#$.99 book sale

[televinita]

ThriftBooks I can literally buy this new on Amazon for $18*, why are your algorithms so stupid.

*I am not going to pay $18 for it, which is why I set up the alert on the website that literally markets itself by name as being thrifty, but the point is you absolutely do not have the upper hand here and it's hysterical that you're pretending you do.

[smashpages]

Smash Pages Q&A | Sarah Byam on ‘Billi 99’

The writer of one of Tim Sale’s first comics projects talks about the new hardcover being crowdfunded by Clover Press.

[authorkarajorgensen]

The Reanimator's Heart is Only 99¢!

You read that correctly, The Reanimator’s Heart ebook is currently on sale for 99¢ for a limited time. The price should be the same across all platforms and [most] countries (sadly, I cannot guarantee every country as the retail sites can be finicky). It is on sale from now until September 6th. Grab your copy now if you want an autistic necromancer who accidentally reanimates his murdered crush…

[murosakiiro]

FOURTH OF JULY SALE

Pick up the first book in my series for only .99 cents on both iTunes and Rakuten Kobo! (Today is the last day to get it for FREE on iTunes!)

Linkie Link Here!

[averymorstan]

Until Wednesday 11/30/22, I have listed Upcycle My Heart as .99 cents on Amazon (Free with Kindle Unlimited). 

I feel like my two nonbinary-focused stories aren’t getting the same traction my two sapphic stories are getting, so I thought it might be nice to put this one on sale to see if that helps. 

Denver is one of my favorite characters. Their heart has recently been broken by an ex and they’ve decided to renovate their apartment to cleanse it of the bad energy. They meet a cutie named Celia at the hardware store. Celia is new in town and definitely loves a project, so she jumps at the chance to help Denver make new memories in their home. Featuring the entire cast of Quaint City queers, this is a quick, low-stress, light spice novella sure to warm your heart. 

[claredugmorewrites]

Both my novel-length romances are on sale for 99Pence 99Cents from Feb 7- March 15. There's dual POV Contemporary Romance  ALL IT TAKES, and dual POV Sapphic Romance TRULY MADLY DEEPLY. http://claredugmore.weebly.com/sales.html

[ovalleba]

On sale! Cocky Cruiser

COCKY CRUISERby Nikki Sparxx99c SALE   99c SALE! Cocky Cruiser by Nikki Sparxx is on sale for only 99c! This is a worldwide sale and is only for a very limited time! “AMAZING!! …This book was written so well and flowed perfectly. I loved these characters” – Goodreads reviewer US: https://amzn.to/3YsS0wfUK: https://amzn.to/3Yx8GmhCA: https://amzn.to/4cdXPAUAU: https://amzn.to/3AcpjtB Cocky…

[kmtaylorauthor]

SALE!

My ebooks are only 99cents for a limited time! Grab them now, before they go back to full price! ❤️

[joannerockauthor]

To the Rescue Box Set for .99

To the Rescue box set on sale now Craving a beachy escape? I’ve got a fabulous deal for you on my 3-book box set of sexy romantic suspense titles– all in memorable beach settings from Puerto Rico to Coronado . Pick up the To the Rescue collection for just .99 while the deal lasts! This set includes: Renegade Defender Protector All titles previously published in earlier drafts as Harlequin Blaze…

[mariannedonley]

**Book Alert** Totally Folked is only 99 Pennies

⁣⁣Totally Folked, a standalone friends to lovers romance by New York Times bestselling author Penny Reid, is only 99 PENNIES for a short while on Amazon US and Canada. Have you checked out Penny's Green Valley spinoff series? Now is the perfect time.

Totally Folked, a standalone friends to lovers celebrity romance from New York Times bestselling author Penny Reid, is only 99 PENNIES for just a short while on Amazon US and Canada. Have you checked out Penny’s Green Valley spinoff series? Now is the perfect time. ★★⁣⁣Grab your copy TODAY!★★⁣⁣ Amazon US: https://amzn.to/35yF77N Amazon CA: https://amzn.to/3oHrMRT One unforgettable night…

[kimcoxauthor]

LOVE'S ENDURANCE - Kindle Countdown Sale

LOVE’S ENDURANCE – Kindle Countdown Sale

[richardmmulder]

