The Black Friday 1+1 sale was so successful that we’ve decided to do it again, only this time there is no limit on the number of ebooks you can get. If you buy 20 Castalia print editions, we’ll send you the 20 different ebooks you want. The only caveats are:
The print sales have to be from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Both hardcovers and paperbacks are eligible.
A SEA OF SKULLS is not an eligible ebook selection UNLESS you buy a print edition of A THRONE OF BONES. The extended edition of ASOS will not be provided to those acquiring ASOS as a bonus copy.
The bonus copy version of THE NINE LAWS will not include the chapter-heading images.
All ebooks sent out will be DRM-free epub. If you prefer Kindle or some other format, just download Calibre and convert it. It takes five seconds.
Kindle Select ebooks are not eligible due to Amazon’s restrictions on non-Amazon distribution. A list of the eligible non-KDP Select ebooks is below.
It’s pretty simple. Order one or more print books from Amazon or B&N today, December 14th. Email a copy of the invoice dated 12/14/2016 with 1+1 in the subject. Specify the non-Kindle Select ebooks you want. Give the print books as gifts and keep the ebooks for yourself.
A text sample from the newly released Book Two in Arts of Dark and Light, A SEA OF SKULLS, featuring one of the new perspective characters, Lugbol, the captain of a warband of orcs called the Black Fist. If you are new to the fictional world of Selenoth, pick up both Books One and Two, but start with A THRONE OF BONES for a combined 1,303 pages of truly epic military fantasy.
“I have tasted Manflesh! I have raped she-men! I have burned Man cities!”
Lugbol rolled his eyes. Who hadn’t? He was almost embarrassed for the big mountain orc, who was boasting of his accomplishments while stalking back and forth in a large circle of about fifty warband leaders listening to their warleader’s customary evening rant. As for the burned cities, most of them had held populations smaller than Lugbol’s own kai hari gungiyar. If they were the terrible Man cities of which Lugbol had been told frightening stories since he was a small orcling, then he was a one-armed goblin.
“Man-Zarki’agh shaking in their tents! Man-Kings on their thrones pissing themselves when they hear the name Zlatagh! Zlatagh Life-taker! Zlatagh Piss-maker! Zlatagh Man-eater!”
That was their cue. “Maneater! Maneater!” the shugaba’ugh obediently chanted, Lugbol among them. He knew that Zlatagh secretly hungered after the praise-name Mansbane, but even the giant warleader knew better than to risk stepping on the clawed toes of the Great Orc Azzakhar, whose claim to the title would certainly trump Zlatagh’s.
And Lugbol rather doubted any Man-King had ever heard the name Zlatagh, let alone pissed himself for fear of it.
Zlatagh was an imposing brute, though, even for a mountain orc. He stood nearly a head taller than most of the shugaba’ugh gathered around him, with a thick chest and heavy muscles that belied his violent speed. A pair of captured iron Man plates covered each powerful shoulder; two cow’s horns had somehow been driven through the center of both breastplates, curving upward like two spare pairs of tusks. Zlatagh’s own tusks were nearly as large; they were thick, yellowed with maturity, and reached nearly to the tip of his nose. Almost unique among the orcs present, Zlatagh’s tusks were unsharpened and unadorned with any bone, paint, or metal.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t fearsome weapons. Lugbol had seen with his own eyes how the big orc once used them to disembowel a goblin. The goblin had been wearing leather armor too, which made the feat all the more impressive. After Azzakhar commanded Zlatagh to invade the Man lands two moons past, the Maneater had found himself facing three challenges to his leadership, two of them on the very first day. Zlatagh beheaded one with the monstrous cleaver he called Headchopper, blinded the second with his bare hands, and ripped the arm off the third before using it to bash in the skull of the overmatched orc. At this point, only a truly thick-skulled shugaba would dare to cross the giant orc, let alone challenge him.
Nor, beyond personal ambition, was there any reason for anyone to do so. Zlatagh was a good warleader, and the warbands over which he’d been given command had enjoyed an unbroken string of victories under his leadership. More than one hundred Man villages had been pillaged and burned, and the orc encampment was littered with the broken remnants of trophies taken throughout the spring campaign. None could complain that he had not passed the ultimate test of leadership; providing his followers with more food than they could eat and more booty than they could carry. Not a single orc’s belly didn’t bulge with fat of the last two moons’ devourings, and even the most cowardly goblin wolfrider wore decorative trophies of one sort or another by now.
