Bene Books

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If you haven’t ditched the Amazon-owned Goodreads in favor of the independent, Black-owned StoryGraph, what are you waiting for?

You can import your Goodreads data (so you won’t lose years of book tracking)!

You can get personal recommendations based on your current preferences!

It’s sleek af!

IT’S NOT OWNED BY AMAZON

Users can apply content warnings so you can avoid triggers before ever opening a specific book

The same applies for ‘mood’! Wanna read something sad? Find books tagged as ‘sad’, that’s literally it

I’ve been using StoryGraph for a bit over a year now and I LOVE IT.

Way better review system - you can mark things as quarter stars, you mark moods, slow/medium/fast pace, several things about plot, character, etc.

Tailored searches - you can search by mood as well as set various preferences and then search for matches.

Can add/view content warnings to books - no more skimming reviews and accidentally getting spoilers!

Really interesting and unique reader-created challenges

Tracks more than # of pages/books read - also tracks moods, types of books, length, fast/medium/slow pace, etc.

Geralt comes home drunk and melancholy after a night out with his brothers. Jaskier asks what’s wrong - and immediately regrets it when Geralt confesses that his mood has been brought about by his unrequited love for a friend. 

2.8k, Modern/Domestic AU, contains swears, drinking and heaps of pining.

~

Jaskier was enjoying, for once, having the TV to himself. Although - he glanced at the clock, noting that it was just past half eleven - he wouldn’t have it to himself for much longer.

Geralt and his brothers were unlikely to stay out till the early hours of the morning: they’d stumble home when the pubs shut just before midnight, instead of traipsing between clubs till the last one closed at 3am like Jaskier and his friends would do. Jaskier wasn’t waiting up for Geralt - not at all - he just happened to be up late, and Geralt would just happen to arrive home before he’d gone to sleep.

Barely even a coincidence.

Besides, Jaskier always enjoyed entertaining Geralt when he drunkenly returned from a night with his brothers. There was always a new story to hear, some fun gossip, and possibly a rushed confession - Jaskier, fucking guess what Lambert and I did—

He heard the front door open, and the tell-tale thumping of Geralt drunkenly removing his boots and coat before making his way into the living room.

“Hey you,” Jaskier said, pausing the movie, “Good ni—” he spotted Geralt’s face. “Gods, Geralt, what’s up with you?”

I say I don’t think people realise - the truth is I hope they don’t, because the alternative is that they don’t care. That’s certainly the impression I’ve got from Twitter, where a truly horrifying number of people are arguing that copyright on  all books should expire after thirty years, and you should be able to acquire books for  free after that. This … would not just mean that everyone gets free books. It would mean if you write a book at 30, not only do you lose any royalties from it at 60, but Disney can take it, make a franchise out of it, Scrooge McDuck it up in a pool of money while you starve because writers don’t get workplace pensions.

Some threads on the unintended (?) consequences of this. I can’t go over it all again. John Brownlow NK Jemisin Michael Marshall Smith Me Marina Lostetter Kari Dru and others William Gibson and others

There are plenty of others. It’s not that this actual idea will actually happen, but I do think it reinforces the idea that it’s not only okay, but sometimes actually virtuous to search for ways to enjoy writers’ work without paying for it. Like it’s somehow a step towards a better world. Not just at the reader end, to be fair, at the employer end too. And I do see a lot of people here too who are all about supporting workers unless the workers are writers in which case fuck’em. 

No there freaking isn’t. A millionaire is not a billionaire-lite. A millionaire is not someone who has absolutely no risk of suffering personal want, and the power to fix multiple social issues and chooses not to.

I chose my words deliberately. If I’d meant “and millionaires” I would have fucking said that. I didn’t forget. 

So much has been said about the difference between a million and a billion that I would have hoped it was no longer necessary to explain it, but here we are. 

 A million is a thousandth of a billion.  A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 32 years. 

If you earned £1000 a day, and spent nothing, it would take you three years to become a millionaire. It would take you 2,470 years to become a billionaire. They’re not even close to the same kind of thing. Obviously it’s fortunate and unusual to be in possession of a million anything at once, (although it’s worth noting that different currencies mean significant differences in how much wealth we’re actually talking) but in a career where it often takes years to create and sell even one book, it should be understood as equivalent to several years of salary coming at once. The safest thing for any writer would be to assume it will never happen again. Your next book bombing - or simply not getting the lucrative film deal your last book did – these are very normal occurrences. Yeah, that wouldn’t in itself take you back to poverty, but it could very easily mean the status of “millionaire” is a one-off blip, not a static condition.    And factor in one fairly normal problem like having to pay for your own or a relative’s longterm care, or any kind of health crisis at all for writers in the US, and you could be back to average levels of wealth at best very quickly.  Also how the hell do you know who is a millionaire? You don’t. 

And people are very quick to assume writers are millionaires, because a book has sold fairly well or has been made into a film or even simply because they’ve heard of them. That’s a big part of the point of this post. People think writers are much, much richer than they are. They are very unaware of how often even books that make money don’t necessarily make money for the writer. (Just look at what happened to Peter Beagle, for a particularly heinous recent example.) They are very keen to find loopholes to  put writers in a special category of person it’s okay to exploit.

Arakawa realized the burgeoning youth of the early 2000s wasnt interested in another plucky spry optimistic young shonen protag. Instead she gave us a short ugly egotistical asshole smarter-than-you atheist with so much money and power that people could no longer best him in arguments by telling him “dude shut up ur literally like 12″ 

Five pages in we’re told Edward’s famous and rich and powerful. Five more pages and he’s calling some girl stupid for thinking God exists. Five more pages and he’s proven right. Five more and he’s kicked an evil priest’s teeth in. And no one can tell his mom on him.