"Why Are You Atheists So Angry?" – Answers To Some of Your Questions

So a bunch of you have been asking a bunch of questions about my new book, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless. (Available on Kindle and Nook; soon to be available on Smashwords and in physical print!) So on the theory that for every person asking a question, there are a hundred people also wanting an answer, I thought that instead of answering them one at a time in the comments section, I’d answer them all together here.

First, in the You Didn’t Ask But I’m Telling You Anyway department: Why Are You Atheists So Angry? is, as of this writing, the #1 book on Amazon in the Atheism category. Not just the #1 Kindle book in the Atheism category — although it’s that, too. The #1 book in the category, period. And as of this writing, it’s the #120 best seller among all Kindle books. Yowsa. That doesn’t suck. Thanks so much to everyone who bought a book, and everyone who told their friends about it!

And now, to your questions.

I have a nook when will that be available? Hurry I need to read soon!

It’s available now!

Anybody know if there’s gonna be an audiobook version?

I can’t say anything official about this yet… but it’s looking good. Expect an announcement soon.

So when is this coming out in old school book version? I would really like to get a copy.

I don’t know exactly. I’m shooting for April. The formatting is almost done; as soon as it is, I just need to pick a POD publisher and say “Go.” It should be just a few weeks after that.

Any word on whether or not it will be available as a hardcover?

It won’t. The print version will be paperback only.

I want to get the physical book when it comes out. I was just wondering, since the List of Rage chapter seems to have a lot of links, how will the physical version look? Will there be footnotes or something?

The physical book will have endnotes where the links in the ebook are.

How soon will it be in ePub format? Us iPad users want to inow.

i don’t know if i am going to be doing that. Right now, my plans are just to do Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, and a physical dead-tree book. But if there’s sufficient demand, i’Ll ask the people who did the formatting about creating an iBook version. (Or if iBook can work with one of the formatted versions they’ve already created for the other readers, i’Ll just do that.) In the meantime, you can get Kindle on your iPad.

Do you know if this version has DRM enabled or not? If it’s turned off, I’ll get happily buy it now and convert to a format that a little more usable for me. Otherwise I’m happy to wait for the Smashwords or Nook versions.

DRM is turned off, and will be for all versions. But the Nook version is ready now, and Smashwords will be ready in a few days, if you’d prefer one of those.

Not available in Latin America and Caribbean.

Hm. That’s weird. It should be. I set my settings to make it available worldwide. Have you tried Amazon.es?

In the meantime, according to commenter Thomas Lawson: If it says NOT AVAILABLE, change your country settings to United States.

Will you sign my Kindle at ReasonRally?

If I see you! You do know that the Park Service in D.C. is estimating crowds of over 30,000, right? The chances of us running into each other are fairly slim. But yes — if I see you, or you see me, I’ll happily sign your Kindle!

I love the name of your publisher. Is Dirty Heathen Publishing something you just created?

Yup. Dirty Heathen Publishing is me. Glad you like it!

Smashmouth? Did you mean Smashwords?

m-/

Yes. Yes, I did. I don’t know why I can never get that right.

SRSLY. You decide to write a book and a few weeks later it’s published?

Yup. Let’s hear it for electronic self-publishing! And also for being willing to give up on sleep/ socializing/ life for a while.

Granted, a lot of this book had already been written when I decided to go ahead with it (chunks of it were previously published on the blog). And I put together a book proposal a while ago to try to get it published by a mainstream publisher, so I did a bunch of work on it then.

But a huge amount of work went into writing new material (of which there is a lot), revising the old material, pulling together citations, and putting it all into a coherent structure that’s actually a book and not just a collection of blog posts. So yes — the last few weeks of my life have pretty much been me drowning in this book, and having essentially no life. Totally worth it.

One question: why do you (and others) continue to spell “god” with an initial capital G particularly since a key goal is to remove the “specialness” associated with the concept?

It is the convention in English to capitalize the names of fictional characters. I capitalize God for the same reason I capitalize Voldemort.

