Tag: books

The gatekeepers strike again

I’d previously made some allusions to the interest of a European publisher in putting out the Arts of Dark and Light series in audiobook and paperback next year, however, after being informed this morning that the publisher changed their mind about publishing it, it has become clear that I have reached the point where I am officially unpublishable by conventional publishers.  C’est la vie.

It’s the usual political gatekeeping of course.  I was told that some of my public statements would make it hard for them to defend the decision to publish with me, despite how much they liked the first book in the series.  The annoying thing is that this is the SECOND time this has happened with this particular publisher; I was assured that this time, my idiosyncratic opinions would not be an issue….

What it comes down to in the end is that I haven’t sold enough books or built enough of a readership to be deemed worth the criticism that comes with my level of notoriety.  The risk/reward balance is too high. Orson Scott Card’s views are every bit as offensive to the gatekeepers as mine are, but Tor Books isn’t about to stop publishing their bestselling author on that basis.  At a mere one million pageviews per month and paltry sales of around 12,000 ebooks annually, the controversy that comes with my name simply isn’t worth it to the publishers.  Now, once I reach 5 million pageviews, I expect they’ll suddenly start sniffing around again.  At 10 million and a top 100 Amazon rank in the Fantasy category, even the most liberal gatekeeper will magically cease to have any problem with my public statements.

Will it take a while for me to get there?  Sure.  But I will.  Fortunately, this is precisely the “that which does not kill me makes me stronger” sort of thing that gives me the motivation to surmount my natural laziness and get things done.  Whether I’ll still see any benefit to working with conventional publishers is a question I’ll consider when the situation arises. In the meantime, my first order of business is to find a reader for the audiobooks I will be publishing next year.  My second order of business will be to begin finding authors who would like to publish electronically through in-game stores with direct access to millions of players.  And my third order of business will be to formally announce the new games we are presently developing.

I would have preferred to take the easy way and turn the book distribution aspects over to a publisher so that I could focus entirely on the writing and game development.  But that’s no longer an option for me due to the political correctness that pervades the publishing industry throughout the English-speaking world.  Since the traditional channels are closed, I’ll simply have to create new ones.  Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention.

I’m not whining or complaining; this is the path I chose.  I’m not looking for sympathy or support.  And I’m not upset with the publishers; they are certainly free to make their own choices and render themselves increasingly irrelevant to various demographics if they like. Yes, it’s certainly irritating to AGAIN find out that a publisher who knows perfectly well how controversial I am when they start talking to me, and who assures me that my notoriety isn’t a problem, ends up getting cold feet before the deal closes.  (Or, in two cases, AFTER it closes.) Still, other than being a minor waste of time, it’s not an actual problem. I’m only irritated with myself because I should have known better; Spacebunny was openly skeptical from the start.

But this isn’t merely a problem for me. The suspicions that publishers have a political agenda and refuse to publish writers solely due to their politically incorrect views are well-founded and are based in absolute, well-documented fact.  Most writers won’t talk about this because they hold out hopes for one day being allowed through the gates and they don’t want to burn any bridges.  However, one advantage of discovering one has already inadvertently nuked all the bridges is that one has carte blanche to speak the truths that would otherwise remain unspoken.

To quote Standout Author Sarah Hoyt: “Like most pioneers, you’re being forced onto it by circumstances and
by the status quo becoming untenable.  But it doesn’t mean you can’t
take the opportunity to build something better. Now go and do it.”

And that is exactly what I intend to do.

The infernal Dan Brown

I have never read what passes for a Dan Brown novel, and it seems that this is probably for the best.  But I should note that the vast success of writers who write for idiots doesn’t bother me any more than the success of sixteen year-old pop stars who perform for teen girls does.  Given MPAI, it stands to reason that the writer whose primary goal is to sell as many books as possible should always cater to the lowest nominally literate consumer.

However, it is a bit much to be expected to also accept the intellectual pretensions of a man who is manifestly writing for the ignorati.  For not only is Brown’s “research” obviously incorrect, the fact that he confuses the ascents of the Purgatorio with the circles of the Inferno tends to suggest that it is entirely nonexistent.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn he’d never even read the entire Inferno, let alone the rest of La Comedia.

