Runners up: Concrete Planet by Robert Courland What If? by Randall Munroe GPS Declassified by Richard D. Easton and Eric F. Frazier Rocket Ranch by Jonathan H. Ward
It has been very gratifying to see how well SJWAL has been received across the political spectrum. SJWs are not merely dangerous to those of us on the Alt-Right, they are a very real problem for conservatives and liberals and those who are entirely apolitical as well.
In other news, Castalia House’s new Audio Editor is on a roll. The audiobook for Cuckservative is now available on Audible for $19.95. I believe it is also available to Audible members for free in some capacity, although I’m not familiar with the system.
Written by: Vox Day, John Red Eagle Narrated by: Thomas Landon Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
The audiobook for A History of Strategy by Martin van Creveld is also complete and will be available soon.
It’s probably a good thing John Scalzi is looking to find some new publishing outlets, because Tor Books obviously isn’t of the opinion that they got their money’s worth with his most recent submission:
So, here’s the Very Important News about my 2016 novel release:
Currently, there isn’t one. Not a new one, anyway.
Which isn’t to say I’m not writing a novel in 2016. In fact, I’m writing two(!). Merely that Tor has decided to wait until 2017 to release the next new one.
Why the wait? Among other things, because Tor just dropped a ton of money on me so we want to make sure we debut this next novel, the first in the new contract, just right. I’m on board with this plan — note the “we” in that last sentence — since (again, among other things) I actually want to try to earn out the silly large chunks of money Tor has dropped on me. I also don’t mind the extra time it gives me to write/tweak the novels I’m currently working on.
I’ll admit it. I laughed. I fully expected Scalzi to crack under the pressure, but not this quickly. It’s one thing to talk about writing a really good book that will sell 100k+ copies, but it’s another thing to deliver on it the big talk.
Now, those who don’t know much about the business of publishing may not understand how serious this little delay is. You see, each quarter, a mainstream publisher has certain books upon which it is relying in order to make its numbers. This is particularly important now, in a market that is characterized by declining sales; all the Big Five have seen their sales shrink as a result of bookstores closing and competition from independent publishers and self-published authors on Amazon.
Now, Tor had never previously depended on Scalzi; as recently as 2012 its bestsellers were Orson Scott Card and Karen Traviss’s HALO novels. But they lost HALO and Robert Jordan isn’t writing any more books, which is why they badly need Scalzi to step up to the next level. Hence the big contract and the aggressive book tours, which are essentially PNH throwing a Hail Mary in an attempt to save his job.
The recent announcement means that Scalzi hasn’t been able to do it and his new novel didn’t meet requirements. He turned it in, and after reading it, the editors at Tor know that it won’t sell enough to meet their needs. So, they’ve pushed it back one year in the hopes that Scalzi can tweak it enough to turn it into something that will justify their investment in him.
But it’s not going to work any better than signing a WR3 to be a WR1 does. More time won’t change the core problem, which is that Scalzi is a stunt writer. He relies heavily on flash to disguise the fact that he’s not a good storyteller, he has no original ideas, and he’s merely a competent wordsmith. There is nothing wrong with that, and he could have had a perfectly satisfying career as the midlist writer that he is – as an editor, I concluded some time ago that writing snarky dialogue for short TV episodes was probably his ideal medium – but he is not the sort of bestselling writer on whom you would ever want to bet the company.
(For what it’s worth, I’m not either. Very, very few writers are. There is no shame in not being a King, a Heinlein, or a Rowling, and even those writers can seldom deliver on that scale for more than a decade.)
But, as we know, SJWs always double down. Tom Doherty or the Macmillan executives should have fired PNH when he gave them the chance last year, because he is going to cost them heavily due to his decision to ride or die with his pyrite boy. It’s far too soon to say this is definitely the case, but the smart money would bet on PNH’s Hail Mary pass falling incomplete. Sooner or later, one has to stop spinning and massaging the Narrative and actually deliver real-world results.
It should be interesting to see what the favorite story in There Will Be War Vol. X is around these parts; as with Steve Rzasa’s “Turncoat” in Riding the Red Horse Vol. I, I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about a contribution by one of the junior authors.
