-categories Under “Fiction” and “Literary” Stands Alone

I’d also point out the BISAC has about 480 sub-categories under “Fiction” and many of these have sub-categories that have their own sub-categories and sometime sub-sub categories; one example: “FIC027440 FICTION/Romance/Paranormal(See a/Witches”). “Fiction/Science Fiction” has eighteen sub-categories; “Fiction/Thrillers” has sixteen; “Fiction/Mystery & Detective has twenty, with seven sub (sub) categories under “Fiction/Mysteries & Detective/Cozy.” You can have a mystery & detective novel that is “Cozy” generally or focused on animals; books, bookstores & libraries; crafts; culinary; holidays & vacation; and paranormal.

There is one “literary” subcategory under “Fiction.” One stinking top-level category for “Fiction/Literary.” No subcategories, no sub-sub categories.

Someone once mentioned to me that life was unfair. Now I know what they were talking about.

The post There Can Be a Tax on Taxonomical Confusion first appeared on David Guenette.

Over Brooklyn Hills has been garnering pretty good reviews, as I’ve written here, here, and here. I describe this book as “Literary Climate Fiction,” which may be of little utility in the ongoing development of fiction taxonomies, but it should suggest the book is not a hyper-genre formula of action and plot but rather a work of “storytelling that prioritizes character development, psychological depth, and thematic exploration over plot-driven action.” Feel free to look up your own definition of “literary fiction” on the web and see if I’m wrong.

One of the aims of The Steep Climes Quartet is to write away from the easy tropes of apocalypse and instead attempt to imagine people’s reactions to the odd and pressing conditions collectively known as climate change. But how do you get your book reviewed—or, even, found—if there’s not widely applied category for it?

The Editorial Review Biz

An author wants to have the world say something about a published book. Reviews can help a book but a lack of reviews will hurt a book. Self-publishers know it. Big trade publishers know it. Even the neophyte struggling with a first book on KDP knows it.

Basically, the trade book business is largely sold through social media these days, and that’s true even for the big boys. If a book shows up on Amazon and there are no Amazon reviews of it, the chances of getting the browser to buy the book when it looks like no one else has is slim to none. If you have editorial reviews such as Publishers’ Weekly, The New York Times, or Kirkus, that’s a big help. Even book blurbs help, that odd practice of saying far too little about a book by someone who carries reputational value or relevant association, encouraging people to believe the book being considered for purchase may, in fact, be a worthwhile bet. But a book will need the best editorial accolades to escape the black spot of no or few customer reviews. Frankly, a book without reviews—editorial and customer—looks downright naked, just sitting there shivering, waiting to get picked up for Christmas Holiday with all the luggage packed, but no one is coming, boo-hoo.

Remember crowd-sourcing? That’s what Amazon customer reviews are, and Goodread’s, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and BookBub, to name only some. In theory, such customer reviews help the would-be book buyer lessen the anxiety of being played the fool. Such reviews provide the affirmation of the crowd, but as many readers discover, customer reviews are written by all sorts of readers and one reader’s literary treasure is another reader’s genre trash. You might also keep in mind that “crowd-sourcing,” like the social media platforms that engender it, is falling into enshittification, and these days typically in the form of grade inflation where most books or products seem to have close high scores that can, with infuriating frequency, not match your actual experience with the book or product. These days, the crowds may be saying less than you think, and the sourcing more the result of algorithms and platform customer management, but let’s leave that for another day.

Still, it’s a weird number game. The necessary numbers of customer reviews vary across opinions, and the presence of other types of affirmations factor in too. You have the coveted The New York Times Best-Seller flag? Terrific. Pulitzer, Booker, Calidcott, or any of the other big literature awards? Hurray! Publishers Weekly tells the world that your book is brilliant? Wonderful. The problem is that the main stream validators of books like Publishers Weekly can only review so many books and the chances of your book getting a slot is slim to none, especially if you lack the backing of one of the major trade publishers. What’s rising to meet the needs of the vast majority of books left standing in the cold is the editorial review business.