That didn’t mean Lugbol was entirely confident in the big mountain orc. Smashing sparsely guarded hamlets and carrying off helpless herds and captives was one thing, defeating a large and well-armed army of the sort that waited for them at the northwestern edge of the Korokhurmagh was another. Zlatagh could boast that the Man chieftains were pissing themselves and afraid to take the field against him all he liked, but it hadn’t escaped Lugbol’s notice that it was their forces who avoided meeting the mounted patrols that chased them throughout the woods, and that Zlatagh hadn’t moved their encampment one step closer to the Man army ever since its presence had been reported by wolfriders fleeing from the metal-clad Mandokki warriors and the huge, fierce, four-legged beasts they rode.
“Who marches today! Who takes the fight to Man!”
“Lugbol!” Lugbol raised his fist and cried half-heartedly, quite happy to be outshouted by other shugaba’ugh more eager to demonstrate their enthusiasm to the big orc. “Lugbol!”
In truth, he was hoping to spend the next day or three in the camp, sleeping, squagging, and allowing four of his wounded warriors to recover from their injuries. One of his trophies was a large keg of yellow liquid that looked like piss, tasted like honey, and hit the skull harder than ale, wine, or club. He didn’t know what it was called, but he fully intended to drain it with the help of a few select companions this evening. It was a pity no females had been permitted; a few abokhi’agh would just about make for a perfect way to spend a lazy afternoon. There were a few she-men in the prisoner corral, but Lugbol was more in the mood for some relaxed and drunken squagging than having his ears assaulted by the piercing shrieks of a raped man. Rape was a fine thing when the dead enemy was strewn about, smoke was in one’s nostrils, and one’s blood was up, but for now it struck him as being more akin to work than pleasure. Especially considering how he only had one good arm at his disposal at the moment.
He watched the Maneater nod with satisfaction as the big orc looked over the shouting captains vying for his attention. Zlatagh laughed, a deep guttural sound, as he basked in the raw power of the moment. Two months of slaughter and victory had given him absolute control over the shugaba’ugh, and it was clear that he knew it.
“The auguries!” Zlatagh cried suddenly. “Bring forward the augurs! What say Gor-Gor?”
As the shouting dissolved into a general cheering, Lugbol saw a pair of heavily tattooed orcs with sharpened silver tusk-caps push into the center of the circle. They accompanied someone; at first Lugbol thought it might be a juvenile Man, but then he caught a sight of yellow-green skin and realized it was a goblin. Nearly half their troops were goblins; they had started out with ten thousand but thanks to the inevitable costs of the campaign, there were about fifteen hundred fewer of them now. The doomed creature looked wild with terror; he seemed to have a fair notion of his imminent fate. But he was silent and he did not struggle; there was literally nothing that a single goblin could do to save itself, not when surrounded by howling, blood-hungry orcs with arms twice the thickness of his legs.
The augury looked to be the usual entrail-reading. For some reason Lugbol had never quite grasped, Gor-Gor preferred to speak to his priests through the intestines of his lesser worshippers. Goblins were the preferred method of communication, though orcs, Men, and even large rats would do in a pinch. He noticed Gor-Gor never seemed to speak through either wolves or warboars, two martial commodities that were always in great demand.
The goblin broke his silence when one shaman kneeled down before him, then ripped open his stomach with both silver-tipped tusks. As the other shaman held the victim, chanting all the while, the killer began calling out the haruspictic ritual and reached into the goblin with both hands. Then he began walking backwards, pulling the dying goblin’s innards out. After taking seven steps, he gave three firm tugs, then finally released the bloody, stinking offal and let it fall with a wet thud. The other shaman followed his example, stepping back and finally allowing the moaning goblin to collapse, dying, to the ground.
Lugbol saw the shaman raise his bloody hands and call out to Gor-Gor. The shaman’s eyes suddenly rolled back into his head and he swayed back and forth, as if drunk, while looking over the entrails spread out upon the ground. He took a step forward, then another, holding his palms toward the ground with his fingers spread wide. It was as if he was feeling his way through something rising up from the spilled innards. Several of the shaman’s tattoos flared into life; a rune on his shoulder blazed red and began to smoke as it burned away his skin, but the shaman didn’t seem to feel or notice anything was wrong. With nothing but the whites of his eyes showing, he began to grunt and growl. Gradually, the guttural noises became discernible as words.