And if you haven’t gotten There Will Be War Vol. X, what on Earth are you waiting for? It’s every bit as good as the reviews are saying.
I own all of the original There Will Be War series from when I bought them new. They were all excellent. This follow-on, after a long series hiatus, is every bit as good. New names, old names, great stories, and thought-provoking essays.
Volume 10, the latest There Will Be War, is worthy to stand with the best of that series. Mil-sf doesn’t get better than this.
This volume represents a long overdue return to the series, and is as timely and pertinent today as the originals were in the 80’s.
Since Military SF’s value is to provide a means to understand future threats and solutions, this volume is a treasure.
I personally don’t think any of the fiction quite rises to the level of “Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg or “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen” by William F. Wu, both of which appear in There Will Be War Vol. II, but I would argue that the non-fiction is actually better. Still, even if Volume X is only the second-best in the series, that is a remarkable accomplishment after a 25-year hiatus.
SJWs are intent on devouring George RR Martin next, although that will certainly take some doing. Because he’s fat. It’s funny because he’s fat.
Season six of Game of Thrones will change its approach to depictions of sexual violence, according to director Jeremy Podeswa.
The show has become infamous for its harrowing depictions of rape, but complaints over the violent scenes in the fantasy series has led creators David Benioff and DB Weiss to reconsider how the subject is portrayed.
Podeswa, who has directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and is expected to helm more in season six, was speaking at an event in Fox Studios Australia. He said the creators “were responsive to the discussion and there were a couple of things that changed as a result.
Imagine if they actually read the books… they’d throw him off a building, then stone him.
After a 25-year hiatus, Jerry Pournelle and Castalia House are pleased to announce that the famous military science fiction anthology series, There Will Be War, has been revived with There Will Be War Volume X. This has been a long time in the making, with more than a few challenges and detours along the way, but as a fan of the series from the 1980s, I am absolutely delighted to see it come alive again, although I regret the fact that there is, once more, a genuine need for it in light of current world events.
In many ways, the first nine volumes of There Will Be War have proved to be a chronicle of the Cold War; reading those earlier volumes published in the ’80s is a literal education in both the events and the psychologies of that time. We will be fortunate indeed if the challenges described in There Will Be War Volume X, in both fiction and non-fiction terms, prove to be similarly ephemeral, and disappear from history as speedily and as bloodlessly. Unfortunately, some of the contributors to the new volume would appear to be less than entirely optimistic in that regard.
There Will Be War Volume X is 401 pages, DRM-free, and retails for $4.99 on Amazon. The editor, who arguably did his finest job in selecting stories and essays since Volume II, shared some thoughts on the revival of his classic series at Chaos Manor today. Highlights:
There Will Be War Volume X will be on Amazon Monday. We will see where it goes from there. There is already a campaign to boycott the book on the grounds that the publisher is a scoundrel. This is apparently something to do with fan politics and awards. I can only say that it has been a pleasant experience to work with them. I have all the editorial decisions, of course, including story choices…. I find them very competent and helpful.
We also have some good stuff from new authors, who apparently prefer to be in this book rather than in the traditional magazines; I’m a bit flattered. Anyway it’s done. If you like war stories you will like this book
Note to New Release subscribers: if you don’t have an email in your inbox tomorrow and you’ve been having trouble receiving the emails despite being sure that you’re a subscriber, get in touch and I’ll send you the link to the bonus books. You won’t want to miss them!
And one more thing: fans of the series will no doubt be glad to hear that the hardcover omnibus of Vols I and II is very nearly done and will be published in January.
UPDATE: Mr. Pournelle notes that one of the contributors, CDR Phillip Pournelle, USN, was just awarded the Surface Navy Association Literary Award for “The Deadly Future of Littoral Sea Control”, which is one of the non-fiction pieces that appears in Volume X.
You may have thought that Castalia House was done for 2015 following the release of its most recent Political Philosophy bestseller earlier this week, but nothing could be further from the truth. Not only are we hard at work getting several audiobooks out before the end of the year, but we are less than two weeks away from reviving a series that has lain dormant for 26 years since the end of the Cold War.