The landscape of editorial reviews is confusing. Publishers Weekly can also review your book for a fee, but even here the magazine’s bandwidth remains small, so Booklife, a part of the Publisher Weekly enterprise, was created and is designed to provide editorial reviews for a fee—somewhere, typically, in the $400-$500 range—and the volume of reviews—the bandwith—is much larger than the original Publishers Weekly pipeline. Kirkus is another such service, on par, some say, with Publisher Weekly reviews, but with a bigger pipeline for fee-based reviews. Some similar traditional review services focus on other segments of book publishing, such as Foreword Reviews, for indie and university presses; Library Journal, which is sometimes described as essential for getting your book in front of library acquisition buyers; and Booklist, which is published by the American Library Association and, not surprisingly, aimed at library collection development librarians and educators.

There’s been something of a complementary explosion in the number of these services as self-publishing has exploded. There’s Independent Book Review, Self-Publishing Review, Book Sirens, IndieAuthors, Booksprout, NetGalley, BlueInk, Book Raid, BookBub, Books Go Social, and the list goes on. Many of these review services not only provide reviews but also marketing and promotion addenda including awards and badge displays, social media promotion packages, ARC (advanced reader copy) distribution management, and interview and podcast features. Many of these organizations have feeder mechanisms to editorial and book production services, too. And an author can always look up on Reedsy for any and all such services from independent contractors.

About Those Amazon Reviews

As mentioned earlier, many online potential book buyers look to online reviews whatever the sales channel. What I didn’t mention before—mostly because it’s an indisputable fact—is that Amazon is the largest online bookseller, and actually the largest bookseller online or off, which is why I’m talking about Amazon customer reviews.

One reason why customer reviews are important for online sales is that the informational feedback is thin online, unlike the experience in a physical bookstore where the potential book buyer has the book in hand. Ironically, online bookstores often have far more information about the book than a would-be buyer would see in the real-life experience standing among the shelves, but how many people even know about Amazon’s Author-Plus pages that a publisher or author can provide about any particular book, and Amazon also provides the infrastructure for what they call A+ Content, another specific book-related pile of all kinds of information about the book in question. Heck, it looks like a lot of publishers and authors remain ignorant about these additional information features, but then no one ever said Amazon makes marketing books easy.

On the other hand, the visceral experience of holding a physical book goes a long way for informing potential buyers about the book being held. Heft, graphics, book cover copy, frontmatter, and, of course, the ability to thumb through the pages and take a gander at the actual writing. Sure, you can virtually do much of this online too, although the available “Read Me” sample is constrained to publisher-selected spots through the book, and, often, simply the frontmatter and first chapter. Besides, in the physical world there’s that new book smell and that bookstore employee you can’t help thinking will conclude you’re a bum if you don’t buy something.

But on Amazon a book can look awfully lonesome without an army of customer reviews. There are some services that provide customer reviews for fee, and what proud papa of a brand new novel doesn’t want to advantage his or her new book? There’s a company called Book Award Pro that has recently added such a service, along with its bread-and-butter offerings of access to book award databases and the ability—for a fee—to submit your new darling novel to such award opportunities, and let me tell you, there are many, many such opportunities, for good or ill.

Their Amazon review program is tempting, especially if you don’t have a big publisher with a solid PR and promotion department behind you, or if you don’t come from a particularly large family or hold solid blackmail threats against the whole church choir.

And, hey, I didn’t want to see Over Brooklyn Hills looking naked, right?

So I tried the Book Award Pro Amazon customer review service out. I wasn’t optimistic, plus I hate spending money. The service is relatively inexpensive and part of the fee goes toward the reviewer buying the ebook version, a nice little sales pop, although one that makes no economic sense in and of itself. But, indeed, the Amazon customer reviews are “verified purchase” reviews, and thus kosher. In fact, this is one of the attractive elements of this specific service—it  won’t run you foul of Amazon’s review policies that can end up getting you kicked off the platform if you get caught gaming the customer reviews, such as by creating a bot to crank them out. The all-knowing algorithm, well, knows all, so I wouldn’t be surprised that the Book Award Pro customer review service ends up triggering a negative reviews review, especially if the company doesn’t up its standards.

My review of the Book Award Pro Amazon customer review service is that it is awful. In order to check it out I spent $199 for three such reviews and all three reviews focused on the same one character in the identically long two-sentence reviews. Mind you, the character they all focus on is a great character, but only one storyline of many, and so the reviews don’t give a good sense of the book overall. And then there is the problem of the reviewers all pretty much saying the same thing, making me wonder if the short reviews may very well have been AI-generated by the very same AI, and I can’t get the image out of my mind of a printer in a dark room somewhere cranking them out in sequence. I don’t know if the three reviews are AI generated, and my suspicion that one person did all three reviews has no evidence, but let me repeat, Book Award Pro’s Amazon customer reviews service is awful.

