Tag: books

#1 Military Strategy bestseller

This is really remarkable when one considers that as many books were sold at the Castalia House store as were sold on Amazon yesterday. On behalf of both Castalia and Mr. Lind, I would like to thank you for your support of what, despite being a must-read, is but a mere prelude to an even more important book that will be published in 2015.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,111 Paid in Kindle Store

  • #1 in Books > History > Military > Strategy
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Military > Strategy
  • #12 in Books > History > Military

A few people need to be thanked for their assistance in the successful launch of On War: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009. First, LtCol Gregory A. Thiele, USMC, who helped me find some of the missing columns. Despite the book’s mammoth size, we’re still missing about five percent of the 325 that were originally written; as we discover them, we will add them to the ebook. Second, LL, who did the first draft of the e-formatting of the first draft, which I can assure you is the only reason the book made it out in 2014. She’s a fast learner and an even faster formatter. Third, Martin van Creveld, the brilliant and influential Israeli military strategist, author of two books in the 4GW canon, who graciously agreed to write the Foreword. We’re hoping to add him to the Castalia House ranks someday.

Fourth is Tesla7, who bought the book as soon as it was available, ripped through it, and sent me an errata list that allowed me to considerably clean up the text before it went up on Amazon. If you’ve ever converted PDF to text, then you’ll understand that despite whatever errata it still contains, the ebook is much cleaner than one would reasonably expect considering its size. Fifth is dh, whose idea for a New Release newsletter turned out to be more effective than I’d ever expected. We’ve now got an active subscriber list that is more than 7x bigger than I anticipated; if you want to join it, just leave a comment at the Castalia blog and check the box at the bottom marked “Add me to the New Release mailing list”. And sixth is JartStar and Ørjan, who joined forces to produce another excellent, eye-catching cover.

So, thanks again for your support of Mr. Lind and Castalia, and regardless of where you bought the book, please consider taking the time to post a review on Amazon. Newsletter subscribers, the download codes for your free books will be sent out later today. I’m rather curious to see how the breakdown of the five books turns out, as more people were interested in Sci Phi Journal #1 than I’d expected.

Pinkshirts at play

Now, recall that we’re supposed to be concerned that the mainstream media is against #GamerGate. John Scalzi was crowing to Sparklepunter that. But do they seriously think we don’t notice when the greater portion of the media establishment is simply pinkshirts doing exactly what Clark described at Popehat: “using these pink resources to promote, give good reviews to, and bestow awards on pink developers and pink games….” In this vein, consider the New York Times review of science fiction and fantasy today:

“Ancillary Justice,” the first novel in Ann Leckie’s far-future posthuman space opera series, recently became the first novel to win the “triple crown” of the genre (the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards), but not without controversy. The central question is whether the story’s structural gimmick — the protagonist’s tendency to refer to all people as “she” regardless of actual gender or even humanity — is sufficiently mind-blowing as to merit all the accolades. It isn’t a gimmick, though; it’s a coup. Rather than seriously entertain the endless, if stupid, debate on whether women have a place in stories of the future, Leckie’s book does the literary equivalent of rolling its eyes and walking out of the room. Her refusal to waste energy on stupidity forces her audience to do the same: A few pages into the first novel, the reader gives up trying to guess each character’s actual gender, and just accepts that this will be a story full of interesting women doing awesome things.

Notice that the reviewer dismisses the controversy around whether an eminently forgettable debut novel truly merits being the most highly-awarded SF/F novel of all time. As if there was every any doubt that a book written by a female pinkshirt was going to be full of women doing things. Prediction: the recently-released sequel to this vaunted SF novel ever is going to fall considerably short of expectations. Now, care to guess who wrote the review?

Why, none other than the educated, but ignorant half-savage herself, NK Jemisin! But we’re supposed to be duly impressed by the fact that the supposedly objective mainstream media praises “a story full of interesting women doing awesome things”, which I note could be used to describe practically any female-written novel from The Pillow Book to 50 Shades of Grey.

Like most pinkshirt victories, this one is hollow and bordering on pyrrhic, because the primary accomplishment is to cause the reader to realize that there is no point reading the NYT’s book reviews anymore. Assuming, of course, that one didn’t already figure that out about 20 years ago. Either way, it represents a once-formidable gatekeeper continuing its spiral downward into irrelevance.