“Fire,” he rumbled. “Fire burns. Demon wings of fire, burning, burning. Demons, iron demons, and death.”
The shugaba’ugh looked at each other, confused. This was not how the ritual usually proceeded. Zlatagh’s eyes narrowed and he made as if to step forward, then the big orc stopped himself. Even a warleader would not dare to lay claws upon a shaman in the holy grip of Gor-Gor.
“Death come, death come, on fire and iron, death come to all!” The shaman’s voice rose into a shriek and he thrust his bloody hands skyward. Then, he began to shake and shiver, as if Gor-Gor was attempting to rid himself of his puppet. Finally, the shaman collapsed face-first on the ground, where he lay motionless except for his labored breathing. Smoke, stinking of burned flesh, rose from three or four blackened tattoos on his back and shoulders.
“The Hell he say? What does that mean?” a furious Zlatagh demanded of the other shaman. One might have almost thought that he was alarmed. “What was the damn augury?” Lugbol looked around at his fellow shugaba’ugh. They were agitated and alarmed, with one significant exception. Snaghak, alone among the warband captains, wore an expression that was full of fury. He no longer looked triumphant, he looked downright vengeful. And, for once, Lugbol thought, Snaghak’s hatred didn’t appear to be directed at him. He stifled a dismissive snort and returned his attention to Zlatagh, who had grabbed the smaller shaman by his tattooed shoulders and was shaking him while shouting in his face.
“I don’t know!” the smaller orc pleaded. “I swear, I swear by Gor-Gor’s tail, I don’t know what happened!”
Zlatagh snarled in disgust and shoved the tattooed orc away from him. Then a groan from the fallen shaman caught the big orc’s attention and he whirled around to see the shaman, his skin still smoking slightly, trying to push himself up from the ground. The injured shaman failed the first time with a barely muted cry, then his muscles bulged with effort as he succeeded in rising to his knees on his second attempt. He didn’t seem to have known what happened to him earlier, because he suddenly winced and looked down at the burns on his shoulders with an expression of pained surprise.
“You!” Zlatagh said, reaching out and pulling the shaman to his feet. “What did you do? What thing did you see in the guts there? What secrets did Gor-Gor tell you?”
The shaman rolled his eyes and slumped in the warleader’s grasp. His initial reply was a drawn-out groan, but when the warleader violently shook him, it seemed to pull him out of his swoon. “I saw death. Everywhere, death.”
“Whose death! The Man cities?”
“No,” the stricken shaman said. He stared intensely into Zlatagh’s face. “Ours. Everywhere, all throughout the woods, I saw orcs dead on the ground, murdered, all of them, by demons of fire and iron!”
“You lie!” Zlatagh shouted instinctively, before driving an oversized fist into the shaman’s tattooed face. There was a loud crunch and the shaman crumpled as if he’d been cloven through the head with a dwarven axe. Whether the shaman was dead or not, Lugbol couldn’t tell, but he wouldn’t be surprised either way.
Zlatagh pointed at the other shaman, who was cringing behind the corpse of the goblin. “You, read the bloody guts! And tell me the truth or I’ll rip your balls out of your sack and feed them to you!”
In Selenoth, the war drums are beating throughout the land. The savage orcs of Hagahorn and Zoth Ommog are on the move, imperiling Man, Dwarf, and Elf alike. The Houses Martial of Amorr have gone to war with each other, pitting legion against legion, and family against family as civil war wracks the disintegrating Empire. In the north, inhuman wolf-demons besiege the last redoubt of Man in the White Sea, while in Savondir, the royal house of de Mirid desperately prepares to defend the kingdom against an invading army that is larger than any it has ever faced before. And in the underground realm of the King of Iron Mountain, a strange new enemy has begun attacking dwarf villages throughout the Underdeep.
Beneath the widespread violence that has seized all Selenoth in its grasp, a select few are beginning to recognize the appearance of a historic pattern of almost unimaginable proportions. Are all these conflicts involving Orc, Elf, Man, and Dwarf the natural result of inevitable rivalries, or are they little more than battlegrounds in an ancient war that began long before the dawn of time?
Epic fantasy at its deepest and most intense. A SEA OF SKULLS is Book II in the ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series that began with A THRONE OF BONES.
A SEA OF SKULLS is 449 pages, DRM-free, and retails for $5.99 on Amazon and at Castalia House. This is the early edition of the book; those who purchase it now will receive a free copy of the 850-page final edition in ebook format if they a) buy the book on Amazon and send a copy of the Kindle receipt to voxday-at-gmail-dot-com right away or b) buy the book from the Castalia House store.