Teen DaughterSpawn was just hammering nails to hang up some pictures in her room when the framed Skepticon photo of you fell on her head. Is that due to atheist anger?

Yes.

Now can we tone down the kitten stuff?

No.

God, if you’re there, could you make me a PB&J?

Probably not.

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"Why Are You Atheists So Angry?" – Answers To Some of Your Questions
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34 thoughts on “"Why Are You Atheists So Angry?" – Answers To Some of Your Questions

  1. 1

    I’m about halfway through the book right now and am really enjoying it. Some content is familiar from reading your blog, but I love how you’ve put it all together along with new writing. It fits together well and the fact that you address various arguments that often come up is something I’ve always enjoyed about your writing.

    It is the convention in English to capitalize the names of fictional characters. I capitalize God for the same reason I capitalize Voldemort.

    Best answer ever.

    Voldemort is my response to the “Atheists hate God” argument. Disliking a fictional character doesn’t prove that you secretly think the character is real.

  2. 2

    Re Smashwords and the person who asked if the book would be available in epub: I publish with Smashwords and they provide (I think) eight different formats, including epub.
    You’re doing great!

  3. 3

    Got to the end of the first chapter. I know it would have been a lot of extra work, but it would have been so satisfying if it had been subtitled “666 things that piss off the godless”.

  4. 5

    Smashwords ought to provide EPUB (they seem to do EPUB, MOBI (Kindle), PDF, RTF and HTML).

    If you go the iBook route, pay very good attention to the contract terms, there were some rather odd provisions in the original terms.

  5. 6

    If the book was successful so quickly without very much publicity it is a safe bet that your excellent choice of cover had something to do with it. Just like I predicted in the “ugliest atheist” comment section.

    Sensemaker

  6. 8

    If God makes you a PB&J, won’t someone eat you?

    I’m glad you wrote this. Now I just need the paper version so when someone asks why I’m so angry I can throw the answer at them.

  7. 10

    I hate to be picky, but here’s a need for a possible correction.

    “The idea that religion operates in a different realm from the everyday world, and it’s unfair to hold it to normal standards of evidence.”

    The above is on my kindle at location 889 of 2744.

    Incomplete sentence or something…

  8. 12

    @Rob:
    It would take another 99 reasons to explain that one.

    Thanks for being so awesome, Greta. And for making me laugh in your FAQ. Voldemort…lol

  9. 13

    I’m nitpicking, but “god” isn’t really a proper noun, it’s just an ordinary noun. A lot of cultures have probably called their god “God”, thinking theirs is special, but for those of us wanting to talk about the concepts of gods in general we have to differentiate between them. So I think it’s confusing to talk about “God”. Jehovah, Yahweh, Allah, Shiva, Odin, Jupiter, Zeus, FSM, The Great Green Arkleseizure, etc… all make sense. “God” does not. It would be like calling “Voldemort” “villain” – sorry, “Villain”.

    I don’t capitalise “god” because I don’t capitalise “villain”. If I am discussing a specific god, I try to use its name to make the point that it is only one of thousands which have been hypothesised over many centuries and cultures.

  10. 14

    When the book goes on Smashwords, they will submit it to their Premium Catalog, which includes the iBookstore, so iPad users should be able to buy it shortly after it goes live on Smashwords.

  11. 15

    Awesome book! Finished the first 2 chapters, I really love how you’ve now “spread the love” a bit more evenly across multiple religions/faiths/countries.

    Hope this is helpful to you and doesn’t seem nitpicky, but where/how should we submit errors/corrections?

    Chapter 1, rant #75, kindle location 442, duplicate word in the link at the end of the paragraph: “… dozens of people people were killed.”

  12. 17

    “I don’t capitalise “god” because I don’t capitalise “villain”. If I am discussing a specific god, I try to use its name to make the point that it is only one of thousands which have been hypothesised over many centuries and cultures.”

    I feel the same way, so I usually use lower case. It’s a symptom of the contempt I feel.

    I’m starting Chapter 2 now. I’d be farther along but time is limited right now. Love it. You;’re a master of the written and spoken word.

