Tag: books

The Revised Schedule

The results of the subscribers’ poll, in which nearly one-third of the Library subscribers made their opinions known, are now available on the Castalia Library substack. The new schedules have also been announced. A brief summary:

  • Library goes to 4 books per year. Price unchanged.
  • Libraria goes to 4 books per year. Price reduced.
  • History goes to 3 books per year. Prices unchanged.
  • Cathedra stays at 2 books per year. Price unchanged.
  • Refunds provided to all Library, History, and Libraria subscribers upon request. Details at the substack.

The entire team is in agreement that this plan is the best we are able to do in the circumstances. It might be worth noting that this was a community effort, as it was a subscriber who came up with the plan in the first place.

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Express Yourself

After some discussion, analysis, and research, we believe we’ve come up with a plan to address the panoply of rising costs of producing the world’s most beautiful books in a painless manner.

If you’re a Castalia subscriber, please read it, take part in the poll, and let us know what you think in the comments there. Please note that nothing has been decided yet, we’re just trying to come up with a plan that will work for everyone and maintain future viability without imposing unnecessary expenses on anyone.

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Castalia and the Cost of Tariffs

So President Trump has imposed a 39 percent tariff on Switzerland. This has a direct impact on all the Castalia Library books now being produced in Switzerland, beginning with the Byzantine histories and Dracula. Now, the tariff is imposed on the declared value, not the retail price, so it’s not quite as bad as it looks, but it is a bit of a problem going forward since the discounts provided to subscribers for paying in advance don’t account for this additional expense to the 12 or so books now in production.

Now, even if we jacked up the subscription prices by 40 percent, our books would be a much-better value than Easton Press books, which go for $168. However, we know things are tight, and we don’t want to price our books out of the reach of subscribers who can’t afford a price increase right now.

So what we’re contemplating doing is to add a T-version of our base subscriptions to Library and History, similar to the Euro version of History, that will allow those subscribers who can a) afford the additional tariff cost and b) want to support the bindery. Libraria and Cathedra prices have a sufficient cushion to absorb the additional expense; we priced Cathedra with the expectation that there would be a tariff, although we were hoping for something in the 10-15 percent range. That would mean increasing the monthly subscription price from $50 to $75 for Library.

Another option, indeed, one that we’d originally contemplated from the start, is going back to producing all the US books in the USA, while producing the higher-quality books from the Bindery for Europe and the rest of the world. This would complicate our production runs, but since we could still produce all the interior book blocks from the same tariff-neutral location, would be entirely viable from a manufacturing standpoint. The primary downside is that we would have to establish another shipping operation instead of being able to rely solely on the US one.

Speaking of US production, THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON has passed the stamp test and will be getting bound and shipped to the warehouse very soon.

Anyhow, if you’re a Library, History, or Cathedra subscriber, please feel free to share your thoughts on how you think we should address the situation.

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Last Call for Coffee

One of the elite rewards of the Hypergamouse campaign was the Coffee Table Book, which is a large horizontal edition with only two panels per page, thereby spreading out each episode to two pages and permitting larger panels and higher resolution art. This backer’s edition is now available at NDM Express as well as at the Arkhaven store and features the first 100 episodes of the popular comic as well as the nine episodes of the original black-and-white comic drawn by the original illustrator. NDM Express is recommended if you have credit card issues at Arkhaven.

There are more details at Sigma Game if you’re interested, including a picture of a test binding of the Hypergamouse leather edition in the new burgundy pigskin. But today is the last day to obtain a copy of this special edition with a very limited print run of less than 150.

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Point of Order

If you are a business, and you do basically the same thing in a variety of ways, DO NOT PRETEND THAT YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE PRICE IS.

We make books. I can, and will, tell you what it costs to make a book. Now, obviously the specific price will vary depending upon whether you want to make one small paperback that will spontaneously combust within 15 years or a giant tome bound in albino orca leather and stamped with pure platinum, but the average price for a basic book is what it is.

For some reason, more and more businesses seem to get off on absolutely refusing to tell you anything at all about the price of their goods and services. Which in addition to being infuriating, and a waste of time, is counterproductive, because the first thing I do when I can’t get a price estimate is to go somewhere else where I can.

Is this an instinctive response to Amazon price-shoppers? Or are they simply attempting to delay the moment of truth when the potential customer decides if the acquisition is worth it or not? I don’t know and I don’t care.

Speaking of making books, I’m very pleased to say Castalia House is making a new book. Publishing it would probably be the more apt term, as I just finished the initial edit of a new Chuck Dixon novel. And it is really good, in fact, it’s even better than those Conan novels that, in a very real, official, and legal sense, never existed except as figments of your very vivid imaginations.