That’s right, for the first time in nearly three decades, Jerry Pournelle’s legendary There Will Be War anthology series of military science fiction and military fact, which served as the inspiration for Castalia’s Riding the Red Horse series, is back! Dr. Pournelle has been hard at work putting together a collection of the best of the new breed mil-SF writers with the best of the old guard, and the result is one of the most formidable collections of talent since the second in the series, the epic There Will Be War Volume II, which featured Poul Anderson’s “Time Lag”, Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus”, William F. Wu’s “In the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen”, and Eric Vinicoff’s “‘Caster”.
Only time will tell if Volume X will prove to be similarly memorable, but the lineup of contributors would be hard to beat. In addition to an introduction by Jerry Pournelle, the new volume features:
Gregory Benford
Charles W. Shao
William S. Lind and LtCol Gregory A. Thiele, USMC
Ben Bova
Allen M. Steele
Michael Flynn
Martin van Creveld
Matthew Joseph Harrington
Cheah Kai Wai
Col Douglas Beason, USAF, ret.
John DeChancie
CDR Phillip E. Pournelle, USN
Russell Newquist
Brian Noggle
David VanDyke
Lt Col Guy R. Hooper, USAF, ret. and Michael L. McDaniel
Poul Anderson
Larry Niven
The much-ballyhooed End of History and the permanent triumph of democratic liberalism has proven to be a mirage. As Dr. Pournelle has repeatedly warned us, There Will Be War.
If you still haven’t signed up for the New Release mailing list, you’re definitely going to want to do so for this one, as the bonus book offer is even better than the one we offered earlier this week. The book will initially be out in ebook, in audiobook early next year, then in a hardcover omnibus edition with Volume IX sometime in Spring 2016.
We are happy to announce that David the Good has followed up his #1 bestselling gardening book, Compost Everything, with the second book in the Good Guide series from Castalia House.
Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening is different than most books for preppers and other survivalists, because it’s not concerned with surviving the first few months of a post-apocalypse, but the next few years. It contains a wealth of data on what sort of things you will need to provide food for your family, instructions on how to use them, and a small encyclopedia of vegetables with instructions on how to grow them as well as a summary of their characteristics… although if you’re a fan of zucchini, it appears you will be out of luck should the world go the way of Fallout 4. There will be no zucchini in the post-apocalypse.
The good news is that between this book and the aforementioned game, you will surely be able to put yourself in the “survival mindset” that our military experts informed us is so vital at the Brainstorm event this weekend. The book is written in the same easy, amusing style as its predecessor, and even those who have no interest in gardening and believe Paul Krugman’s assertion that the federal government will be able to avert all ills by further inflating the currency will find it both informative and enjoyable.
The book has apparently struck a nerve of some sort, as even prior to this announcement, it had already hit #1 bestseller in Gardening, marking Castalia House’s third straight #1 category bestseller.
So, congratulations to David the Good for his second category bestseller; with three of the top 30 books, he practically owns the Gardening & Horticulture Vegetables category. I’d also like to thank Brian Niemeier, who graciously offered his science fiction novel, Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1), as a bonus offer to the Castalia New Release subscribers who bought Grow or Die. Have a look at it, particularly if you’re a John C. Wright fan.
As always, we are absolutely fine with whatever retail option you happen to prefer. Whether you buy Castalia books from Amazon, from the CH store, or get them “free” via Kindle Unlimited, we are just happy that you have decided to support Castalia House and we hope you find our books to be good values.
Yesterday Mike Cernovich announced that he would be publishing his next book, Last Man Standing, with Castalia House. He also announced that he had accepted a position as Editor-at-Large with Castalia House. What he did not mention, at my request, is that he is also working with Castalia House on a third project. I asked him not to mention it because I wanted to tell you myself.
As dark lords go, I am, as most of you know, unusually civil. Having asked one of my GGinParis co-hosts to write a foreword for one of my books, I thought it would be a grievous breach of etiquette to fail to request the same of the other. So, I am pleased to announce that the aforementioned Editor-at-Large has already written the foreword for my next book, which I have written with a fellow American Indian (albeit one from a different tribe). It is expected to be released before the end of year. It is a hard-hitting book in the vein of SJWAL, but addresses an even more important and controversial subject: the politics of American immigration.