20 years later

Charles Murray reflects on The Bell Curve:

American political and social life today is pretty much one great big “Q.E.D.” for the two main theses of “The Bell Curve.” Those theses were, first, that changes in the economy over the course of the 20th century had made brains much more valuable in the job market; second, that from the 1950s onward, colleges had become much more efficient in finding cognitive talent wherever it was and shipping that talent off to the best colleges. We then documented all the ways in which cognitive ability is associated with important outcomes in life — everything from employment to crime to family structure to parenting styles. Put those all together, we said, and we’re looking at some serious problems down the road. Let me give you a passage to quote directly from the close of the book:

    Predicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about:

        An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.
        A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.
        A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive distribution.

    Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. (p. 509)

Remind you of anything you’ve noticed about the US recently? If you look at the first three chapters of the book I published in 2012, “Coming Apart,” you’ll find that they amount to an update of “The Bell Curve,” showing how the trends that we wrote about in the early 1990s had continued and in some cases intensified since 1994. I immodestly suggest that “The Bell Curve” was about as prescient as social science gets.

The Bell Curve was an early example of the media pinkshirts attacking reality. And it is a good lesson for how retaining a firm grasp on truth will always outlast whatever the various political pressures du jour happen to be. As with The Irrational Atheist, if the ideas a book contains are in harmony with reality, they will penetrate the collective consciousness eventually even if the pinkshirts are successful in preventing people from reading a book or even hearing about it.

The truth always wins out in the end, not due to its own virtues, but because lies always eventually collapse under their own accumulating weight. One of the reasons the equalitarians are becoming increasingly vicious is that their vision has completely failed to deliver on any of the promises that the naive and the clueless found so compelling.

Mrs. Wright’s new book

L. Jagi Lamplighter, aka Mrs. John C. Wright, today published THE RAVEN THE ELF AND RACHEL. Mr. Wright describes it as follows:

If asked, I describe the book as ‘Nancy Drew coming of age in the Roke of Sleepy Hollow hidden in the world from FRINGE hidden in the universe of Gaiman’s Sandman hidden in the multiverse of Zelazny’s Amber meets Aslan at Camp Halfblood: girl detective at magical boarding school uncovers figures from spooky New England folktales, secret weirdness and secret conspiracies, ghosts and elves and gods and greater powers beyond that, hellish and heavenly. And has a crush on a boy.’

Before coming to Roanoke Academy, Rachel Griffin had been an obedient girl—but it’s hard to obey the rules when the world is in danger, and no one will listen.


Now, she’s eavesdropping on Wisecraft Agents and breaking a lot of rules. Because if the adults will not believe her, then it is up to Rachel and her friends—crazy, orphan-boy Sigfried the Dragonslayer and Nastasia, the Princess of Magical Australia—to stop the insidious Mortimer Egg from destroying the world.


But first she must survive truth spells, fights with her brother, detention, Alchemy experiments, talking to elves, and conjuring class.


As if that were not bad enough, someone has turned the boy she likes into a sheep.


When someone tries to kill a fellow student, Rachel soon realizes that, in the same way her World of the Wise hides from mundane folk, there is another, more secret world hiding from everyone-which her perfect recall allows her to remember.  Rushing forward where others fear to tread, Rachel finds herself beset by wraiths, magical pranks, homework, a Raven said to bring the doom of worlds, love’s first blush, and at least one fire-breathing teacher.

Debating Amazon

Joe Konrath hands Rob Spillman his head in a debate over Amazon:

“What I can’t understand is why you would cheer for Amazon in its fight against traditional publishers. Here comes one of my analogies that you love to pull apart – -it seems like rooting for the lions against the Roman prisoners in the Coliseum.”

I was a Roman prisoner in the Coliseum, being feasted on by lions. Those lions were big publishers. After 20 years, a million written words, and nine rejected novels, I finally landed a book contract. And I worked my ass off and published eight novels with legacy publishers, dozens of short stories with respected magazines, and went above and beyond everything that was required of me, in order to succeed.

And I got eaten. One-sided contracts, broken promises, lousy money. But it was the only game in town. If I wanted to make a living as a writer, I had no choice.

Then Amazon invented the Kindle.

I first self-pubbed in May of 2009. That first month I made $1,500, publishing books that New York rejected. Those same rejected books have earned me hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I cheer for Amazon because it saved me, and thousands of other authors, from the Coliseum. And I try to show others there is a way to make money from publishing where the terms are better, and the writer stays in control.

“My central argument is that if Amazon crushes us all, it will be able to dictate whatever terms to anyone using its massive platform. What if it suddenly decides to flip terms and only offer you 30 percent, or decide that your books really should be sold for 50 cents?”