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Custom Books

Castalia Bindery will be offering a new service soon to fill in the inevitable downtime in between book runs.

While we are extremely busy working on catching up to our backlog now that the bindery is fully operational, it is clear that there are going to be occasional days when we’re waiting for book blocks or leather to show up due to the vagaries of international shipment. So, we’re planning to take a page from some of the better old binderies out there and utilize that time turning nice old first edition and special edition hardcovers into custom leatherbound books.

Read more about it at the Castalia Library stack. If you’ve got an old first edition or a particular set in mind, get in touch. We’re not going to have time to do a lot of these, and they’ll have to fit in around the production runs, so first come, first served.

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Coffee Table Book

One of the elite rewards of the Hypergamouse campaign was the Coffee Table Book, which is a large horizontal edition with only two panels per page, thereby spreading out each episode to two pages and permitting larger panels and higher resolution art. This backer’s edition is now available at the Arkhaven store and at NDM Express. NDM Express is recommended if you have credit card issues at Arkhaven. We’re doing this for the benefit of those who missed the campaign for one week only and features the first 100 episodes of the Arkhaven comic as well as the nine episodes of the original black-and-white comic drawn by the original illustrator.

Each episode features large panels and stretches across two pages, which is why although the coffee table book is 222 pages, the content is exactly the same as the 115-page hardcovers and paperbacks that have already shipped out to all of the backers, including the essays by Vox and Lacey. It also has the special gold Arkhaven logo that is reserved for first editions. You can see more pictures, including the cover, at Sigma Game.

The price of the book is $169, which includes shipping. It’s a uniquely collectible and historical book. Unfortunately, the window of opportunity to buy a copy is just six more days, since the print run is going to be small, limited, and ordered very soon.

As for the leather edition, as you can see, we are making progress. And as will only be clear to the most discerning eyes, we will also be introducing our new pigskin leather with it.

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Saint Henry’s Day

Discover the life of Saint Henry II of the Holy Roman Empire, a pious and just ruler who lived a saintly life. He fought battles, built cathedrals, supported reforms in the church and monasteries and loved God above everything else including worldly power and riches.

This book came about because I was looking for children’s books about the patron saints of my godchild and some other little ones who are dear to me. When I couldn’t find anything, I decided to write one myself. This book would make a great Baptism, Confirmation, Christmas or birthday present for a little Henry in your life. 

Our own Alisabetta, Princess of the Blood, has penned an illustrated story for Christian boys about Saint Henry, who, by a fortunate coincidence, is celebrated today. She’s crowdfunding it on Fund My Comic; the picture book is available in English, French, and Italian.

Saint Henry, also known as Henry II, was the Holy Roman Emperor from 1014 until his death in 1024. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church for his piety and support of the Church, and he was canonized in 1146.

In other crowdfunding news, you can still back John C. Wright’s campaign for the covers of his STARFIGHTER novels.

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Correction

The LA Review of Books simply doesn’t know how to read and doesn’t know what it is talking about.

The Far Right believes that the future belongs to them. In much reactionary discourse, only white men have any meaningful ability to imagine the future. According to this worldview, white people possess a racially unique capacity for speculation, including rational planning, counterfactual imagination, and inspired innovation. At the same time, the Far Right claims that only white men have the discipline, intelligence, and foresight to realize this future. This ideology holds that whiteness is a potential for greatness, including the inborn ability to build a high-tech society. In other words, whiteness is speculative to the alt-right: it possesses a promissory value far in excess of any white men’s actual achievements. Some fascist thinkers have gone so far as to suggest that science fiction is an inherently white genre. For example, Theodore Beale (a.k.a. Vox Day), the leader of the Rabid Puppies fan group, claimed that increased racial diversity would ruin the genre because, in his view, people of color could not possibly understand the achievements of white science fiction authors. Despite the widespread success of speculative authors of color in recent decades, there are fascists who hold that nonwhite people are genetically incapable of imagining and inhabiting science-fictional futures.