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, having written what
for lack of a mightier term we must call a novel, a novel that proved that John
the Apostle was a girl, Mary Magdalene a helpless goddess, and a hypotenuse an
African water buffalo—having revealed for millions the lavish colors of the
frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris (there are no frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris),
the grim austerity of Spanish Cathedrals (Spanish Cathedrals are notorious for
baroque exuberance), and the deep mystery of the Golden Ratio (every schoolboy
knew about the Golden Ratio)—having shown the world that he could write a novel
about art, theology, and Christian history while knowing nothing about art,
theology, and Christian history, except what he could glean from the covers of
matchbooks and obiter dicta from Cher—having shown how much
you can do if you do not bother to open an ordinary encyclopedia, this Dan
Brown, I say, this man of our time and of no time, has now written a novel about
the greatest poet who ever lived, Dante.

Only it doesn’t have
a damned thing to do with Dante, just as The
Da Vinci Code didn’t have anything to do with Leonardo.  Dante is just
a quick needle used to inject the “story” into the reader’s head.  This
time, Mr. Brown has opened a lot of encyclopedias, deluging the reader with 400
pages of material that belongs in Michelin guides to Florence, Venice, and
Istanbul, none of it to the point.  Even at that, he gets details wrong as
soon as he veers away from something you might find in a guide book, especially
when he engages in an exceedingly rare moment of telling us something about
Dante’s poem.  He says it was called a Comedy
because it was written in the vernacular, “for the masses.”  No, a comedy,
according to the medieval definition, was a poem in which a character moves
from misery to happiness, regardless of what language it is written in, and
there were no “masses” to read it, since books were still costly to produce and
scarce.

He says that Dante’s
Purgatory has nine circles of ascent; no, there are seven, one for each of the
deadly sins.  He says that Purgatory is the only way to get from the
Inferno to Paradise.  No, it isn’t; nobody but Dante visits Inferno and
leaves the place, and plenty of people do not have to ascend the
mountain.  Essentially, Dante’s poem is about the resurrection of a human
soul, by the grace of God, to turn from the lie of evil to the truth and beauty
of goodness.  Brown doesn’t get any of that, because he doesn’t care about
any of that.

What’s this book
about?  It’s 462 pages of bad prose.  Portentous sentence
fragments.  Italics, for somber
emphasis.  J—–, there are childish profanities!  Even childish
punctuation?!  Anticlimaxes, a good dollop of Most Favored Bigotry, for
sales; one dimensional characters, most of them pallid even in their one
dimension, and a message with all the sophistication of Sesame Street. 

I understand that Eco isn’t for everyone, let alone Calvino and Borges.  But it would be nice if someone in Brown’s position would be responsible enough, if not to actually bother reading Dante, to at least hire someone to read it for him and ensure that he isn’t actively misinforming the sort of people whose only exposure to the culture Brown is mining are his books.

SE+ is shipping

I’ve been informed by Marcher Lord that the new Summa Elvetica hardcover is now shipping to the preorders.  If you receive it, please let me know how it looks; it will be a while before my copies get to me.

Reviewing Men on Strike

Dr. Helen Smith’s Men on Strike was released today.  I reviewed it at Alpha Game.  An excerpt:

With the publication of Men on Strike, Dr. Helen Smith
fires an important shot in the ongoing cultural war for the soul, and
indeed, the survival, of Western Civilization.  It is a shot she fires
in defense of the defenders, in defense of the barricades, in defense of
the gates, against the lawless barbarians marching under the banner of
the Female Imperative.

If the horror stories and red pill realities she chronicles will not be
unfamiliar to those who are regular readers of the androsphere, they are
nevertheless particularly effective when presented, largely
dispassionately, one after another in succession.  Dr. Helen does an
competent job of drawing clear links between a legal regime biased
towards women and the fearful behavior of men who no longer see
sufficient incentive to perform the roles that society has long expected
and required of them.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

Pulp Writer review

Jonathan Moeller reviews The Last Witchking:

Last year, I read A THRONE OF BONES by Vox Day, and thought it was one of the more interesting new epic fantasy novels I’ve read. The author was kind enough to send me an advance copy of THE LAST WITCHKING, a group of three short stories set in A THRONE OF BONES’S setting of Selenoth. Specifically, THE LAST WITCHKING, THE HOBLETS OF WICCAM FENSBORO, and OPERA VITA AETERNA.

The first story deals with the titular LAST WITCHKING, and provides an origin story for one of the villains in A THRONE OF BONES. In Selenoth, the “Witchkings” were the pejorative name for a race of extremely powerful sorcerers that once ruled and tyrannized much of the world. The elves eventually destroyed the witchkings, but before they did, the last two witchkings conceived a child and hid him among the humans, intending that child to be the instrument of vengeance upon their enemies….

[T]he Selenoth books are a welcome breath of fresh air. SF/F publishing
has become too ossified and moribund (science fiction and fantasy are
supposed to be the literature of the speculative, yet every writer these
days seems to have the exact same standard-issue SWPL worldview) so
books from a writer who is capable of regarding organized religion as
something other than a peculiar superstition practiced by the peasantry
are most welcome.