The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America contains an extremely important phrase that is almost always ignored by those who appeal to it, or to the men who wrote it, in defense of immigration. It states: We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. The key phrase is this: “to ourselves and our posterity.” The blessings of liberty are not to be secured to all the nations of the world, to the tired and huddled masses, or to the wretched refuse of the teeming shores of other lands. They are to be secured to our children, and their children, and their children’s children. To sacrifice their interests to the interests of children in other lands is to betray both past and future America. It is to permit an alien posterity, like the newly hatched cuckoo in another bird’s nest, to eliminate our own, and in doing so, defeat the purpose of the Constitution. It is, like the cuckolded husband, to raise the children of another man instead of one’s sons and daughters. It is, in a word, cuckservative.
Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America will be published in December by Castalia House.
The New York Times missed the real story when it wrote about a nonexistent decline in ebook sales. Unsurprisingly, Fortune manages to do rather better in observing that the decline is limited to the traditional publishers, who are losing out to their smaller rivals:
A recent piece in the New York Times about a decline in e-book sales had more than a whiff of anti-digital Schadenfreude about it. The story, which was based on sales figures from the Association of American Publishers, implied that much of the hype around e-books had evaporated — with sales falling by 10% in the first half of this year — while good old printed books were doing better than everyone expected.
This was celebrated by many as evidence that e-books aren’t all they are cracked up to be, and that consumers are swinging back to printed books. But is that an accurate reflection of what’s actually taking place in the book-publishing or book-buying market? Not really, as it turns out.
When I first saw the story, I thought it raised two important questions, neither of which was really answered conclusively in the piece (although the second was hinted at). Namely: 1) Are e-book sales as a whole dropping, or just the sales of the publishers who are members of the AAP? And 2) Isn’t a drop in sales just a natural outcome of the publishers’ move to keep e-book prices high?
Data from the site Author Earnings, which tracks a broad spectrum of information related to digital publishing, suggests that both of those things are true. In other words, a decline in market share on the part of established publishers is being taken as evidence of a drop in e-book sales overall, and at least some of the falloff in market share that publishers have seen is likely the result of high e-book prices.
What’s really happening is that overall sales are remaining close to flat, but the mainstream publishers are rapidly losing out to small and independent publishers. I jazzed up Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings report to make it more obvious what has been happening over the last 15 months, which just happens to coincide with the birth of Castalia House.
In other words, the share of ebook sales that belong to the major publishers have plunged from 39 percent down 26 percent due to the rise in ebooks published by Independents and Amazon itself. This is due to several factors, ranging from increasingly mediocre authors being signed by the editorial staffs to foolish pricing decisions by the business people.
I suspect the decline in the self-published category was initially due to Amazon skimming off the best of them, followed by the change in Kindle Unlimited rules that deter the publication of very short ebooks. The KU change probably also explains why Indie growth has leveled off since May.
To put it into more personal terms, and to explain why Tor will continue to have John Scalzi running himself ragged on non-stop book tours until his contract is eventually canceled prior to its completion, consider the following comparison between several recently published books. All the numbers were current as of 6:30 AM EST.
END OF ALL THINGS 190 reviews Publisher: Tor (August 13, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #342,147 Paid in Kindle Store
Paperback Publisher: Tor Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #218,704 in Books
Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Tor Books; 1st Ed edition (August 11, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,935 in Books
LOCK IN 497 reviews Publisher: Tor Books (August 26, 2014) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,214 Paid in Kindle Store
Mass Market Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Tor Science Fiction (August 4, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,372 in Books
Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Tor Books; 1 edition (August 26, 2014) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,079 in Books
SJWS ALWAYS LIE 301 reviews Publisher: Castalia House (August 25, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,359 Paid in Kindle Store
Paperback: 236 pages Publisher: Castalia House Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,250 in Books
GORILLA MINDSET 181 reviews Publication Date: June 27, 2015 Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,674 Paid in Kindle Store
Paperback: 212 pages Publisher: CreateSpace (June 28, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,792 in Books
This is interesting because what it tells us is that the only people interested in reading Scalzi’s latest are his longtime fans who are completing the series. They’re buying the hardcover to round out their collections, but the casual readers aren’t even bothering to read it. Lock In, on the other hand has shown more appeal to casual readers, but it’s not particularly popular, especially for one of Tor’s top authors. Scalzi is far from a failure; he’s #54 in Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction by virtue of all his books selling reasonably well. I am merely #329.