Deception (Conquest: A Dystopian GameLit Saga Book 2) - Interlude 2: The Rapture

Deception (Conquest: A Dystopian GameLit Saga Book 2) – Interlude 2: The Rapture

Doug’s many years of paranoia had prepared him for just this kind of scenario. Having logged out of Conquest, he hurried around his apartment and grabbed his antiquated laptop, his 72-hour kit, his sawed-off shotgun, his sash filled with military grade 12-gauge shells, and his hidden wad of hundred-dollar bills, and scurried out the back door. He wasn’t exactly sure where Brittany’s body was, but…

[authorkarajorgensen]

Get 2 Books for $2

From now until August 28th, both The Reanimator’s Heart (TRM #1) and The Reanimator’s Soul (TRM #2) are on sale for $0.99, so you can grab both books for $2. It’s the perfect time to read and catch up before The Reanimator’s Remains (TRM #3) comes out October 29th. There is one day left in the Narratess Indie Sale (ends the 26th), so if you are looking to beef up your to-be-read pile for Indie…

[nicolamcameron]

Like ACOTAR? Do I have a series for you! “Flawless and stunning.”
–– Night Owl Reviews Two countries, united by a political marriage turned passionate love match, are poised on the brink of a golden age. But brilliant mage-queen Danaë of Hellas and her warrior husband Matthias of Ypres will have to battle internal conflicts, foreign enemies, and deadly magical threats if they want their kingdoms—and their love—to survive. Empress of Storms - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017PGRLSU Palace of Scoundrels - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LX44RKS Lady of Thorns - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0765SGYNQ King of Blades - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08JD86CPF Red Robin and the Huntsman - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078H477TF A Small Favor - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L46SHS3

[emeryleewho]

My latest book is live on Kickstarter with a full cover reveal!

Here are 10 Reasons you should pledge to my kickstarter (or at least reblog this post!)

If less than 0.5% of the people who've bought my previous books pledge to the paperback tier, this book would be over-funded, so it's a very doable project but I need help finding those readers again!

I launched this Kickstarter because despite being award-winning and making impressive sales, I wasn't offered a living wage for my next YA book (which went to auction) so it felt counterintuitive to sell this adult book to a publisher that doesn't appreciate me.

The book is VERY queer! It's literally a drag queen romcom. Like, come on.

If you read Meet Cute Diary or Café Con Lychee, you'll get to revisit some characters you love in this one! If you haven't read either, you can still enjoy this one because it technically stands alone!

If we get enough backers, I can upgrade everyone's copies to include more art and higher quality editions!!!

Despite doing this entirely independently, the DDTO eBooks are MUCH cheaper than what's offered for my first two books by a major publisher, and if we get this Kickstarter fully funded, I should be able to offer my paperbacks cheaper too! More access, woo!!!

Helping indie creators achieve their goals is just cool. It's innovative.

The book has Studio Ghibli references and other nerd culture! I get to name drop Lil Nas X! It's just a fun time okay!

There is a nonbinary, trans masc character that I am 99% sure Tumblr is going to lose its absolute mind over, but WE'LL NEVER KNOW IF THIS DOESN'T FUND!

Seriously, let's just stick it to the multi-billion dollar corporation that begged me for my "Meet Cute Diary" sequel only to not even offer me a living wage, like how funny would that be y'all?

Anyway, we only have until Friday October 11th to get this funded so spread it far, spread it wide, spread it through the countryside, just help me get the word out pretty please? <3

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Intuit: “Our fraud fights racism”

Tonight (September 27), I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.

Today's key concept is "predatory inclusion": "a process wherein lenders and financial actors offer needed services to Black households but on exploitative terms that limit or eliminate their long-term benefits":

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2329496516686620

Perhaps you recall predatory inclusion from the Great Financial Crisis, when predatory subprime mortgages with deceptive teaser rates were foisted on Black homeowners (who were eligible for better mortgages), resulting in a wave of Black home theft in the foreclosure crisis:

https://prospect.org/justice/staggering-loss-black-wealth-due-subprime-scandal-continues-unabated/

Before these loans blew up, they were styled as a means of creating Black intergenerational wealth through housing speculation. They turned out to be a way to suck up Black families' savings before rendering them homeless and forcing them into houses owned by the Wall Street slumlords who bought all the housing stock the Great Financial Crisis put on the market:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

That was just an update on an old con: the "home sale contract," invented by loan-sharks who capitalized on redlining to rip off Black families. Back when banks and the US government colluded to deny mortgages to Black households, sleazy lenders created the "contract loan," which worked like a mortgage, but if you were late on a single payment, the lender could seize and sell your home and not pay you a dime – even if the house was 99% paid for:

https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Plunder-of-Black-Wealth-in-Chicago.pdf

