#MLM Book

[duckprintspress]

Sample Chapter 1 of The Salt in the Sea!

We are entering the second – and final – week of our pre-order crowdfunding campaign to pay for the publishing of The Salt in the Sea by J. D. Rivers – and we’re 90% of the way to our baseline goal, and almost 40% of the way to our main goal!

Interested in the book but on the fence? Then allow us to wet your appetite: you can now read the first chapter of The Salt in the Sea completely free! Download the chapter 1 sample here!

Visit our campaign page to read the blurb, meet the author, check out the merchandise, and more!

[yeahthatswhatimtolkienabout]

Done! I've plotted the entire novel!

If you have 80% of a book plot and a bunch of thin threads, I fully recommend just buying a pack of sticky notes and finding a wall to stick them on. Pick a colour for the plot and different ones for chapters, themes, notes and anything else you need and just get it all up there.

It offers such great flexibility in moving bits of the plot round and figuring out what happens and when. I started out with a strong beginning and end - I just needed to weave the middle bit together. I now have the full thing! So definitely recommend doing this if you're struggling with plotting and weaving themes in.

Now that this is done, I feel like I can start writing now! This book is based on a dream I had (not like Twilight omg) and some life lessons I wish people had told me when I was younger.

It covers things like finding and choosing your family, coming to terms with the fact that the people you are related to aren't always the best people (and coming to terms with that), finding validation and self acceptance and learning to let go of people or things that would otherwise do you harm. All in a fantasy setting! Woo!

Oh and it is also very queer.

I love the characters and messaging and will post updates as I go because eventually - I will need test readers!

Now to come up with a fucking title.

[thesansanti]

[wbtym-pod]

Happy National Black Cat Day to WBTYM!'s favorite black Cat, Grace Jones! Don't know what we're talking about?

Check out Christian Baines' book My Cat's Guide to Online Dating, and our episode on the novel: Outro is My Safe Word.

[fallen-in-love-suggestion]

Do you want to get coffee and go to the bookstore with me?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing

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/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

In her unmissable 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein paints a picture of a "mirror world" of right wing and conspiratorial beliefs that are warped, false reflections of real crises:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

For example, Qanon's obsession with "child trafficking" is a mirror-world version of the real crises of child poverty, child labor, border family separations and kids in cages. Anti-vax is the mirror-world version of the true story of the Sacklers and their fellow opioid barons making billions on Oxy and fent, with the collusion of corrupt FDA officials and a pliant bankruptcy court system. Xenophobic panic about "immigrants stealing jobs" is the mirror world version of the well-documented fact that big business shipped jobs to low-waged territories abroad, weakening US labor and smashing US unions. Cryptocurrency talk about "decentralization" is the mirror-world version of the decay of every industry (including tech) into a monopoly or a cartel.

Klein is at pains to point out that other political thinkers have described this phenomenon. Back in the 19th century, leftists called antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Socialism – the idea that working people are preyed upon by capital – is reflected in the warped mirror as "working people are preyed upon by international Jewish bankers."

The mirror world is a critical concept, because it shows that far right and conspiratorial beliefs are often uneasy neighbors with real, serious political movements. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, in other words:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

Once you understand the mirror world, you start to realize that many right wing conspiracists could have been directed into productive movements, if only they'd understood that their problems were with systems, not sinister individuals (this is why Trump has ordered a purge of any federally funded research that contains the word "systemic"):

https://mamot.fr/@Lazarou@mastodon.social/113943287435897828

This also explains why the "tropes" of right wing conspiratorialism sometimes echo left wing, radical thought. I once had a (genuinely unhinged) dialog with a self-described German "progressive" who told me that criticizing the finance industry as parasitic on the real economy was "structurally antisemitic." Nonsense like this is why Klein's "mirror world" is so important: unless you understand the mirror world, you can end up believing that "progressive" just means "defending anything the right hates."

Historian Erik Baker is the author of a new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, which has some very interesting things to say about the mirror world:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674293601

In a recent edition of the always-excellent Know Your Enemy podcast, the hosts interviewed Baker about the book, and the conversation turned to the subject of pyramid schemes, the "multilevel marketing systems" that are woven into so many religious, right-wing movements:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-the-entrepreneurial-ethic/

MLMs have it all: prosperity gospel ("God rewards virtue with wealth"), atomization ("you are an entrepreneur and everyone in your life is your potential customer"), and rabid anti-Communism ("solidarity is a trick to make you poorer").

The rise of the far right can't be separated from the history of MLMs. The modern MLM starts with Amway, a cultlike national scam that was founded by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos (father-in-law of Betsy DeVos).

