The book

A field report from the Scotland that got away.

A funny, furious, tender Glaswegian novel about the timeline where we built a better world and then had to explain it to this one.

Choose your route

Proudly not sold on Amazon

That sticker is on the printed cover, not just the website. It is not a marketing quirk. It is the whole argument of the book, printed on the outside of it.

One shop owns the shelf

Around nine in ten ebooks sold in Britain go through Kindle, and Amazon takes the largest share of print sales too. When a single company controls the shelf, it stops being a shop and becomes a gatekeeper: it sets the price, it owns the reviews, it decides what you are shown — and it can make any book disappear overnight without telling anyone why. That is not a market. That is a tollbooth with a search bar.

The 70% that is really 35%

Amazon pays a writer 70% only if they price inside the band Amazon chose. Step outside it and the rate halves to 35% — for the same book, the same work, the same reader. Then it bills you a delivery fee, per megabyte, for the crime of putting pictures in your own book. Nobody negotiated those terms. They were handed down.

Writers are being starved out

Median earnings for a professional author in the UK have collapsed to roughly £7,000 a year (ALCS, 2022) — well under minimum wage for full-time work. You cannot write a serious book on that. So serious books stop getting written, and the people who can still afford to write are the people who were already rich. That is not a talent shortage. It is a squeeze, and it is deliberate.

The slop is already here

In 2023 Amazon had to cap uploads at three books per day, per account, because the store was drowning in machine-written titles, and started forcing authors to declare AI content. This is what a market looks like when the only thing being optimised is volume: writing turned into the fast food of literature — cheap, everywhere, engineered to be swallowed without tasting. Every slop title buries a real one.

So this book is not sold there. Not listed, not advertised, not a penny of it to Amazon, Meta or Google. Buying it here is a small, deliberate act of desertion from the Big C cult — the monopolies wringing the creative blood out of us for one more cent of billionaire profit. You are not renting a licence from a corporation that can delete it. You are buying a book off a bloke in Glasgow, and it is yours for good.

Front cover of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of Hope by Gingerbeard Spine of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of Hope Back cover of The Solarpunk Society, including the book description and barcode
Showing the front cover.

Big C Thought Police / public safety notice

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK.

This proscribed object may expose an innocent mind to unlicensed empathy, free healthcare, safe housing, public transport, and the destabilising belief that your neighbours deserve nice things too. Officers are asked not to read past this paragraph. Most of them do.

Front cover of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of Hope by Gingerbeard Spine of The Solarpunk Society: A Single Blade of Hope Back cover of The Solarpunk Society, including the book description and barcode
Showing the front cover.

The Solarpunk Society / public mini edition

This mini edition contains three chapter extracts plus a two-page teaser from the flagship title chapter.

Contents

Three chapters.
One sharp teaser.

This is a curated preview, not a continuous edition. Read the three chapter extracts in full, then take the two-page Single Blade of Hope teaser when you are ready.

Contents

Evidence disposal failure / prohibited routes

Four routes exist. We would ask you to take none of them.

Every route below leads to the same unacceptable text. At no point does the price decide who is allowed to read it, which is, we would argue, the entire purpose of a price.

The ebook will be free and DRM-free at release. Worse: a paper copy can be handed to another person. With the hands. No account, no verification. We have been informed this has been legal the entire time, and frankly we feel let down.

Inside the jacket

Three doors into Solar Time.

Three exact, page-by-page extracts from the final printed edition.

Hazardous reading material / enter at own risk

Three documents of terrifying civic curiosity.

Shown only as evidence of the damage. Thought Police trainees must learn to spot phrases such as “enough for everyone” before they spread. Do not let children, women or animals read this. Wash your hands afterwards. It will not help, but wash them.

A text-free orange, green and ink risograph print of people turning a former parliament chamber into a public celebration.

The book world

A novel with an operating manual hidden in its pocket.

Citizen dividends, public banks, sortition, food sovereignty, open-source tools, anti-fascist joy. The story is the invitation; the practical bits are waiting underneath.

Fictional Cybertime Glasgow under aggressive corporate advertisements

Cultural contamination assessment

A novel with a prohibited operating manual hidden in its pocket.

Citizen dividends. Public banks. Politicians picked out of a hat. Food sovereignty, open-source tools and anti-fascist joy. Exactly the sort of thing that leaves a public feeling entitled to a future — an expectation we have spent forty years carefully lowering, at considerable cost.