But then look at how well other indie authors (and RTRH contributors) such as B.V. Larson (#13 in SF), Christopher Nuttall (#25 in SF), and David van Dyke (#99 in SF) are doing without the support of the largest publisher in science fiction.
This is a serious problem for the major publishers because ebook sales are a literally less-than-zero-sum game at this point in time. Regardless, it’s not so much the direct competition that threatens to do the big publishers in as it is the new X-factor in ebook sales, which is Kindle Unlimited. Notice which two types of publishers have been doing well since the KU change: Amazon and Small to Medium Publishers.
For an explanation, consider this book, which competes directly with Scalzi’s “military science fiction”, Back From the Dead by Rolf Nelson.
Publisher: Castalia House (September 22, 2015) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,794 Paid in Kindle Store
What is astonishing about the moderate success of the Nelson book is that it has “sold” 4x more books via Kindle Unlimited than it has through conventional book sales. Keep in mind these aren’t just “paid” sales, they are books that have been downloaded and read.
KU works very well for longer, inexpensive indie books; with his book’s KNPC, Rolf makes more money from a KU read than he does from an Amazon sale at $4.99. (NB: This isn’t confidential information, it’s all right there on Amazon for those who comprehend the system.) But more importantly, most of those KU readers are not Castalia fans, they are mostly new to Rolf’s work.
(By way of testing this hypothesis, I’ve added a page to Back From the Dead letting readers know about other Castalia books available on KU. If I’m correct, this should have the result of increasing the average Kpages read for the other books listed.)
KU is Amazon’s real challenge to the mainstream publishers. It was bad enough for them competing on a level playing field with ebooks that cost one-half to one-fourth the price of their own ebooks. But how can they possibly compete with all-you-can read for $10, especially when Amazon is going out of its way to promote those books? For the price of one-third of a new Tor ebook, you can read literally dozens of KU books such as Riding the Red Horse, A Throne of Bones, On War, and Back From the Dead, many of which are objectively better than the Tor books, at least as far as the Amazon ratings and reviews are concerned. And the problem for the major publishers is only going to get worse as the KU readers discover new favorite authors, and new publishers, and begin to read their way through their non-mainstream catalogs.
Ebooks were disruptive, but KU is going to cause several of the major publishers to go out of business. The Big Five will be the Big Three inside three years.
That being said, there is observably a distinct type of KU reader. They clearly prefer lighter, faster-reading fiction fare; while SJWAL has sold 5x more copies so far this month than Back From the Dead, the latter has 3.7x more KU pages read.
Vox hosts a monthly webinar called Brainstorm. Over dinner in Barcelona he invited me to be a guest. As he’s a friend of mine, I thought it’d be fun.
I did not expect to sell hundreds of copies of books.
Yet that is exactly what happened.
Before appearing on Vox’s Brainstorm, Gorilla Mindset had been selling 35-50 copies a day. A good day on Kindle was 30 copies. (I still sell 10-20 audio and paperback books a day, respectively.)
As you can see on the chart below, Vox’s review of Gorilla Mindset in addition to the scheduled Brainstorm created quite the spike in sales. Doing the virtual book tour with Vox sold at least 100 copies, and likely 200 copies or more.
Send a screen cap of your pre-order to Shauna.Danger@gmail.com We’ll host a webinar exclusive for those who pre-order. You only have until October 30th.
Speaking of Brainstorm, the October event for Annual members will be tomorrow night. Invites will go out later today. We have a LOT to discuss, very little of which I am inclined to mention in public.
It’s fascinating to see how useful Brainstorm has become in further weaponizing the VP community. We had a very successful Wargame Task Force meeting two evenings ago, which will be of absolutely no interest to anyone to whom the words “Avalon Hill” and “GDW” mean nothing, but it allowed us to quickly and efficiently make decisions, assign responsibilities, and start making progress on our current project, the first glimpse of which can be seen later today over at Castalia House.
I have no doubt that it will be equally useful for other projects, both more and less esoteric.And for that, we all have to thank the Annual members. They are the individuals who are making this all possible.
