Today, Amazon’s targeted advertising saw fit to recommend some fantasy eBooks to me. Their huge servers churned through gigabytes of data, beamed data between satellites in outer space, calculated PI to a gazillion decimal places, pondered the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything … and then had a quick look at my purchase history and decided I’m probably into scifi and fantasy.

Well, I’m assuming it’s my purchase history they used. They’d come to much the same conclusion just by looking through my tee-shirt drawer. Plus, then they’d also know to sell me more shirts because mine look like string vests.

Anyway, because I’m a tight-arse I wasn’t willing to take a gamble on three eBooks for a fiver. I’m unlikely to be swayed by a pouting cover model who looks okay holding a samurai sword and pretending to be all vampire-hunterish. But they offered to send a free sample to my Kindle to see what I thought.

My god, it’s dreadful. Three pages in and I’m angry beyond belief. Some time ago I wrote about creating the perfect mix of derivative teenage-angst monster-killing secret-agenting prom-attending nonsense, using all the subtle prose of bad fan-fiction. But I wrote it as a joke … I didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously.

It makes me angry that the author might make money from this. It makes me angry that she might think she can call herself an author because she’s released this tripe. This sort of behaviour should not be encouraged. I deleted it from my Kindle, counted to twenty … then picked up the Pratchett book I got for Christmas and resumed reading.

Suddenly, all is right with the world. Now that man could rightfully call himself an author.