I’m sticking with the old-fashioned organic customer reviews, thanks.

To Publish is to Suffer

As with so many other tempting shortcuts to fame and fortune, the truth is that selling copies of a novel these days is hard. The signal-to-noise problem is excruciatingly difficult to overcome, there being all the noise of some three-to-four million trade books published each year. There’s some talk these days that print fiction reading may be in an all-time slump, or maybe it is book reading overall that happens less and less. Sure, I’ll produce audiobook versions of The Steep Climes Quartet series, since everyone tells me that this is the thing to do, but the production will be touched by resentment from this pro-text guy. I’ll try my best to hide my true feelings about audiobooks.

What purportedly sells are romances, thrillers, and horror, and most of such books are what I call hyper-genre that share the common traits of low character-to-action ratio. Or is that a shallow character-to bodice-ripping ratio? It’s all a matter of taste, said the lady as she kissed the cow (I’m still in search of the source of the second half of this cliché, but maybe my father came up with this addendum.)

As it so happens, sales of Over Brooklyn Hills are picking up despite not being a hyper genre work, but I’ll be hundreds of book sales short of making expenses back for a while and as likely as not, ever. After all, putting out a novel takes money—sure, not on the scale of producing an album or movie—but editors and proofreaders need paying and editorial reviews are rarely for free, especially for someone occupying my level of Dante’s book authorship Inferno.

It turns out that Over Brooklyn Hills has already won an award:

We are proud to present you with the Literary Titan Book Award. Following the recent review of your book through our Book Review Service, it was automatically entered into our Literary Book Award competition. Your book deserves extraordinary praise, and we are proud to acknowledge your hard work, dedication, and writing talent. Start telling the world that you’re an award-winning author because we will be!

You will find the book award image attached to this email. Display it proudly on your book’s cover or anywhere else that you want to display it.

Well, thanks, and better than a sharp stick in the eye, that’s for sure, and if this helps more people read my work, that’s great. One of the hellish aspects of writing is the author’s desire to see the work out and about in the world and the typical frustration of that desire and don’t let anyone tell you different. Sure, the driving force of writing must be the pleasure derived through the act of writing, but a writer having readers is kind of crucial too.

At least that’s what those hundreds of editing and publishing and marketing service companies, including reviewer and awards services, tell me they can help me with, for a price.

The post Reviewing Reviews, or The Strange Little Business of Feeding the Marketing of Novels first appeared on David Guenette.

Here’s my favorite line from the  Kirkus review of Over Brooklyn Hills:

Guenette’s attention to the ways in which climate change may affect communities at the local level makes for a compelling read, and the writing is zippy and clean.

On the other hand, the Kirkus reviewer chose to highlight the review with the following quote:

A few too many ideas prove distracting in this otherwise prescient and compelling near-future climate exploration.

A mixed compliment, seems like, but overall the review was a good one. You can judge this for yourself, reading the review in full:

OVER BROOKLYN HILLS, THE STEEP CLIMES QUARTET, BOOK THREE

A few too many ideas prove distracting in this otherwise prescient and compelling near-future climate exploration.

The post Kirkus Weighs In On Over Brooklyn Hills first appeared on David Guenette.

Also, remember please that you can buy the latest title in The Steep Climes Quartet from many places, including through your local bookstore using Bookshop.org or by simply asking your favorite bookseller to order Over Brooklyn Hills. Or Amazon, too, Kindle or paperback. Or ePub format.

An Everyman

Over Brooklyn Hills follows a seventy-year-old man whose struggles with the painful realities of climate change parallel larger threats involving fossil fuel interests and a climate terrorist group. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Several things bother me about a lot of climate fiction, and one is that while climate change is an actual existential threat to the social and economic well-being of humans and our biosphere, climate fiction often puts climate change to be upfront acutely. Today—and into the near future—the danger of climate change is less on a human scale than most other of life’s challenges. Much of climate fiction has some apocalyptic quality to the story or presents a main character who is a climate scientist or activist trying to correct a wrong. Unfortunately, such approaches can fail to help readers identify with the issue of climate change within their own lives. Without such identification, the issue of climate change is more likely to remain abstract and all the more easily ignored.