Rank-and-file members of the Amway cult lived in dire poverty, convinced that their financial predicament was their own fault for not faithfully following the "sure-fire" Amway method for building a business. Andrea Pitzer's gripping memoir of growing up in an Amway household offers a glimpse of the human cost of the cult:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/amway-america/681479/?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZxYkntna5M_rYEv4707Zqqs

Amway – and MLMs like it – don't just bleed out their members by convincing them to buy mountains of useless crap they're supposed to sell to their families, while enriching the people at the top of the pyramid who sell it to them. The "toxic positivity" of multi-level marketing cults forces members deep into debt to pay for seminars and retreats where they are supposed to learn how to repair the personal defects that keep them from being "successful entrepreneurs." The topline of the cult isn't just getting rich selling stuff – they're making bank by selling false hope, literally, in Hilton ballrooms and convention centers across the country, where hearing an MLM scammer berate you for being a "bad entrepreneur" costs thousands of dollars.

Amway destroyed so many lives that Richard Nixon's FTC decided to investigate it. The investigation wasn't going well for Amway, which was facing an existential crisis that they were rescued from by Nixon's resignation. You see, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, was the former Congressman of Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel, who was also the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful business lobbyist in America.

At Ford's direction, the FTC exonerated Amway of all wrongdoing. But it's even worse than that: Ford's FTC actually crafted a rule that differentiated legal pyramid schemes from illegal ones, based on Amway's destructive business practices. Under this new rule, any pyramid scheme that had the same structure as Amway was presumptively legal. Every MLM operating in America today is built on the Amway model, taking advantage of the FTC's Amway rule to operate in the open, without fear of legal repercussions.

MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate – it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.

In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.

But it's worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the "customer" to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don't need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.

An MLM isn't just a pathogen, in other words – it's a contagion. When someone in your social support network gets the MLM disease, they don't just burn all their social ties with you and the people you rely on – they convince more people in your social group to do the same.

Which brings me back to the mirror world, and Erik Baker's conversation with the Know Your Enemy podcast. Baker starts to talk about who gets big into Amway: "people who already effectively lead by the force of their charisma and personality many other people in their lives. Right? Because you're able to sell to those people, and you're able to recruit those people. What are we talking about? Well, they're effectively recruiting organizers, people who have a natural capacity for organizing and then sending them out in the world to organize on behalf of Christian capitalism."

Listening to this, I was thunderstruck: MLM recruiters are the mirror world version of union organizers. In her memoir of growing up in Amway, Andrea Pitzer talks about how her mom would approach strangers and try to lead them through a kind of structured discussion:

Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.

This kind of person, having this kind of dialog, is exactly how union organizers work. In A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey's classic book on labor organizing, she describes how she would seek out the charismatic, outgoing workers in a job-site, the natural leaders, and recruit them to help bring the other workers onboard:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Organizer training focuses on how to have a "structured organizing conversation," which McAlevey described in a 2019 Jacobin article:

“If you had a magic wand and could change three things about life in America [or her town or city or school], what would you change?” The rest of your conversation needs to be anchored to her answers to that question.

https://jacobin.com/2019/11/thanksgiving-organizing-activism-friends-family-conversation-presidential-election

The MLM conversation and the union conversation have eerily similar structures, but the former is designed to commodify and destroy solidarity, and the latter is designed to reinforce and mobilize solidarity. Seen in this light, an MLM is a mirror world union, one that converts solidarity into misery and powerlessness instead of joy and strength.

The MLM movement doesn't just make men like Rich De Vos and Jay Van Andel into billionaires. MLM bosses are heavy funders of the right, a blank check for the Heritage Foundation. Trump is the MLM president, a grifter who grew up on the gospel of Norman Vincent Peale – a key figure in MLM cult dynamics – who tells his followers that wealth is a sign of virtue. Trump boasts about all the people he's ripped off, boasting about how getting away with cheating "makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

The corollary is that being cheated means you're stupid. Caveat emptor, the motto of the cryptocurrency industry ("not your wallet, not your coins") that spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected.

Tech has its own mirror world. The people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and make delightful and wonderful things are mirrored by the people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and call for fascism, ethnic cleansing, and concentration camps.

In Picks and Shovels, my next novel (Feb 17), I introduce readers to a fictitious 1980s religious computer sales cult called Fidelity Computing, run by an orthodox rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Mormon rabbi:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Fidelity is a faith scam, a pyramid scheme that is parasitic upon the bonds of faith and fellowship. Martin Hench, the hero of the story – a hard-fighting high tech forensic accountant – goes to work for a competing business, Computing Freedom, run by three Fidelity ex-employees who have left their faiths and their employers to pursue a vision of computers that is about liberation, rather than control.

The women of Computing Freedom – a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family, a Mormon woman who's renounced the LDS over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who's left her order to throw in with the Liberation Theology movement – are all charismatic, energetic, inspirational organizers.

Because of course they are – that's why they were so good at selling computers for the Reverend Sirs who sit at the top of Fidelity Computing's pyramid scheme.