It’s always interesting to see which of the three stories contained in Witchking are preferred by various readers.  I also find it amusing that people who haven’t read Hoblets assume it is some sort of Shire ripoff – somewhat ironic in light of how Robert Jordan admitted he was intentionally ripping off The Shire in the first book of The Wheel of Time – whereas those who have read it have expressed some degree of frustration at the way in which it is not even possible to identify what they are.

To the printers

I am sorry for the delay in getting the new Summa Elvetica out the door.  We had some technical errors caused by a domain transfer problem, did an extra round of errata-hunting edits to ensure a much cleaner text than before, and since the book ended up being a few more pages than anticipated, another revision of the dustjacket turned out to be required.  But it is now off to the printers and should be reaching to those who preordered sometime the week after next.

We may or may not do an ebook version, as all of the stories the hardcover contains are already available in ebook format.  So, if you want the complete-to-date collection of Selenoth stories, this would be your book to go with A THRONE OF BONES.  Kirk redid the spine, so, although it is not part of the Arts of Dark and Light series proper, SE+ should at least look tangentially related next to them on the bookshelf.

The book is a 6×9 hardcover of 488 pages, priced at $25.99.  It contains Summa Elvetica, eight other novellas, novelettes, and short stories, and a very slightly updated map.

It’s been interesting to see how people’s opinion of SE has changed a little since the publication of A THRONE OF BONES, including my own. What didn’t necessarily work all that well as a full-fledged novel in its own right actually holds up rather nicely as a part of the larger series.  Even though I didn’t see it at the time, it seems Jamsco was correct to observe that it held the seeds of something bigger and better all along.

The thing that I find a little astonishing is that with the publication of SE+, the total page count of the complete Selenoth collection now exceeds that of The Lord of the Rings, 1,342 to 1,147.(1) Now, of course, that doesn’t include The Hobbit, The Simarillion, or the various lost tales.  And Selenoth will never rival Middle Earth, although I do hope it will eventually come to surpass Westeros, Malazan, Randland, and the Four Lands.

(1) Knowing that someone was bound to raise the typography issue, I went ahead and tabulated the word counts. They are virtually identical at this point, with a slight edge to LOTR at 475,202 as Selenoth is presently at 471,387.

Mailvox: #1 “bestseller”

THE WARDOG’S COIN
  
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#145 Free in Kindle Store 
#10 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Fantasy
 #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Fantasy > Epic 
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War 

While a book can’t actually be called a best seller when it is being given away for free, it is still satisfying to see The Wardog’s Coin reach number one in Epic Fantasy in the free Kindle store. Thank you if you were a part of making that happen, whether by downloading the book or reviewing it. One of my objectives for next year is to see either A THRONE OF BONES or Book Two in the Arts of Dark and Light series reach #1 in Epic in the Kindle Store proper.  Also, if you haven’t scored a copy of Wardog yet, note that it is still free today.

And while The Last Witchking doesn’t appear to be threatening the bestseller lists – it only reached #37 in Epic on its first day out – I’m very pleased that most of those who have read it appear to find the three stories it contains to be worth reading. Given the semi-canonical and allegorical nature of “Hoblets”, the unrestrained darkness of the title novelette, and the complete lack of any action in “Opera”, I was half-expecting Selenoth fans to be disappointed in it. I should have known that those who already appreciate a relatively broad spectrum world would tend to enjoy seeing the scope of the world expanded.

Gecko asked: “what’s the recommended reading order for the first Selenoth run-through?”  That’s a good question, and one which I’ve never actually considered in light of how most of the series has only been published in the last five months.  But I suppose there is a considerable amount of text out there in comparison with the average series where only the first book has been published already. This is the order I suspect may be optimal for the average reader, but keep in mind that there is absolutely no authorial intent here.  And, as you will note, I am very skeptical of the value of authorial intent when it comes to these matters.

A Magic Broken
The Wardog’s Coin 
Qalabi Dawn
A THRONE OF BONES
Summa Elvetica
Master of Cats
Birth of an Order
The Last Witchking
Opera Vita Aeterna
The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro

Now, I think an advanced reader who prefers epic fantasy would be best advised to begin with A THRONE OF BONES from the start, but since it is a giant novel and one that begins slowly at that, it’s probably better for most readers to begin with a few of the smaller works.  I wrote the smaller works in the knowledge that many of them would be read prior to the central series; that’s why all of them are set in times prior to the events of Book I.