Rob, that’s what the Big 5 already do. Except for an elite, tiny group of upper-tier authors, the Big 5 treat 99.9 percent of us badly. Keeping rights for term of copyright? Non-compete clauses? Twenty-five percent e-book royalty on net? I’ve had chapters cut by editors that I wanted to keep. I’ve had terrible cover art. I’ve had my titles forcibly changed. And my experience isn’t unique. I’m friends with hundreds of authors. A few were treated like kings. Most were screwed.

You worry that Amazon might someday offer 30 percent when publishers right now offer 17.5 percent? You must see how odd that is.

I was treated very well by Pocket Books. I have no complaints on that score. But my personal experience, which was mostly positive, doesn’t change the fact that mainstream publishing is extremely exploitative of authors; the feed-em-in-and-spit-em-out system is constantly churning and destroys the careers of the vast majority of authors who enter it.

And speaking of independent publishing, I’m pleased to say that we should be able to announce as many as FOUR new Castalia authors in the near future.

Recommending books

First of all, thanks to the nearly 100 Ilk who went to Recommend and set up accounts there. I’ve already personally found it to be useful, as I picked up a copy of Battle Academy 2 on Kool Moe Dee’s strong recommendation of The Campaign Series from Matrix Games. It was also nice to see the strong recommendations for A Throne of Bones by David Jirovec and even for this blog by Aquila Aquilonis.

One reason you may be interested in following along, even if you’re not initially interested in recommending anything yourself, is that I am methodically working my way through my reading list and making recommendations on the various books I have read this year. So, if you’d like to know my actual opinion of those books, you can join up and read them there. Here are four examples of my recently posted book recos:


FAIR: The Elephant Vanishes and Other Stories by Haruki Murakami occasionally shows the award-winning author at his diffident best. Not all the stories will be new to the longtime reader; the original version of The Wind-Up Bird is here, and frankly, it is more appealing in many ways than the novel it subsequently turned into. The title story is arguably the most interesting, as who but a Murakami character would become fascinated with an aged elephant and his equally decrepit keeper? But the most insightful and most troubling is probably the story of a woman who loses the ability to sleep, and in doing so, also loses her connection to her humanity. As is often the case with his longer works, Murakami seldom provides the answers to his mysteries, but then, it is the journey rather than the destination that is to be most savored here.

DISAPPOINTING: Although Eco is easily my favorite writer and he demonstrates both his
esoteric expertise and his customary attention to detail in this book,
The Prague Cemetery simply isn’t very absorbing. It’s an origin story
for “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”, but the mercenary
protagonist is neither sympathetic nor interesting, a strange identity
device is utilized that is neither relevant nor even remotely
convincing, and the extended detour into the Risorgimento seems forced.
Still worth reading, because, after all, even a lesser Eco book is
better than most books by other authors, but it’s not Eco at his best.

BAD:  Despite the title, the religious need not fear this book. A Manual for Creating Atheists,
by Peter Boghossian, is far less likely to turn theists into atheists
than it is to turn atheists into agnostics out of sheer intellectual
embarrassment. A more accurate title would have been Atheism: Begging the Question.
Boghossian’s entire manual can be reduced to three simple steps: 1. Beg
the question. 2. Redefine any commonly understood dictionary term to
mean something completely different. 3. Declare victory. There are
perfectly rational arguments for atheism to be made, but none of them
are to be found in this particular book. Peter Boghossian would very
much like to replace the late Christopher Hitchens as the Fourth
Horseman of Atheism, but it is no wonder that Messrs. Dawkins, Dennett,
and Harris are disinclined to admit him to their ranks.

AWESOME: Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers, is a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, and as such, is a good book worth reading. But it is more than that. By setting it at the site of her old academic haunts, Sayers also presents us with a vivid portrait of bygone times. The portrayal of female academics at Oxford in the early 20th century is keenly historical, for all that it is fiction, written by a literary master who was actually there at the time. The mystery itself is almost secondary to the fascinating interplay of old rivalries and lingering jealousies that remain active among a group of exceptional women. Sayers always had unusual insight into the human condition, and Gaudy Night is perhaps her novel that most clearly demonstrates this.