UPDATE: just to be perfectly clear, New Release subscribers are free to download the bonus book from John Van Stry regardless of where they purchase A Sea of Skulls.
Every author faces a few decisions when he writes a book, particularly when writing a sequel. Be driven by the market or be driven by the vision. Write more of the same that has proven popular or go where the story takes you. These are not binary decisions, but a series of gradients, and while the consequences of those decisions vary, there are no right or wrong decisions per se, only more effective and less effective decisions which depend entirely upon the perspective.
I made two choices in writing the second book of Arts of Dark and Light, and I have no idea if my decisions will prove to be popular or not. The first decision was that it had to be better from my perspective and more true to my original vision than its predecessor was. That’s why it has taken longer to write. Before, I was only dealing in existing human cultures. Now, I had to work in 3+ inhuman cultures as well, which proved considerably more difficult. The second decision was to increase the contrast. A moral dilemma where there is neither potential loss to the character nor moral consequence is no true dilemma. A choice that is obvious to everyone but an idiot is no true choice. Good people do bad things, and bad people do good things, but the character of a man is seldom defined by a single act. And, I decided, even the most minor character deserves to be taken seriously, presented fairly, and speak with his own voice. Or her own voice. As an example of what I mean by that, here is a sample of the text at Castalia House.
In other words, this is a “damn the torpedoes” book. It should be interesting to learn who likes it better than A THRONE OF BONES and who likes it less. But I hope you will enjoy it, and I hope those of you who read it will be as diligent about posting serious and substantive reviews as you were with its predecessor.
As a side note, I find it incredible to observe that, according to Amazon’s page count, there is now more Selenoth, with 1837 pages of Summa Elvetica + A Throne of Bones + A Sea of Skulls, than there is Middle Earth proper, with 1531 for Lord of the Rings + The Hobbit. It’s not as good, of course – how could it possibly be – but it is worthy of the title “epic”. I should mention that there will be print editions in April-May and they will be the final edition.
Thanks very much to Matthew, Robert, and Kirk for all their hard work in getting this out before the end of the year.
When I was completing my Appendix N series back at the tail end of 2015, let me tell you… it felt like I was just about the only one. Not that I was the first, by any stretch. Ron Edwards and James Maliszewski had trod the same path before me. But the thing is… I couldn’t square how obvious my observations were next to the fact that nobody in the book scene seemed be saying anything remotely in the same vein. It was baffling, really. Sometimes it seemed like there was really only one or two people that even “got” what I was trying to do.
It’s ironic given how I much I’ve written about mass media’s conquest of the imagination, but really… I couldn’t imagine that changing. I should have known better. Working out the actual history of science fiction and fantasy was like putting a puzzle together with no box lid, no edge pieces, and several pieces on the table from entirely different pieces. It took a while. And when it finally started to come together, something happened. There was (and I’m not exaggerating) a kind of sea change in the book discussion scene.
All of it’s documented right here on the Castalia House blog in my Sensor Sweep link roundups. What’s going on exactly…? Well, if you are into classic Dungeons & Dragons you might recognize it as being similar to the Old School Revival that swept over the role-playing game bloggers several years ago. (Cirsova is an obvious counterpart to, say, Fight On! and Knockspell, for instance.) Beyond that, it’s becoming increasingly clear that people that are exposed to the science fiction and fantasy canon don’t just want to talk about it. They want to create!
What does this mean for readers…? It means that awesome things are on the way! If you want a preview, then check out the fifteen book bloggers that I’ve singled out as the best of 2016.
15. Hooc Ott — Ah, the number of times that I’ve been told that Appendix N was just a list of books that Gygax liked. No it wasn’t. Zelazny’s Amber stories thoroughly infuse an iconic adventure module for the classic expert set. And Edgar Rice Burroughs was not just a primary influence on the formation of D&D. He was an essential inspiration to Conan in particular and thus swords and sorcery in general. The only people are still in denial about just exactly Appendix N is at this point are the ones that have blocked Hooc Ott on Twitter.