In answer to Gecko’s other question, “Nephew or Wardrobe?”, I can only say “Wardrobe” and declare that I am fully prepared to fight to the death anyone who would be so abysmally stupid to assert otherwise.  I have staunchly resisted buying a new set of Narnia novels, even though our old paperbacks are mostly in pieces now, because I don’t want to own a set that is ordered incorrectly.

NB: the free copies of Witchking went out to those who preordered the Summa Elvetica hardcover at 9:30 PM Mountain time.  If you didn’t receive it, first check your spam traps and if you still can’t find it, let me know.

The Wardog’s Coin: free on Amazon

In case you haven’t delved into Selenoth yet, today would be an excellent day to do so, as in honor of the publication of The Last Witchking, Marcher Lord Hinterlands is giving away The Wardog’s Coin on Amazon today and tomorrow.

The Wardog’s Coin consists of two stories set in the epic fantasy world
of A THRONE OF BONES. The title story is about a human mercenary company
which finds itself in the employ of an elf king. Outnumbered and under
attack from an army of orcs and goblins, the Company discovers it is no
longer fighting for pay, but for survival. The second story, Qalabi
Dawn, features a young tribal chieftain, Shabaka No-Tail, who seeks to
find a way to unite the fractious tribes of The People before the
implacable legions of the Dead God invade the desert to carry out their
crusade of total extermination.

In tangentially related news, it looks as if the Arts of Dark and Light have found a second home and will be published in paperback and audiobook editions next year. I’ve been talking to several international publishers who expressed interest in the books, and have found one I believe will complement Marcher Lord very well by providing conventional bookstore distribution while permitting the near-complete creative freedom I enjoy with Hinterlands.

UPDATE: While I’m pleased that the Dread Ilk are not prone to sycophancy, this email from a reviewer concerning Witchking cracked me up, as it reminded me of something another writer said about how I have “just the worst fans”.  By which I think she meant that most of you don’t hesitate to criticize when I’ve gotten something wrong or even just phone something in.  The sincerity of the pity she was offering was why I didn’t bother trying to convince her that this was actually a feature, not a bug.


“Damn good. Reviewed here. 
To be honest, I thought your angel stories sucked, and I’m really shocked at how good your writing has got.”

People sometimes ask how it is that I’m so unfazed by criticism,(1) and conversely, not much affected by praise either.  It’s probably thanks to my father.  I’ll never forget the phone call I received from him not long after The War in Heaven.  “Hey, I read your book! Want me to tell you what was wrong with it?”

The funny thing was that I told him, “no, not particularly” in the full knowledge that it wouldn’t even slow him down for a second.

(1) Actual criticism, you understand.  Obviously, I refuse to accept the fake variety that is simply rhetorical combat by other means.

The Last Witchking

I am pleased to announce that Marcher Lord Hinterlands has released THE LAST WITCHKING,
a 105-page ebook that consists of the title novelette and two short stories, all three of of which are set in Selenoth, the world of A THRONE OF BONES.  It
is now available from Amazon for $1.99.

The title story concerns the hidden heir to a fallen race of magicians,
the infamous Witchkings, who delves deep into his father’s dark lore as he pursues vengeance against the elves and men responsible for destroying his people. The second story, “The Hoblets of Wiccam
Fensboro”, is a tale of survival and the triumph of simple human decency
in the face of brutality and defeat. The third story, “Opera Vita
Aeterna”, tells the story of the relationship between an elven sorcerer and a monk of the Ordo Sancti Dioscuri, and
how they discover that the transformational power of friendship can be the
highest and most potent magic of all.  The third story also features a brief appearance by one of the perspective characters from A THRONE OF BONES.

Thanks
to Jartstar, who did another excellent job on the cover.  We wanted to go for a different look this time, one that hinted at the broad spectrum of good and evil that is explored in the book.  To celebrate the new publication, Hinterlands will be giving away THE WARDOG’S COIN for free on Amazon tomorrow and Friday.

Last day to preorder SE

Contrary to previous reports, the hardcover version of Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy & Other Stories will not be 465 pages, it should be more like 500 pages.  I left out one of the stories from the manuscript upon which I did the word count.  The total comes to 173k words, a bit more than half of ATOB’s 297k words.  Of course, the precise page total will depend upon how Marcher Lord lays it out.

If you’re interested in preordering for a discount price of $17.99, you can do so today from Marcher Lord.  Preordering ends tonight, so if you’re interested in getting one to go with your ATOB hardcover, don’t put it off.  And remember, you’ll get a free ebook, The Last Witchking, which will be available from Amazon within a week or so.