Hearing Baker's interview and reading Pitzer's memoir last week made it all click together for me. Not just that MLMs destroy social bonds, but that within every person who gets sucked into an MLM, there's a community organizer who could be building the bonds that MLMs destroy.

[shyjusticewarrior]

Jason: Has Bernard always looked at you like that, and if so how did you think he was straight?

Tim, to Steph: Stop telling Jason things.

Steph, ignoring Tim: I took Tim's gaydar cause he's not worthy.

[littlestpersimmon]

My mlm / queer books and manga that resonated in my trans man heart book recs: (at the top of my mind)

[lulu-fic]

IMAGINE

Y/n (male reader) was a gamer, not very well known, who did not showed his face as he liked his peaceful everyday life while still having a thriving social presence.

And as every community has a creator that they look up to, the gamer community also had one.

And it was him.

But oh y/n hated his guts. Because 1. He was hot 2. He was rude and last but not least he had a personality of a Playboy.

So when the so-called gamer god decided to comment something rude about a hater, y/n decided to clap back by tweeting "Just because you have a pretty face and nice gaming skills doesn't mean you can comment about someone's face."

Of course that post quickly blew up. And of course he decided to react to it by saying some mean things to y/n and about his face.

So to clock him, y/n posted picture of his a bare, washed face and just tagged him, and just went to sleep with his phone switched off.

Later that night he decided to react to y/n's "reply" to his comment. He also thought it would be a good idea to live stream his reaction. Bad idea.

Because as he was live streaming his reaction, going all "let's see this y/n so-called comeback." But when he finally saw y/n's post, he was..... dumbfounded. His jaw slacked.

Y/n was drop-dead gorgeous. He was so pretty with his natural pink cheeks and plump lips. So of course he had to send y/n a follow request on the game arena and follow all his social platforms. But Wrong move.

As all of this was recorded was on his live stream. Soon the whole twitter gaming community was in uproar about how whipped he was. Tbh, he genuinely didn't care as he got a excuse to stake a claim on you.

In morning, when y/n woke up and finally checked his phone, he nearly fell off his bed to see the chaos unfolding on the twitter. But when he got to know the reason behind, he knew he was screwed.

Well, this might be a start of something new.

© lulu-reads, 2025. All rights reserved. Don't copy, translate or modify my work. Also Do not post my work on any other platform.

[kajamnikk]

finished this selfindulgent nightmare... if anyone from abroad would be interested in the near future then DM me!!

[verdantmeadows]

MONSTER HIGH PRIDE 2025 AND ITS COVER REVEALS WE STAY WINNING

Quote via editor Riley Farmer:

Plot teaser:

(Source link via Comics Beat) (Also link to Riley Farmer's Twitter announcement, @/bonesbunns's Tumblr and Instagram posts of their cover)

[duckprintspress]

Cover Reveal: The Salt in the Sea by J. D. Rivers

The Salt in the Sea by J. D. Rivers is Duck Prints Press’s next novella release! Meet Thoma and Victor, two men with complex pasts that include a previous bittersweet encounter with each other. The Salt in the Sea is a novella about building a life in the aftermath of disaster, about isolation literal and metaphorical, and about second chances. Oh, yeah, and there’s also a corpse to deal with…

Blurb:

A downtrodden ex-soldier. After leaving the military, werewolf Victor is shunned in his civilian life. Money is tight, so when an ex-comrade offers him an easy job—getting a package from an island—he jumps at the chance. A lost inn-owner. When Selkie Thoma opens the door to a knocking patron, he wants to close it again immediately. Standing before him is Victor, his one-night stand from three years ago. The last thing Thoma wants is to have to explain why he left that night. As Victor and Thoma cross paths unexpectedly, emotions flare anew. But Victor is only on the island for a week, and Thoma can’t face his past, the consequences of his decisions, or the resulting condemnation from his sea-going selkie family. A dead body in a post office. When a corpse is discovered, fingers throughout the community point at Victor. With time running out before justice is served, it’s on Thoma to find out the truth. Because on the island justice is deadly.

Our pre-order crowdfunding campaign for The Salt in the Sea begins April 1st 2025 (no foolin’!), with a minimum goal of $900 US. You can learn more about the campaign, and sign up for our newsletter to make sure you get notified when sales go live!

The cover artist is planetsandmagic.

[abustoslife]

[thesansanti]

What's a dual perspective romance with out the other guy !

Head Over Heelflip By Sander Santiago https://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/books/head-over-heelflip-by-sander-santiago-4385-b

[ladyadaine]

From the creators of Science Gays

Comes Crime Lesbians

[khaoala]

❝Since when did you start liking me?❞

FORCE JIRATCHAPONG as PHOOM and BOOK KASIDET as VICHA KANNULA episode 7 of PEACEFUL PROPERTY