14. James Cambias of Just the Caffeine Talking — If you don’t know who James Cambias is, well… I’ll hazard a guess that you were never into space themed role-playing games. He wrote or co-wrote a lot of the big ones. He also writes a blog that has more than its fair share of references to classic games and old school science fiction and fantasy. His Nostalgie Du Geek is a must-read series in my book, as are his posts on Game Mechanics. (If you don’t have strong opinions about that last one, then you aren’t a gamer.) He dips into movies on occasion as well, but the post of his this year that got the biggest reaction from me was The Worst Science Fiction Writer Ever which completely destroyed one of my favorite characters of all time.
13. John C. Wright — Jon Mollison nailed it when he tweeted the other day: “I’m starting to think John C. Wright is the spider at the center of an all-encompassing web.” I thought that was hyperbole until I went back through his posts for the year. If you look past the rants on the usual geek culture meltdowns, the political posts, and the analysis of “Morlock” thinking… you really can see Wright was endorsing key players in the scene well before any of this became a “thing.”.
1.0 out of 5 stars This book sets up a false binary from the start … By PinkGandhi on December 9, 2016 Format: Kindle Edition This book sets up a false binary from the start and then goes to prove its case on these terms. It is for the simple minded.
How fortunate that there are so many simple-minded people who troubled to read it.
I also have some other book-related news. As you know, the 500-page early edition of A SEA OF SKULLS will be out soon, most likely next week. There will be two ways to acquire it:
Buy it for $7.99 at the Castalia store. We will send out the 900-page final edition when it is completed in the late spring, which is when the paperback and hardcover editions will also be released. There will be no print editions of the early edition.
Buy it for $5.99 at Amazon, then update in the spring.
We expect most people to prefer Amazon and we will absolutely be willing to send out updates to everyone who buys from Amazon and send us a copy of a purchase invoice dated December 2016, but we are aware that there are people who are liable to fall through the cracks that way.
Take this with a grain of salt, of course, given that an author finishing a novel is among the least trustworthy of judges, but the initial internal reviews of ASOS have been positive. I was determined to avoid both the sophomore slump and middle-book syndrome, as well as GRRM’s patented perspective-character metastasization, and it would appear that I have been successful in doing so. ASOS is a harsher book than ATOB, but then, that is because it provides a glimpse into some harsher cultures than that of Amorr.
In Selenoth, the race of Man is on the ascendant. The ancient dragons sleep. The ghastly Witchkings are no more; their evil power destroyed by the courage of Men and the fearsome magic of the Elves. The Dwarves have retreated to the kingdoms of the Underdeep, the trolls hide in their mountains, and even the savage orc tribes have learned to dread the iron discipline of Amorr’s mighty legions. But after four hundred years of mutual suspicion, the rivalry between two of the Houses Martial that rule the Amorran Senate threatens to turn violent, and unrest sparks rebellion throughout the imperial provinces.
In the north, the barbarian reavers who have long plagued the coasts of the White Sea unexpectedly plead for the royal protection of the King of Savondir, as they flee a vicious race of wolf-demons who have invaded their islands. And in the distant east, the war drums echo throughout the mountains as orcs and goblins gather in vast numbers, summoned by their bestial gods.
Epic fantasy at its deepest and most gripping. Military fiction at its most fantastic. A THRONE OF BONES is Book I in the ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series. Available in both paperback and case-bound hardcover.
Thanks to Matt, Robert, Markku, and Kirk, who somehow managed to find the time to get this out before next week’s release of the early edition of Book II, and in between all of the other new releases to boot. Although the text is the same, it has had another round of deep proofreading and is a completely revamped print edition. Despite being Royal Octavo and larger than the Marcher Lord hardcover, it clocks in at 922 pages.
Scott Cole of the Castalia House blog interviews Castalia author John C. Wright about his recently completed trilogy, (and first quarter of his MOTH & COBWEB duodecology) The Green Knight’s Squire, which consists of the following three books:
Scott Cole: After reading both books my thought is the series is influenced by The Once and Future King and shares similarities with the Book of Revelations (i.e. descriptions of some of the beasts, especially at the first elf tournament), Shakespeare, Narnian anthropomorphism, and Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch along with a multiple mythological references.
John C Wright: You are a little off, but not too far. Any similarity with Lukyanenko’s NIGHT WATCH is pure coincidence. Shakespeare I certainly steal from, but I don’t recall stealing anything from Narnia, aside from a mood. I am not a fan of T.S. White; I take my Arthuriana from Mallory and the Mabinogion and Tennyson’s IDYLLS OF THE KING. Alan Gardner’s WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN is also an inspiration.