If you think “Awesome” is a bit much for the Sayer’s novel, you’re absolutely correct. The four-rating system is a little limiting and Recommend will go to the six-rating system that I personally prefer in November. Two negative ratings, HORRIBLE and DISAPPOINTING, will go with FAIR, GOOD, EXCELLENT, and AWESOME. The idea is that the EXCELLENT rating should be sufficiently superlative to encourage users to actually distinguish between something that is legitimately AWESOME, such as The Lord of the Rings, and something that is more reasonably described as EXCELLENT, such as Gaudy Night or A Game of Thrones. And, of course, I will bump up The Elephant Vanishes to GOOD once the new system is active.

A 4GW fiasco in realtime

You don’t have to be an expert in 4th Generation Warfare to know that the US decision to resort to air strikes against the Islamic State was going to backfire:

The U.S.-led air war in Syria has gotten off to a rocky start, with even the Syrian rebel groups closest to the United States turning against it, U.S. ally Turkey refusing to contribute and the plight of a beleaguered Kurdish town exposing the limitations of the strategy.

U.S. officials caution that the strikes are just the beginning of a broader strategy that could take years to carry out. But the anger that the attacks have stirred risks undermining the effort, analysts and rebels say.

The main beneficiary of the strikes so far appears to be President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces have taken advantage of the shift in the military balance to step up attacks against the moderate rebels designated by President Obama as partners of the United States in the war against extremists.

The U.S. targets have included oil facilities, a granary and an electricity plant under Islamic State control. The damage to those facilities has caused shortages and price hikes across the rebel-held north that are harming ordinary Syrians more than the well-funded militants, residents and activists say.

At the start of the air campaign, dozens of U.S. cruise missiles were fired into areas controlled by the moderate rebels, who are supposed to be fighting the Islamic State. Syrians who had in the past appealed for American intervention against Assad have been staging demonstrations denouncing the United States and burning the American flag.

If there is one person who desperately needs to read William S. Lind’s forthcoming ON WAR, it is Barack Obama. And it wouldn’t hurt if whoever is presently in charge of the US military response to the Islamic State would do so as well.

When publishing was taken over

In the annual Publisher’s Weekly salary report, it is easy to see when the Pink Rot solidified:

Meanwhile, the pay gap between men and women—the other well-known imbalance in the industry—continued in 2013, even though women accounted for 74% of the publishing workforce and men only 26%. The average compensation for men in 2013 was $85,000, the same as in 2012, while average compensation for women rose to $60,750 last year, up from $56,000 the year before. Women filled at least 70% of the jobs in sales and marketing, operations, and editorial, but only 51% of the management positions. The relatively large portion of men in management roles (though they’re still a slight minority there) partly explains the overall pay gap, since those jobs are the best paid in the industry. But men also tended to earn more than female colleagues with similar titles last year, due, in part, to the fact that men tend to have more experience. In 2013, the median number of years of experience for men in the industry was 17, compared to 11 for women (the median for men in management was 19 years, compared to 13.5 for women).

Look at the Years of Experience chart at the linked post. Whereas 37 percent of the men have more than 20 years of experience, only 21 percent of the women do. But sometime between 11 and 20 years ago, women first made up the majority of employees. That’s observably the point at which the pinkshirts took over; for me it first became apparent when THE QUANTUM ROSE, which is little more than a romance novel in space, won the Nebula and made me realize how much the SF/F field was changing, and not for the better.

The amazing thing is the way it is implied that a field in which there are three times as many women as men working is somehow stacked against women due to the “pay gap”. The amusing thing is how lily-white and non-diverse the field is; it is readily apparent that the reason the publishing industry so feverishly embraces diversity in their authors is as a shield to distract from their own lack of diversity in their offices.

Obviously the process began more than 15 years ago, but that’s when it became increasingly difficult for those writing masculine fiction for male audiences to break into print.

Of fraudulent lists and fake “bestsellers”

File 770 sounds a little disappointed to discover that an SF “bestseller” on the NYT Bestsellers List doesn’t necessarily indicate the mainstream adoption of SF:

I’m a science fiction fan, yet I’m constantly being surprised to discover how that shapes my thinking. Although I know bestseller lists are artificial constructs, I also know they are constructs dominated by mainstream fiction and literary biases. Consequently, when a science fiction writer appears on the New York Times bestseller list I don’t ask how, I just shout “Hooray!” But now a Higher Critic has explained why I should be dissatisfied and suspicious about how they got there.

And now I am.

Vox Day unfavorably compared John Scalzi to Larry Correia based on alleged manipulation of the bestseller list. But isn’t Correia’s status as a bestselling author the same reason people believe Correia is the gold standard?