Usurers and con-artists love to style themselves as anti-racists, seeking to "close the racial wealth gap." The payday lending industry – whose triple-digit interest rates trap poor people in revolving debt that they can never pay off – styles itself as a force for racial justice:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#academic-fraud

Payday lenders prey on poor people, and in America, "poor" is often a euphemism for "Black." Payday lenders disproportionately harm Black families:

https://ung.edu/student-money-management-center/money-minute/racial-wealth-gap-payday-loans.php

Payday lenders are just unlicensed banks, who deploy a layer of bullshit to claim that they don't have to play by the rules that bind the rest of the finance sector. This scam is so juicy that it spawned the fintech industry, in which a bunch of unregulated banks sprung up to claim that they were too "innovative" to be regulated:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

When you hear "Fintech," think "unlicensed bank." Fintech turned predatory inclusion into a booming business, recruiting Black spokespeople to claim that being the sucker at the table in the cryptocurrency casino was actually a form of racial justice:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/business/media/cryptocurrency-seeks-the-spotlight-with-spike-lees-help.html

But not all predatory inclusion is financial. Take Facebook Basics, Meta's "poor internet for poor people" program. Facebook partnered with telcos in the Global South to rig their internet access. These "zero rating" programs charged subscribers by the byte to reach any service except Facebook and its partners. Facebook claimed that this would "bridge the digital divide," by corralling "the next billion internet users" into using its services.

The fact that this would make "Facebook" synonymous with "the internet" was just an accidental, regrettable side-effect. Naturally, this was bullshit from top to bottom, and the countries where zero-rating was permitted ended up having more expensive wireless broadband than the countries that banned it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/countries-zero-rating-have-more-expensive-wireless-broadband-countries-without-it

The predatory inclusion gambit is insultingly transparent, but that doesn't stop desperate scammers from trying it. The latest chancer is Intuit, who claim that the end of its decade-long, wildly profitable "free tax prep" scam is bad for Black people:

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-intuit-black-taxpayers-irs-free-file-marketing

Some background. In nearly every rich country on Earth, the tax authorities send every taxpayer a pre-filled tax return, based on the information submitted by employers, banks, financial planners, etc. If that looks good to you, you just sign it and send it back. Otherwise, you can amend it, or just toss it in the trash and pay a tax-prep specialist to produce your own return.

But in America, taxpayers spend billions every year to send forms to the IRS that tell it things it already knows. To make this ripoff seem fair, the hyper-concentrated tax-prep industry, led by the Intuit, creators of Turbotax, pretended to create a program to provide free tax-prep to working people.

This program was called Free File, and it was a scam. The tax-prep cartel each took a different segment of Americans who were eligible for Freefile and then created an online house of mirrors that would trick those people into spending hours working on their tax-returns until they were hit with an error message falsely claiming they were ineligible for the free service and demanding hundreds of dollars to file their returns.

Intuit were world champions at this scam. They blocked their Freefile offering from search-engine crawlers and then bought ads that showed up when searchers typed "freefile" into the query box that led them to deceptively named programs that had "free" in their names but cost a fortune to use – more than you'd pay for a local CPA to file on your behalf.

The Attorneys General of nearly every US state and territory eventually sued Intuit over this, settling for $141m:

https://www.agturbotaxsettlement.com/Home/portalid/0

The FTC is still suing them over it:

https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/192-3119-intuit-inc-matter-turbotax

We have to rely on state AGs and the FTC to bring Intuit to justice because every Intuit user clicks through an agreement in which we permanently surrender our right to sue the company, no matter how many laws it breaks. For corporate criminals, binding arbitration waivers are the gift that keeps on giving:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/24/uber-for-arbitration/#nibbled-to-death-by-ducks

Even as the scam was running out, Intuit spent millions lobby-blitzing Congress, desperate for action that would let it continue to privately tax the nation for filling in forms that – once again – told the IRS things it already knew. They really love the idea of paying taxes on paying your taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/20/turbotaxed/#counter-intuit

But they failed. The IRS has taken Freefile in-house, will send you a pre-completed tax return if you want it. This should be the end of the line for Intuit and other tax-prep profiteers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/17/free-as-in-freefile/#tell-me-something-i-dont-know

Now we're at the end of the line for the scam, Intuit is playing the predatory inclusion card. They're conning Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender into running headlines like "IRS Free Tax Service Could Further Harm Blacks,"

https://defendernetwork.com/news/opinion/irs-free-tax-service-could-further-harm-blacks/

The only named source in that article? Intuit spokesperson Derrick Plummer. The article went out on the country's Black newswire Trice Edney, whose editor-in-chief did not respond to Propublica's Paul Kiel's questions.