Since the book is called SWAN KNIGHT’S SON’S SQUIRE, expect to see the events of THE SWAN KNIGHT’S SON played out. Also, I decided to borrow the bad guys from G.K. Chesterton’s THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, and to make Gil a member of the Last Crusade.
SC:What was the inspiration for the Moth and Cobweb series?
JCW: Once upon a time I asked my editor, Vox Day, what I could write that would reach a wider audience. He suggested writing something aimed at the juvenile market, and said that talking animals were always popular. He also admired my short story ‘A Parliament of Beast and Birds’ which appeared in the anthology BOOK OF FEASTS AND SEASONS.
The mystery of where writers get their ideas is a perennial one, but the truth is that we have no more ideas than anyone else. The difference is that, unlike muggles, we write our ideas down and use them. Every writer I have ever met keeps a notebook in purse or pocket or in his smartphone where he jots down ideas.
So, I threw the idea of a talking animal into the pot and looked through my notebook of unused ideas to find what else might go into the stew. Usually a writer needs three ideas to get the ball rolling.
I had the germ of an idea that had been in the back of my mind for some years, a juvenile originally set in a mythical place called Uncanny Valley, Nevada, where four seniors in high school, cousins, each had to do an apprenticeship or internship over the summer with one or another of their mad uncles. Instead of the normal jobs, because some of their uncles were from beyond the fields we know, the kids end up being a squire to a knight, the sidekick to a superhero, a sorcerer’s apprentice, or something of the sort.
A second idea came not from my notebook but from my wife’s Harry Potter inspired role playing game. Like all the games we run, we made up our own rules. In her role playing game, she decided that in addition to buying character stats like strength or scholarship, dexterity and intelligence, you could also buy social stats like fortune, friends, fame, and family. So, for example, an orphan with a vast bank account would have a zero in family and high marks in fortune, whereas a poor boy from a large and supportive family would have the opposite.
One innovation in her rule system, which I had not seen used elsewhere, was that each player had a star he could use to mark one stat and only one he had purchased, and this carried a secret benefit revealed in the course of the game. So, for example, putting a star in scholarship gave the character total recall. Putting the star in family meant you were a member of the largest and most supportive extended family imaginable, the children of the seneschal of Titania, the Moths. This did not give you any magic powers, but it meant that you had uncles and cousins both in the human world and beyond, including royalty, famous scientists, mermaids, and so on. Indeed, my wife had umpired more than one game with these rules, so it became sort of a running joke that I always played a member of the Moth family. My first character was named Dusty Moth, and he was a cowboy from Utah, and an amateur alchemist, who had the blood of elves in his background.
The third idea came from the song ERLKOENIG or the medieval tale of TAM LIN, where a boy is being sold by the elfs to hell. I had noticed that elfs and fairy creatures from the days before Tolkien and Gary Gygax, and indeed from before Shakespeare’s MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, were actually quite spooky and frightening, not the pretty and twee tween girls of Disney’s Tinkerbell cartoons.
I noticed traces of the sulfurous scent of the inferno clinging even to such recent and childish works as DARBY O’GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE, a favorite film of mine, based on an older series of books, where the Leprechauns are terrified by the powers of a parish priest, whose blessings and exorcisms can shrivel them. Even in the lighthearted Disney version, as in the original books, the elfs are angelic beings who neither aided Satan during his rebellion, nor fought on the side of Heaven, and so were cast out of paradise, but not all the way to Hell.
It’s a really good interview. Read the rest of it there. And the books are really good as well. If you ever enjoyed Susan Cooper or Lloyd Alexander, you will almost certainly enjoy John C. Wright’s MOTH & COBWEB series.
Castalia author Peter Grant, the author of the post-Civil War western Brings the Lightning, has just published a new book in his Maxwell Saga, Stoke the Flames Higher. We don’t publish this military SF series in ebook, although I’m pleased to announce that Castalia will be publishing all five books of the Maxwell Saga in print and audio, as well as all three books of Peter’s Laredo series, the third of which we will be publishing in ebook as well. Peter has posted an excerpt from the new book, and I can confirm that you don’t have to have read the four preceding volumes in order to pick up the story here.
Peter had considerable military experience in South Africa and it shows in his writing; he knows whereof he writes.