One of the important threads in my writing of fiction and poetry is to make the attempt to capture characters’ feelings as they respond to circumstances. I love to write full-on action and plot-driven parts of stories too, but both as a reader and as a writer, I find that characters without some interiority seem only pawns in the puzzle master’s play, and no matter how compelling or cleverly built the plot may be, the story will feel empty. Raymond Chandler, as much as he’s pointed to as a master of private investigation pulp fiction, is a wonderful and effective writer because the reader gets to know Philip Marlowe, whether by actual reflection by the character, the way the character describes the world around him (including the famously odd and wonderful similes), or how he interacts with other characters.

Why did you want to tell this story through the perspective of Davin Caine at this stage of his life?

Davin Caine is something of an everyman—neither hero nor villain, not a genius with special knowledge nor someone lacking curiosity. Caine, like many other characters in the book, knows about climate change, but like most everyone else, his priorities are the bills to pay, work, friends, family, the next house repair….

By the time of the action of Over Brooklyn Hills in 2035, Caine is seeing a lot of change with the climate crisis and has gotten more involved. Climate migration—writ small and large—is one of the themes.

At the start of the series (in Kill Well, taking place in 2026), Caine is still recovering from a divorce, is worried about paying bills and the cost of energy, and is ambivalent about his paying job. All the chaos of the Trump regime overwhelms him. He’s frustrated that he can’t get into his art studio, and anxious, basically, about everything. Caine feels isolated, just like most people living in our culture today. One of the themes in this book is the difficulty of grasping in our daily lives the import of climate change; another theme is the malfeasance of entrenched interests such as the fossil fuel corporations and the countervailing forces obscuring, delaying, and denying climate action. Well, the malfeasance of moneyed interests and danger of income inequality carry throughout the series.

In Dear Josephine (which takes place in 2029), the climate situation worsens, but progress has a glimmer of hope in the U.S., post-2028 elections. Still, Caine and most everyone else tend to focus on mundane everyday concerns, but the climate crisis keeps creeping in, and acutely so with Hurricane Josephine. I didn’t want the hurricane to be experienced directly—that’s not how most of us would experience it. Caine is in the Berkshires, and the perspective on the hurricane is mediated by the news and by distance. A major theme is how climate change affects us, including economically, even when the consequence is not direct. Another theme is the previously referenced malfeasance, but in this book, the readers see bad actors emerging from different sides: pro-climate, pro-economic justice, and the big money interests.

As I age, I find myself interested in how aging fits into climate fiction, so Caine is set up to show us these effects. Farm to Me, the last book of the series and set in 2047, has Caine at 82. There’s plenty of climate progress, but the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the years before maintain a changing climate. There’s a distinct focus on young persons’ climate change struggles, in part contrasting with what we see with Caine.

I don’t think you can talk about climate change effectively without including it in daily lives.

Do you think fiction can help readers grapple with issues that often become polarized in public debate?

I believe so, but I can’t claim to know this. There have been some studies on the efficacy of climate fiction to get readers involved, but those studies are thin—small sample sizes—and there’s the lack of consideration in them about the characteristics of the specific climate fiction used in the studies. One easy conclusion? Apocalypse and dystopia may have the tendency to discourage people from acting, but I’m pretty sure there’s no need for a Ph.D. for this finding.

The biggest need for public action is to end the social silence suppressing conversations about climate change. In the U.S., nearly three-quarters of the population think climate change is a serious problem, but only something like 20 percent talk to others about it. Can the right fiction help encourage conversations? I hope so. Is my work that kind of climate fiction? I hope so, but this question can only be answered by readers. Climate change is a big problem, and big problems get addressed legislatively. Conversation is oxygen for political metabolisms.

One of the reasons why I pursued the topic of climate change through a series is to provide a sort of longitudinal study across the next two decades. Restricting the series through characters to the Berkshires helps, I hope, to keep the reader thinking about their own everyday lives in relation to climate change. The fact is that here in the developed nations, we aren’t on the verge of climate change-instigated societal collapse, even if the energy systems we’re participating in are laying the groundwork for longer-term problems that make the world a harder place for people to thrive.

What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?

I’m at work on Food to Me, which is the last book in The Steep Climes Quartet. I expect a Spring 2027 publication date. In this last book, food production is a theme, as is the consequence that the young will suffer. Like the other books in the series, there are thriller elements, although none of the books are simply thrillers, which is why I describe the series as “literary climate fiction.”

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