  13. 18

    For those wondering about Epub, Barnes and Noble uses Epub. Since the DRM is turned off you should just be able to buy it from them, track down the file and load it into whatever app you want. If the smashwords version isn’t out by the time my wife or I finish our current books, that’s probably what I’ll do.

    Somebody else mentioned Smashwords’ premium catalog upthread. That should also get the book into Kobo for those people who were asking about it earlier.

  14. 21

    Greta, you made DaughterSpawn’s day. Thanks.

    The picture of you is just what every teen girl needs as a good role model. Also, it creates interesting questions from various Catholic and Mormon kids who visit our dissolute homeschooler home.

  15. 22

    I have been wanting a book just like this. So I went a bought it just now (but will have to charge up the tablet to read it).

    I will be posting a review of it on Amazon and my own atheism blog (which is new by the way!) If it is like your writing here I am fully expecting to enjoy it.

    Will you be doing an audiobook version anytime soon?

  16. 23

    One more question that I didn’t see addressed above:

    How do you autograph an eBook?

    A long long time ago, I got Jack Mingo to autograph his book via the Internet: I asked for, and received, permission to print out his Usenet .signature onto paper, and place it in my dead-tree version of his book.

    With eBooks, I’m not sure. You could digitally sign an image of your signature. Though perhaps the coolest way to do it would be: I send you something that proves that I have a legitimate copy of the book (details to be worked out later), and you send me back another copy of the eBook, which includes “to arensb” or something on the title page.

  17. 24

    @19: But that god already has a proper name, transliterated into English from Ancient Hebrew (with some guessing on the vowels, informed by a comprehensive linguistic analysis of other transliterations into languages contemporary to Ancient Hebrew that did mark vowels for the Tetragrammaton) as Yahweh, or from the Greek transliteration as Jehovah/Yehovah. We’re trying to strip exactly the linguistic privilege you’re talking about from Yahweh; no one’s claiming that people DON’T impart linguistic privilege on a/some particular god/s, we’re arguing that we shouldn’t reinforce the practice.

  18. 26

    Can I ask what I hope is not a rude question, but I fear it is? Why is it $7.99 on Kindle, the same price as a physical paperback book? I have a hard time imagining that the cost of publishing an ebook is the same as publishing a physical book. It’s not just your book; every time I check ebook prices, I see the same pattern of ebook prices being close to or the same as physical paperbacks. This is a big reason I’ve so far refused to purchase any ebooks.

    It occurs to me that you’re self-publishing, and maybe that changes the equation in your case.

  19. 29

    Greta, One more question: Will you do the audiobook or will someone else read it? I think it’d be kinda awesome if you were to do it.

  20. 32

    I have no argument with the $7.99 price. If it means more royalties to the author, so much the better as far as I’m concerned. I’ve written a book and offer it free on a website. I know firsthand how much work is involved. Wish this kindle and nook thing had been going originally and that I had had a blog presence back then to promote it.

    In the end, what’s important is that I got my message out to whoever might be interested. If you resent such a nominal amount for a book that is well worth it, I think a little rethinking might be in order.

  21. 33

    Hope this is helpful to you and doesn’t seem nitpicky, but where/how should we submit errors/corrections?

    Chapter 1, rant #75, kindle location 442, duplicate word in the link at the end of the paragraph: “… dozens of people people were killed.”

    That wasn’t an error. That was to distinguish “people people” from “sorta-kinda people.” You know, like the folks forbidden from marrying each other because some invisible daddy figure doesn’t like them. Or minorities. Or liberals. Or anybody else who doesn’t fit into a narrow worldview.

  22. 34

    “God, if you’re there, could you make me a PB&J?

    Probably not.”

    Aw, I really wanted to be a sandwich.

    The only thing that bugs me so far about the book is that the font of the questions in Chapter 2 is really blurry. I don’t know if you can retroactively fix it for people who have already purchased the Kindle version (dunno if it extends to the other versions), or even if you *could* upload a version with a cleaner font for the questions.

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