Also, Peter has reviewed the input of his readers regarding one of his next projects, and he has decided to proceed with the space detective story, which he apparently intends to bring to Castalia. I’m delighted to hear that, since, as QUANTUM MORTIS fans know, I’m rather partial to space detective stories myself. In the unlikely event he would like to situate it there, instead of in the Maxwell universe, he’ll certainly have my permission. But regardless, we’ll be more than happy to publish it. And yes, this is actually how we work, with our publishing decisions not only being made without our involvement, but sometimes without our knowledge.
In other book news, I experimented with Amazon’s new KDP paperback system yesterday, and a paperback version of On the Question of Free Trade was the result. I chose it because a) we were never going to get around to doing it via our normal system, and, b) it struck me as the sort of book you might want to give someone or carry around to use as a reference in an economics course. I have to confess, I was VERY disappointed to learn that the system is nothing more than an integrated version of the CreateSpace system, as I thought it was going to auto-generate a print layout from the Kindle file. I expect that’s what Amazon ultimately has in mind, but they certainly aren’t anywhere near there yet.
Since some of our authors will no doubt be curious about it, here are the pros and cons I observed.
PROS
It’s pretty easy to use and the Cover Creator’s limitations should ensure that you can’t screw up the spine placement very easily.
It’s fast. It takes about one week to get a published book up on Amazon through our usual system. This took only 12 hours. However, it doesn’t automatically connect to the Kindle edition any more automatically than non-KDP-published books, which is a little odd.
The printing price is pretty good. $2.15 for a small book like that one, and eighty-five cents plus 1.2 cents per page for up to 828 pages.
You can upload your own cover images and use them in a variety of ways in the Content Creator.
It doesn’t cost anything and it’s integrated with KDP. This will take yet another chunk out of the mainstream publishers, and in combination with Kindle Unlimited, will probably cause the Big Five to shrink to four, and possibly three.
Although you can’t just use the Kindle file, you can provide either a formatted PDF or an unformatted Word document for the text.
They give you a free ISBN.
CONS
The 40 percent slice that Amazon takes in addition to the print charge is pretty hefty. This will preclude most independent publishers from using it. We’ll probably use it for some books, like On War and some of our less popular books that aren’t even on the print production list, but it will never be our primary option.
I’ve never heard anything good about the quality of the CreateSpace paperbacks and there is no reason to believe these will be any better. There was a reason we looked for a better alternative from the start. I’ll be very interested to know what people make of now On the Question of Free Tradeturned out because I have absolutely no idea. So, please consider yourself warned in that regard.
Distribution is limited to Amazon. CreateSpace tried to claim otherwise, which wasn’t really true, but Amazon isn’t even bothering to try. Amazon is the big dog, but it’s not the only market out there and an increasing percentage of our book sales are print books sold though other resellers. Although we still tend to think of ourselves as an epublisher, and barely half our books are even available in print editions, 40 percent of our sales are now in print.
The ISBN is only good for use on Amazon.
There is no way to identify the publisher or imprint.
Conclusion: absolutely great for self-publishers, of minor interest to authors with publishers, a potentially useful second option for low-margin independent publishers, and a complete nightmare for high-margin traditional publishers. I expect most successful authors are going to increasingly gravitate to the Peter Grant approach, and making publication decisions based on a series-by-series basis. As for me, I think I will use it to publish all of my collected WND columns in a two-volume paperback set, which will be useful for my own reference, if nothing else.
And finally, in case you missed it over the weekend, Back From the Dead by Rolf Nelson is finally available in paperback and hardcover editions. Don’t think you’ve seen the end of the book shilling either, because we have no less than FOUR (4) big announcements to make before Christmas.
Speaking of which, I would like 10 volunteer reviewers who are familiar with ATOB. If you’re a) interested in reviewing ASOS and b) you’ve already reviewed ATOB on Amazon, please send me an email with ASOS in the subject and a link to your review on Amazon.
Helton Strom is just a guy between contracts when he runs afoul of both planetary officialdom and space pirates. He is left with nothing but the clothes on his back, and not even a citizenship to his name. Is the ancient, broken-down military surplus starship and the young lady living aboard it the key to a bright future, or will his repairs and new mercenary friends reawaken the demons lurking in the ship’s murky and lethal past?
BACK FROM THE DEAD is the first book in The Stars Came Back series. It is a space western, the story of regular folks just trying stay alive, seeking work to earn money for repairs to get to the next job, with no shortage of action and adventure along the way. It is military sci-fi, featuring a company of mercenaries, spaceship combat, mortar and rifle combat, spear-and-shield battle, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And it is a philosophical investigation, pondering everything from the lessons of Achilles to how one stops a bar fight with earplugs.
