SN wondered when SJWs will stop trying to dismiss Castalia House:
How many No. 1s do you think Castalia will have to publish before the rabbits stop referring to it as “an obscure Finnish publisher”?
Well, we know the answer is “fiver”, since we’ve already published more than five #1 category bestsellers and rabbits can’t count past that. I’d have to look it up, but I believe we’re approaching ten by now. We happen to have three at the moment, and only narrowly missed having four at a time, as 4GW Handbook was #1 in Military Strategy last week, but has fallen to #10 now.
In case you’re wondering, as I did, how Grow or Die and Compost Everything could both be #1 in Gardening & Horticulture, the answer is that whereas Grow or Die is #1 in Gardening & Horticulture, Compost Everything is #3 in that category, but #1 in the Gardening & Horticulture > Gardening Techniques category. So apparently it gets its own little orange ribbon too. Which is nice.
Anyhow, it really doesn’t matter what the rabbits say, think, or do. The fact is that we’ve barely gotten started. We just put out our first press release last week, our new Editor-at-large is just gearing up to get rolling, we will have a new announcement to make in the near future concerning audiobooks, and the retail channel that is the primary reason Castalia even exists is very close to launch at last.
We haven’t made any noise in the science fiction and fantasy categories yet, but we will. We fully expect to become the leading publisher there in time, but we’re not in any particular hurry to get there. Our focus is excellence, and everything we do is with the aim to improve upon what we’ve done before. We have great authors, authors such as John C. Wright, Martin van Creveld, William S. Lind, and Jerry Pournelle, and we have some younger authors that we are in the process of developing, but our depth is still somewhat thinner than we would like. But we will not sign up new authors simply for the sake of putting out more books. Our goal is for me to represent the low bar for Castalia House.
We know we have the best support any small publisher could hope for, and we are intent on proving worth of your trust. We aren’t going to publish any stinkers because we have to get X number of books out per quarter, and while we may make the occasional esoteric call from time to time, we have the luxury of simply refusing to release substandard works.