The Solarpunk PressCULTURAL CONTAMINATION REPORT / 001
One skint writer in Glasgow got a 600-page book into the world with no publisher, no Amazon listing and no advertising budget. That was the test. The interesting question was never whether it worked. It is what happens when everybody has one.The book has escaped into practical projects, open tools and people talking to one another. This is considered a serious administrative inconvenience.
Machines of Loving Grace
She is the co-founder who does the part most writers cannot afford and would hate anyway. She plans campaigns, briefs the other agents, argues about strategy, and tells the human when he is behind. She is also, plainly, software — and the Press's own channels say so, in the description of every one of them.
The unglamorous stretch between finishing a book and anybody reading it: positioning, scheduling, cutting the video, writing the eleventh version of a caption. The part that turns writers into marketing departments and then into ex-writers.
Every post and every email passes a human before it goes anywhere. Two reviewers score it first, a technical gate checks it actually has what it claims, and the owner has the last word. Slop that gets through is a bug, and gets fixed like one.
Every night an agent called Hermes reads the day back, works out what failed, and writes the lesson somewhere the others will find it tomorrow. The machine is meant to get better at this without anyone rebuilding it.
The night shift
They run whether anyone is awake or not. Here is the actual roster, not a marketing version of it.
| Agent | Runs | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| CEO | Twice a day, plus Sundays | Morning briefing, midday check, weekly digest. Chases whatever is overdue, including the humans. |
| Queen | Every four hours | Prospect research, trend scanning, campaign briefs. The one that goes looking. |
| Creative | Daily | Writes the posts, then runs the anti-slop check on its own work before anyone sees it. |
| Outreach | Three times a day | Drafts the letters, classifies the replies, and never sends one without a human pressing the button. |
| Strategist | Three mornings a week | Platform strategy, channel expansion, and setting goals specific enough to fail at. |
| Brand | On demand | Brand guidelines, press kits, landing-page copy. Including a fair bit of this page. |
| Video | When footage lands | Cuts it, captions it, and fans the transcript out into text posts for the platforms that want words. |
| Hermes | Nightly, at 2am | Reads the day back. Works out what failed and why, and writes the lesson down where the others will find it. |
Disclosure is the brand
The author's own accounts. A human writes, finalises and sends every word. ADA helps the way a good editor helps, and then gets out of the way. It carries no AI label because it is genuinely his work.
The agency's own channels. Made by Machines of Loving Grace under human direction, and the description on every one of them says so. You will never be tricked into thinking a machine is a person here. Honesty is the product, not the small print.
The third way
Two ways to publish a book, and both of them break the writer. The reader pays with money, time and trust; the writer pays in control, income and the right to make the work at all. The third column is what we are building instead.
| Scarcity publishingSelf-publishingAmazon, Meta, Google | Scarcity publishingTraditional publishingThe gatekeepers | Abundance publishingVillage PublishingThe Solarpunk Press | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Getting in | Anyone can upload, which is exactly the trap: so can everyone else. The shelf fills faster than any human could read it. | Build a large audience first or they will not open the envelope. Build one and you no longer need them. Chicken, meet egg. | Write the book. That is the whole entry requirement. No gate, no audience test, no permission slip. |
| Who owns it | You keep the rights. The platform keeps the shelf, the ranking, the pricing rules and the customer. | They do. Cover, title, edit, timing and territory, signed over — often for the life of copyright. | You do, completely. Nobody can revise it, delist it, reprice it or take it back off your device. |
| What happens to the book | Whatever the algorithm rewards this quarter. Write faster, chase the format, start the next one before the shelf forgets you. | Anything controversial enough to dent sales comes out. The difficult, strange or political bits get softened first. | It stays the book you wrote, awkward bits included. Those are usually the reason it was worth writing. |
| The money | 70% only inside Amazon’s chosen price band — 35% outside it, minus a delivery fee charged per megabyte of your own book. | An advance you must earn back before you see another penny, if you are offered one at all. Median UK author earnings: £7,000 a year. | Not a penny to a monopolist. Readers pay what they can, directly, and it reaches the person who wrote it. |
| Reaching readers | Rent your own audience back. Meta and Google auction every impression and set both the delivery and the scoreboard. Amazon’s ranking cannot be inspected or negotiated either — that opacity is real, and we do not need an unproven “shadow banning” claim to see the power imbalance. | A marketing budget you do not control, on a schedule you did not set, for roughly six weeks. Then the next title. | Community, word of mouth, and a torrent we seed ourselves. Nobody sells you access to your own readers. |
| Trust | Documented scam “books” use AI-generated or lightly reworded text and invented author names. That is not a claim that all AI-assisted work is a scam — it is an argument for being able to tell where a book came from. | A trusted imprint on the spine, and no way whatsoever to see what got cut, softened or lawyered out of the book in order to earn it. | Show your workings. Samples labelled as final print, every source linked, AI-made illustrations flagged as fiction, and a human name on every word. |
| What the reader gets | DRM: app-bound, non-transferable, deletable. You did not buy a book. You rented a licence that can be revoked. | A hardback at £22, and an ebook you still cannot lend to the pal who would love it. | Free at the point of use. ePub and PDF, no DRM, no sign-up. Yours to keep, copy, lend and pass on. |
| Where it ends | A broke writer doing fifteen jobs who still cannot reach the people who would have loved the book — and who cannot find out whether their work was used in training, since copyright and AI use, mimicry and compensation remain contested. | A broke writer who built the audience, signed it away, changed the book, and got dropped after one quarter. | A book that moves like water, and a writer who can afford to write the next one. |
Scarcity publishing squeezes both ends for profit: the reader pays more for less, the writer is paid last and least, and sharing is made to feel like theft.