The space liner’s lounge is sparse and spare, dim with the faint, reddish light that indicates the night shift. A few round ports and several screens line the walls above solidly mounted furniture. Helton slouches at an angle, half-facing Art, an elderly businessman with a dazed expression on his face and a drink in his hand, looking absently out one of the larger viewing ports. His coat is in a heap on another chair, and his bag supports his feet. “By the time it was over, virtually all my assets were forfeited on the spot, I’d been stripped of citizenship, and searched by the Blue Gloves way more personally than I’d like. How?” He shakes his head slowly in disbelief. “How did we get here?”
“It could be worse,” the old man says quietly. “You are here, yes?”
Helton stares at him, incredulous. “Well, yeah, but–”
“Not in jail. Not in uniform.”
“They wouldn’t–”
“Still breathing.”
Comprehension dawns on Helton’s face. He takes a drink, then says, “But I don’t understand. Why?”
“They get a percentage of any fines or forfeitures they assess, as an ‘incentive’ to be attentive to the letter of the law. Likely you were put on a list some time ago, and this was just the easiest opportunity to make you go away. If they hadn’t gotten busy with that bomb on Level Eight, you might still be there.”
“Wha…? Bomb? Nobody said anything about a bomb.”
“The disturbance that called them away?”
“But that was some sort of transformer explosion in an electrical vault…”
Art looks as him with a slight shake of his head and a knowing, apologetic smile on his face. “Always buy a round trip ticket. Always have the appearance that you have good reason to come back, and no plans to do otherwise. Terrorist, separatists, false flag — makes no difference.”
“You…?”
“You are just now realizing what’s been going on these last months and years?”
Helton says, feebly, not even accepting his own excuse, “Been busy.”
“People have had to flee on a moment, packing light, for thousands of years. The warning signs of collapse are always the same. The debt. The scapegoats. The lies. The ‘temporary emergency measures.’ I cut it closer than I should have.” Art shrugs and takes a drink from his own glass. “My family is all safely away, and everything else shipped ahead for us by others.” A small, sympathetic smile crosses his wizened face. “It looks like you won’t be returning, either.”
Helton looks at him in disbelief, frowning, brows knit. Quietly, in shock, he says to himself, “Homeless.” He turns his gaze back to the port, staring blankly.
“You are lucky, though,” Art says.
“If this is lucky, I’d hate to see unlucky.”
“They picked you clean, but they let you leave.” He looks intensely at Helton. “Think. What do you have? Where are you going?”
He shrugs, waves to his coat and bag. “My sister’s.”
“And?”
Helton shakes his head, still not sure what Art is asking. Art taps his temple, then his chest. Then waves to the room around them, at the glass in Helton’s hand. Slowly, forcing himself to think positively, Helton taps his temple. “I have … useful skills … and knowledge.” He touches his chest. “I’m heading for family … who will welcome me. Work. I’m not sucking vacuum or” he holds up his glass, “dying of thirst in a desert. Better off than Odysseus meeting Nausicaä.”
A big smile spreads across the old man’s face. “A man of education.”
“Not enough. Didn’t see this coming.”
“It will serve you well. Never forget your assets, just because you acquired some new liabilities. Have faith in yourself, and you’ll be okay. God works in mysterious ways.”
Helton looks at Art silently for a long moment. He drains his glass, unconvinced.
Castalia author Peter Grant, of Brings the Lightning fame, is polling people about his next open project slot:
The book for the second quarter of 2017 is where I’m looking for your input. I have the following possibilities, all of which are partially written or plotted out already.
A heroic fantasy novel. Sword and sorcery in the classic tradition, with good triumphing over evil (of course!). The first draft of this novel is about 45% complete.
Another fantasy novel, less in the ‘heroic’ tradition, but including sword and sorcery in a more formal military setting. Think late Middle Ages or early Renaissance in a European-style country. First draft is about 30% complete.
A space detective novel, set in the Maxwell universe and tying in with the Maxwell Saga from time to time (i.e. characters from both series will get together). First draft is about 30% complete.
A mil-sci-fi novel set in the Maxwell universe, but with completely new characters. The idea would be to establish a backstory from which the character might meet and/or work with Steve Maxwell in future books. Plotted out, but not yet begun.
If you care to weigh in, you can do so at his blog.