Even here, all Larry Correia ever did was point out two times when his books made the New York Times best seller list. Which they did. But both times the books disappeared from the list the following week. One and done….

I’m perfectly happy that Larry Correia is an NYT bestselling author. (Which I said in the post.) But since Correia and Scalzi both have experienced the same one-and-done pattern, then why would anybody doubt that Scalzi’s listings are also the result of real sales, Vox Day notwithstanding?

Actually, I didn’t compare them. I merely referenced Scalzi’s own comments on the subject. As always, Larry Correia is perfectly capable of speaking for himself. As for me, I answered Mr. Glyer on his own blog as follows: There are two reasons for the difference between Scalzi’s one-week showings and Mr. Correia’s. 1. Correia’s Amazon rankings at the time correlated correctly with his NYT bestseller listing. Scalzi’s Amazon rankings aren’t egregiously off, but they’re not high enough to be credible. 2. Baen Books is not known for attempting to game various awards and bestseller lists. Tor Books, which has won the Locus Award for Best Publisher 27 years in a row, among other things, is.

Does anyone really and truly believe that whereas OLD MAN’S WAR and THE GHOST BRIGADES did not sell well enough to make the NYT Bestseller list, FUZZY NATION did?

All one had to do was look at the Amazon rankings to see that LOCK IN was not selling well enough to have made the bestseller list without a bulk-sale marketing campaign. And as noted on File 770, I had an inkling LOCK IN would not only be on the NYT bestseller list, but be there for a single week before disappearing.

These faux bestsellers aren’t any great secret. It’s just one of the ways the Big Five publishers promote their favored authors. Talk to a top editor or a publishing executive if you don’t believe me; I’m not making this stuff up. Tor is simply trying to massage public perceptions to bump a high mid-list writer into reliable bestseller status.

And then, as it happened, the Washington Examiner happened to address the issue of the unreliability of this particular list today:

The New York Times Book Review, which has a history of belatedly recognizing conservative bestsellers, has banished conservative legal author David Limbaugh’s latest, Jesus on Trial, from its upcoming best seller list despite having sales better than 17 other books on the list.

According to publishing sources, Limbaugh’s probe into the accuracy of the Bible sold 9,660 in its first week out, according to Nielsen BookScan. That should have made it No. 4 on the NYT print hardcover sales list.

Instead, Henry Kissinger’s World Order, praised by Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post, is No. 4 despite weekly sales of 6,607….

The September 28 list of the top 20 print hardcover best sellers includes one book that sold just 1,570 copies.

Limbaugh, published by Regnery, has been a New York Times best seller, so the newspaper should have been looking out for his high sales numbers. And as a hint, they could have looked at Amazon, where Limbaugh’s Jesus hit No. 1 recently. On Thursday, it ranked No. 6 in books sold on Amazon.

Note first that Mr. Scalzi’s LOCK IN is presently ranked #3,566 on Amazon and did not make the September 28th list. The #20 book to which the Examiner presumably refers is I AM MALALA which is presently ranked #992 on Amazon. Keep in mind that there are two different lists and that non-fiction usually sells more than fiction.

The New York Times bestseller list is simply not what it claims to be. It’s mostly a marketing device manipulated by media ideologues and marketing departments. Some books make it legitimately. Others don’t. Fortunately, Amazon gives us a means of distinguishing between the two.

Announcing Castalia Associates

You may have noticed there is a change to the left sidebar. In the place of the RECOMMENDED books, there is now a selection of books that are self-published by authors acquainted with Castalia House who have made their books available through Castalia’s online store. We are listing these books on the store under the category CASTALIA ASSOCIATES.

We’re pleased to announce the first two Castalia Associates are Chris Kennedy, the bestselling author of the mil-SF series THE THEOGONY, and Christopher G. Nuttall, the bestselling author of ARK ROYAL and the mil-SF series THE EMPIRE’S CORPS. Their books are being sold in the same DRM-free EPUB format that Castalia House books are sold. Additional Castalia Associates will be announced in the weeks to come; please do not contact us to request participation at the moment as we have our hands full with getting our forthcoming works ready for publication.

We’re also very pleased to be able to say that both Chris Kennedy and Christopher G. Nuttall are contributing short stories to the first volume of the Tom Kratman-edited mil-SF anthology series, RIDING THE RED HORSE. And while we’re on the topic of Castalia House, you surely won’t want to miss the Appendix N retrospective that many of us have been anticipating, as Jeffro addresses the Zelazny classic, NINE PRINCES IN AMBER.