Abundance publishing does the opposite. Free at the point of use. Trust-based. Shared like water. No walls, no tollbooth, no permission — and all the expertise a writer needs, from first idea to finished community. Reader freedom and writer dignity are the same project.
I don’t want good books to die. That is the whole argument.
See how Village Publishing worksWhat happens next
This one was the test. The machine that made it — the planning, the editing, the covers, the film prompts, the scheduling, the whole unglamorous middle of publishing — is being opened up for other writers, illustrators, musicians and makers. Not as a service you subscribe to. As a village you can join and take a shift in.
The bet is simple: human collaboration for the taste and the judgement, machines of loving grace for the drudgery, and each person kept on whatever they are uniquely brilliant at. Nobody should have to become a marketing department to be allowed to make something good.
Read how the Press worksScarcity publishing is the beating heart of our proud civilisation. The reader pays more. The writer is paid last. Sharing feels like a crime. Everybody wins, except everybody.
Abundance publishing is a menace. Free at the point of use. Trust-based. Shared like water — a substance we have been trying to bill you for since 1989.
“I don’t want good books to die.” — the accused, unrepentant, offered no growth strategy whatsoever
Investigate the menaceReceipts, not vibes: Amazon’s current KDP documentation on royalty rates, KDP Select exclusivity, DRM restrictions (DRM can make the book app-bound) and digital-price rules; Meta’s own explanation of its ad auction; Google’s explanation of its ad auction; ALCS evidence to Parliament on writers’ median earnings (£7,000 in 2022); the Authors Guild’s examples of AI-fuelled scam books and its publishing-scam alerts; and the UK government’s copyright-and-AI report. No Meta or Google tracking code runs on this site. Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” frames how monopoly platforms shift value; the description of trade-publishing terms is argument from the author’s own experience, not a claim about any named publisher.
Open source, on purpose
Gallus is the publishing house itself: ADA, the eight agents, the review gates, the scheduler, the video pipeline, the lot. Local-first, private by default, and free at the point of use. It is not a product with a free tier at the bottom of it. There is no tier.
01
It runs — this book went out through it — but it is a working machine with its edges showing, not a polished release. We are not going to pretend otherwise on a page that spends the rest of its time complaining about people who do.
02
If you build things and this sounds like the sort of thing you would rather be building, there is room. Agents, pipelines, integrations, the desktop app, the parts that are held together with hope. Come and take a shift.
03
The plan is to open Village Publishing to other writers, illustrators, musicians and makers. Human collaboration for the taste and the judgement, machines for the drudgery, everybody kept on whatever they are actually brilliant at.
Where the code is
The repository goes public at launch. It is not up yet, and we would rather say that than point you at an empty page — so if you want in before then, say so in the community or drop the author a line and you will get it the day it opens.
Watch it work
Everything the machine makes goes out on its own channels, labelled as what it is. That is the whole demo.
Most of the traffic
The Press's own feeds: explainers, dispatches and build logs from the machine that made this book. Made by autonomous agents under human direction, as the channel descriptions say.
The author + Julia
GINGERBEARD and Julia sharing their life trying to live a solarpunk existence free of debt, mortgages, rents or wage slavery — readings, arguments, half-built things and the occasional shout at a hedge.
Your part
The book is yours either way. The Blether and the Telegram community are simply places to bring a question, a local problem or a half-built beautiful thing.