  1. The future does belong to the so-called “Far Right”. The Left and the Center-Right subscribe to observably and objectively false beliefs, don’t have enough children to replace themselves, don’t have any lasting principles, and can’t even tell the difference between a man and a woman anymore. Their ideas and philosophies are not only bankrupt, they are literally dying out.
  2. The entire history of the world clearly demonstrates that only European people create and maintain European-style societies and civilizations. Any Post-European North American societies will bear as little resemblance to America as America did to the pre-European native tribal societies. This really isn’t that hard. That being said, the future is actually much more likely to be dominated by a Chinese “Far Right” than a white one given the military, industrial, and technological trends, mostly because China is not infected with either Enlightenment values or a satanic elite. The dirt is not, and has never been, magic.
  3. Science fiction is, and has always been, an inherently white male genre. There were virtually no female authors who qualified to join SFWA until the bylaws were changed to permit fantasy authors to join it. Diversity and inclusion have devastated the science fiction world, to the point that none of the current nominees for the various science fiction awards even qualifies as science fiction of any kind. There is nothing wrong with the fantasy romances that female authors prefer to write, but they aren’t science fiction even if Tor or some other former SF publisher attempts to market them as such.
  4. I claimed that increased racial diversity would ruin the genre and I have been proven absolutely correct. There is no objective metric by which it can be claimed that diversity and inclusion have improved it in any way. Fewer readers, lower average advances, fewer book sales, fewer authors published by publishers, fewer bestsellers, and so forth. Diversity and inclusion are not the only cause of the decline, but they have observably contributed to it.
  5. It is not my view that people of color could not possibly understand the achievements of white science fiction authors. Whether people of color can understand those achievements or not is irrelevant, the point is that they are not interested in replicating them. It is, however, my observation that N.K. Jemisin, the affirmative-action author donated multiple Hugo awards for Best Science Fiction novel for her remarkable feat of writing while black and female, declared “Speculative fiction is at its core syncretic; this stuff doesn’t come out of nowhere. And it certainly didn’t spring solely from the imaginations of a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys in the 1950s.” Perhaps, but science fiction definitely isn’t springing from the non-white, non-male, diverse authors of the 2020s because they prefer writing non-science fiction works. Are we seriously supposed to pretend this wasn’t obvious from the start?
  6. Also, I’m not a fascist. If I were, I very much doubt I would be a welcome guest on CGTN. I’m not a communist either, but one could at least produce a modicum of evidence for that.
  7. What widespread success? If all of these award-winning authors of color are so successful, why are they constantly crying about their lack of book sales on social media?

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Shots Fired! Shots Fired!

Much like the way the air grows still and the sky takes on a greenish tinge, one can almost feel the inevitable Facebook rant coming.

With Larry Correia announcing he would be launching a Kickstarter for his new Ark Press venture, a Baen Books insider reached out to Fandom Pulse to vent how similar the series seemed to their hit with him, Monster Hunter International. With Correia taking his own successful work and doing a spin on it for Ark Press, one has to wonder with AI writing becoming as good as it is, who can do MHI better: AI, or Larry Correia himself?

Artificial Intelligence has become increasingly good at writing with giant leaps up in the technological prowess over the last year, especially with the help of Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus 4.0 delivering prose levels many never thought possible.

Vox Day has been experimenting with AI to no small degree, making full albums out of music on Suno and testing the capabilities on short stories ranging from styles of Neil Gaiman, to John Scalzi, and even Larry Correia, pioneering the future in AI art.

Meanwhile, in traditional publishing, it appears as if Baen Books is in massive trouble as Correia sees the proverbial writing on the wall and has taken moves to diversify out of his long-time publisher and now announced he’s going to be kickstarting a series, American Paladin, that sounds very similar to Monster Hunter International, his long-time gun urban fantasy series that’s been a hit with Baen over the years.

Ark Press, his new publisher which is owned by mega-billionaire Peter Thiel, seemed to want an MHI-style story out of Correia to launch the press, and they’ve advertised its similarities as well.

Since Correia is taking his hit series and giving a new take on it, the question is, can AI build a better modern iteration of MHI than Larry Correia himself can given its new found prowess?

Vox Day has already been working on this with a serialized novel called Monster Control Inc. In this, he’s trained AI to write in Larry Correia’s style to provide a signature version that reads enough like Correia that if you didn’t know it was written by AI, you might think it’s Correia’s novels.

Just to be clear, Monster Control Incorporated utilizes a judicious blend of literary seasonings, one of which is Larry Correia’s. But because the objective was to utilize a Gamma protagonist, and since Larry is the most Delta author who ever wrote a Delta self-insert since Louis Lamour laid down his prolific pen, it was necessary to bring in other elements in order to capture that inimitable Gamma snark, passive-aggressiveness, and relentless obsession with unattainable women.

I also didn’t think that Larry’s signature gun porn was desirable in this case, although I certainly did utilize that in my non-AI Quantum Mortis novel, A Man Disrupted, and to such an extent that more than one review even asserted that I had outcorreia’d Correia himself, although I think that was not actually true and was merely an overenthusiastic response to my incorporation of orbital artillery into a police procedural.

It will be an interesting test, though. Can one of the leading critics of textual AI write a better pastiche of his own style than an AI can? Read Monster Control Incorporated and find out!

I’ve been walking my crush home since last week to protect her from all the creeps walking around. Next week I’m going to introduce myself to her.

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