The Merits of Literary Mercs
On Chuck Tingle and Other eBook Slumlords
Chuck Tingle, for those that don’t know, is an Internet legend of sorts. Just do a Google image search of his name, and you will find such amazing titles as “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” and “President Domald Loch Ness Tromp [sic] Pounds America’s Butt” neatly printed atop book jackets that can only be described as soft-core gay erotica with dinosaurs and jet planes. (I have seen many a Photoshop job, but Chuck Tingle’s book jackets, I must say, are the best shoops in the world.) Inside these books, you will find soft-core gay erotica with dinosaurs and jet planes. They are wonderful, and not at all impossible to read. I know because I’ve read one. (Who in their right minds would pass on “President Domald Loch Ness Tromp Pounds America’s Butt” for $2.99 on Amazon?)
Not that much is known about Mr. Tingle. He lives in Billings, Montana, he’s a grand master in Tae Kwon Do with a PhD in holistic massage, and he lets his son Jon edit all of his books. He uses a stock photo as his profile picture on Twitter and he only follows one person: Katy Perry. There are even people who think he’s an AI bot, and he plays along:
Whether he’s real or not, whether anything he’s said in the few interviews he’s given has much truth to it, or it’s all just an elaborate prank, he does it with such flair that you can’t help but grin and want to be one of his “hard buds 4 lyfe.”
I read an article recently on The Hustle called Part 1: Confessions from the Underground World of Kindle eBooks*, which interviews an anonymous self-help author that Sidd Finch calls a “Kindle gold rusher.” (Personally, I find Kindle gold rusher lacking. I prefer the title eBook slumlord or literary merc.) This author sells 6,000 books a month, and makes over $150,000 a year by outsourcing the content creation for his Kindle eBooks to a ghostwriter from the Philippines and a graphic designer on Fiverr.
I can’t tell if it’s the dudebro-tone of The Hustle website, or the actual content of the article that disgusts me more, but after reading it I had one thought:
“I wonder if this is what Chuck Tingle does.”
My next thought was say it ain’t so, Joe! I love Chuck Tingle for all of his tinglers, but he does have a ton of eBooks. It’s quite possible that he’s just in this to turn a buck. I’d like to think that’s not the case and he prefers writing about butts and dinosaurs to the mega-eBook dollars he’s making at $2.99 a pop, but it’s possible.
Since I’m a fan of introspection, I had to ask myself some of the hardest questions of all time.
If Chuck Tingle is exploiting Amazon self-publishing loopholes to get rich quick, do I care?
After much soul searching, I determined that I really don’t care. I really really really don’t. After all, I’ve been known to exploit the occasional loophole to keep more money in my pocket. Not in like a massive “Trumpian tax fraud” way, but I tend to job hop, which means I can potentially increase my pay by 20–30% every other year instead of a regular 2.5–5% cost of living increase year over year (if that). I can coupon with the best of ’em too. Gotta earn. Gotta save that 10 cents on floss. These are important things in life.
So why then do I give Chuck Tingle a pass, and balk at the nerve of the anonymous eBook slumlord from the Hustle interview?
For one, Chuck Tingle is a known quantity. The other author was interviewed anonymously. If I knew who it was and liked their content, I might take a different stance, but I know I like Chuck Tingle’s content. If not for his superb gay erotica, then for his stellar book jacket designs, tweets, and rampant use of mythical beasts. There’s an entire persona behind Chuck Tingle that’s strange, but likable. I have an affinity for the weird, and a desire to understand the strange.
The other answer to that is probably wrapped up in my own code of ethics, which can be a bit squirrelly sometimes, but it’s mostly an issue with farming out content.
I create content, both for a living and for funzies on the side. As a content creator, it annoys me that someone can get away with outsourcing content creation and still reap the benefits. I think that’s just a normal human reaction though. You didn’t do something but you still got a reward for it?
O’ the injustice!
The other day my friend Fry said something like, “I’ll take a job if it’s offered to me but I won’t interview for it,” and I just scratched my head.
Wut. That’s not how things work…
This messes with the order I like to see in the world. First you interview, then you get the job. First you put in a bunch of hard work, then you become a successful eBook author. If you skip the first part then how’d you earn what you got? The short answer is you didn’t. You cheated. And while it’s not necessarily fair, it does happen, and I can’t actually begrudge anyone for trying to get a leg up.
My stance on people gaming any kind of system for personal gain will vary greatly depending on the game and the system. That exists in an ethical gray area for me because not paying taxes for 20 years when you’re a millionaire, or even just a thousandaire, is not quite the same as employing a ghostwriter or job-hopping.
What originally gave me pause was the thought that Chuck Tingle might outsource his content. If he does, I don’t care, because it’s low on the totem-pole of awful shit people could be getting away with, and I know what the end result is. I happen to enjoy the end result.
If I didn’t know what the end result was, I would probably be poo-pooing it too. I fear the unknown.
I also think wondering how you can get in on that action is another normal response when faced with someone receiving input for little to no output. That’s the dream, right? Getting paid to do nothing? That’s always been my dream, anyway.
So I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, scams of this variety are kind of gross. On the other hand, if you can legally get away with it, wouldn’t it be great to not care about getting that 10 cents off floss for once?
It’s a classic conundrum. What do you think? Do you have to be in this content creation game for love or for money? Why not both? If you were given the option to take money without creating the content yourself, would you do it?
*Side Note: Part 2 and Part 3 of the Confessions series dealt with a journalist scamming Amazon themselves by self-publishing a romance novel in one week, and then the fallout from plagiarizing said book. Though they did uncover some legitimate black-hat techniques that at least one author is abusing, in my opinion, the way they went about it undermined the focus of their journalistic efforts (if you can call it that).