Then Black Enterprise got in on the game, publishing "Critics Claim The IRS Free Tax Prep Service Could Hurt Black Americans." Once again, the only named source for the article was Plummer, who was "quoted at length." Black Enterprise declined to tell Kiel where that article came from:

https://www.blackenterprise.com/critics-claim-the-irs-free-tax-prep-service-could-hurt-black-americans/

For Intuit, placing op-eds is a tried-and-true tactic for laundering its ripoffs into respectability. Leaked internal Intuit memos detail the company's strategy of "pushing back through op-eds" to neutralize critics:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483061-Intuit-TurboTax-2014-15-Encroachment-Strategy.html

Intuit spox Derrick Plummer did respond to Kiel's queries, denying that Intuit was paying for these op-eds, saying "with an idea as bad as the Direct File scheme we don’t have to pay anyone to talk about how terrible it is."

Meanwhile, ex-NAACP director (and No Labels co-chair) Benjamin Chavis has used his position atop the National Newspaper Publishers Association to publish op-eds against the IRS Direct File program, citing the Progressive Policy Institute, a pro-business thinktank that Intuit's internal documents describe as part of its "coalition":

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6483061-Intuit-TurboTax-2014-15-Encroachment-Strategy.html

Chavis's Chicago Tribune editorial claimed that Direct File could cause Black filers to miss out on tax-credits they are entitled to. This is a particularly ironic claim given Intuit's prominent role in sabotaging the Child Tax Credit, a program that lifted more Americans out of poverty than any other in history:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/three-times-is-enemy-action/#ctc

It's also an argument that can be found in Intuit's own anti-Direct File blog posts:

https://www.intuit.com/blog/innovative-thinking/taxpayer-empowerment/intuit-reinforces-its-commitment-to-fighting-for-taxpayers-rights/

The claim is that because the IRS disproportionately audits Black filers (this is true), they will screw them over in other ways. But Evelyn Smith, co-author of the study that documented the bias in auditing says this is bullshit:

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/measuring-and-mitigating-racial-disparities-tax-audits

That's because these audits of Black households are triggered by the IRS's focus on Earned Income Tax Credits, a needlessly complicated program available to low-income (and hence disproportionately Black) workers. The paperwork burden that the IRS heaps on EITC recipients means that their returns contain errors that trigger audits.

As Smith told Propublica, "With free, assisted filing, we might expect EITC claimants to make fewer mistakes and face less intense audit scrutiny, which could help reduce disparities in audit rates between Black and non-Black taxpayers."

Meanwhile, the predatory inclusion talking points continue to proliferate. Nevada accountants and the state's former controller somehow coincidentally managed to publish op-eds with nearly identical wording. Phillip Austin, vice-chair of Arizon's East Valley Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, claims that free IRS tax prep "would disproportionately hurt the Hispanic community." Austin declined to tell Propublica how he came to that conclusion.

Right-wing think-tanks are pumping out a torrent of anti-Direct File disinfo. This surely has nothing to do with the fact that, for example, Center Forward has HR Block's chief lobbyist on its board:

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4125481-direct-e-file-wont-make-filing-taxes-any-easier-but-it-could-make-things-worse/

The whole thing reeks of bullshit and desperation. That doesn't mean that it won't succeed in killing Direct File. If there's one thing America loves, it's letting businesses charge us a tax just for dealing with our own government, from paying our taxes to camping in our national parks:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/30/military-industrial-park-service/#booz-allen

Interestingly, there's a MAGA version of predatory inclusion, in which corporations convince low-information right-wingers that efforts to protect them from ripoffs are "woke." These campaigns are, incredibly, even stupider than the predatory inclusion tale.

For example, there's a well-coordianted campaign to block the junk fees that the credit card cartel extracts from merchants, who then pass those charges onto us. This campaign claims that killing junk fees is woke:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

How does that work? Here's the logic: Target sells Pride merch. That makes them woke. Target processes a lot of credit-card transactions, so anything that reduces card-processing fees will help Target. Therefore, paying junk fees is a way to own the libs.

No, seriously.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers