#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Castalia Library is happy to report the successful test-stamping of JUNIOR CLASSICS VOL. 7, HEROES OF HISTORY at the bindery. There are more details available at the Castalia Library substack.
Also, as a result of the reader poll, it has been decided that it will be STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS by Sir Charles Oman that will be serialized on the substack. The serialization will begin tomorrow.
We’re pleased to report a few new developments that will be of interest to Library and History subscribers. First, the test stamping of Castalia History Book 2 was successful and you can see the results at the new Castalia Library substack. These are promising to be our most aesthetically successful books yet. While we are still utilizing the mailing list and the LibraryThing group, too many subscribers have somehow been falling through the cracks, so we’ve created this new substack that everyone who is interested can follow either through the site or the emails.
Second, since there won’t be daily updates, at least not until we’re doing a LOT more books, we are going to be serializing one of our Library books there. There isn’t much point in doing Dracula, since there is already an extremely popular substack dedicated to serializing that, so we’re giving you the choice of one of four current or coming Library/History books. There is a poll there running for the next two days, so feel free to make your voice heard.
And third, speaking of serialization, we’ve set up a substack dedicated to the Junior Classics. This may or may not be of any interest to those who already have them, in leather, hardcover, or ebook, but we think it is a good way of helping bring them to the attention of homeschool parents and others who have never heard of the Junior Classics.
If you’re wondering why we’re utilizing Substack now, the fact that the Sigma Game substack already has 137k views in little more than two weeks should suffice to explain it. I expect it to surpass this blog in terms of traffic by the time the book comes out.
We’re also working hard on getting production caught up, and the leathers for both volumes of War and Peace as well as four other books are being ordered now that we have the final size of the interiors. On the bindery front, both hubbing tools have been made and the first one will be tested as soon as the coming week. That’s the last major challenge we face before Team Europe can start tackling The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Book 4 in the Castalia History series, the subscription book for January-February-March, is Studies in the Napoleonic Wars by Sir Charles Oman. This is an excellent book that will be enjoyed by those who are familiar with Napoleonics as well as by those who are not. It’s esoteric enough to appeal to the subject matter expert while also being sufficiently accessible and interesting to those who know nothing about military history.
To subscribe to Castalia History, click here. Please note that Books 2 and 3 are already sold out. We are therefore increasing the print run for Book 4 from 550 to 650 books.
Also, the January newsletter has been sent out to all of the Library, Libraria, and History subscribers on the mailing list. If you are a subscriber who did not receive the email, email me and request being added to the mailing list. Of possible interest is the discount code for a complimentary copy of A SEA OF SKULLS, the complete edition, as previously promised. A complimentary copy of THE ALTAR OF HATE is also included.
Another good way to stay up to date is to join the Castalia Library Collectors group on LibraryThing. It also serves as a useful reference for the historical subscriptions.
We have not yet announced the January-February book for the Library/Libraria subscription as we are waiting to see if we can announce a new acquisition in time for this yet or not. We anticipate making that announcement sometime in the next two weeks.
This is a previously unreleased excerpt from the newly released full edition of A SEA OF SKULLS, which is now available in an ebook edition at the Arkhaven store.
Lugbol growled and slapped at one of the forest’s infernal insects that was busily engaged in biting his left bicep. He crushed it under his horny palm, felt a pop, and looked down to see he’d smeared his own dark green blood along with the remnants of the bug that had bitten him across his upper arm. He shook his head, knowing that the bite was going to start itching momentarily, then slapped fruitlessly at another one that had just bitten his calf.
“I don’t remember them being this bad before,” he complained.
“They had all the dead to feed on then,” Ghurash replied. Even though it had been less than three weeks since they’d fled the dark shadows of the Korokhurmagh, already the denizens of the forest had all but picked the thousands of dead bodies clean of flesh. They were rapidly approaching the western edge of the great wood and soon they would be encroaching on the true Man lands, not merely the pillaging the small villages and hamlets that had been carved out of the trees by the lesser tribes and clans.
The Hagahorn’ugh had been cocky and full of contempt for the martial abilities of the Szavon’agh as they passed through the burned-out remains of the villages overrun by Zlatagh’s army, but they gradually fell silent and their mood turned grim as they began to come across one large-skulled, thick-boned skeleton after another. There were few Man skeletons, and the bones of those they encountered were eagerly snatched up and divided among sqwaaks and younger kors seeking clubs or remains to decorate their armor.
More than a dozen fights broke out over the Man bones, the worst of which began when a boar rider commandeered a large thigh bone another kor had intended for a club, then cracked it open and sucked out the marrow. By the time Lugbol and Karnuhg, one of the cavalry grun-kors, managed to put a stop to the fracas, four mountain orcs and two Black Fists were dead, and another Hagahornu was so badly wounded that he ended up in the cookpot that evening.
The kral chewed him out for the needless death of his orcs, of course, but Lugbol had the sneaking suspicion that the older orc was secretly impressed at how Lugbol’s veteran kors managed to more than hold their own against the bigger mountain orcs. In fact, knowing that Lugbol, being Goghu and half the size of his Hagahornu officers, could never pose a threat to his rule, Nekheru had proven increasingly inclined to give his new hadvezer more responsibilities as they marched through the forest toward the Man lands. In addition to commanding the light infantry and the goblin cavalry, Lugbol was now serving as the liason between the farkh’agh and the various shugaba’ugh and grun-kors whose kors had the annoying habit of feasting upon their fellow marching companions whenever they couldn’t find adequate meat to sate their appetites.
Two large goblins, wearing the ornate headgear favored by their shugaba’agh, approached him now, escorted by a nervous-looking bodyguard of twelve lightly-armored yellowskins carrying pikes. Lugbol groaned. Given the angry expressions on their hook-chinned, hook-nosed faces, he had a pretty good idea of why they were coming to see him, even though they were attached to units outside his command.
Castalia House is pleased to announce that the full text of A SEA OF SKULLS is now complete at an estimated 914 pages and is available in a new ebook edition at the Arkhaven store for $7.99. This is the initial text edition and therefore lacks an appendix and the additional images that will be added to the print edition, which is expected to be released in the spring and should clock in around 924 pages.
A coupon for a free download will be sent out to the readers who purchased the abbreviated edition back in 2016 and sent in their proofs of purchase from Amazon. The first batch have gone out already, the remainder will go out before midnight. If you don’t get one, or if you didn’t send in your Kindle proof of purchase for it already, please don’t do so now. I’m sure it will be on the various pirate sites before the weekend is out. The coupon for a free download will also be provided to all Castalia Library, Libraria Castalia, and Castalia History subscribers in the December monthly newsletter, which will go out next week.
Merry Christmas, Librarians…
The two leather volumes will be included in the Castalia Library and Libraria Castalia subscriptions sometime next year. An audiobook+ edition will be released once Jeremy Daw has finished recording it. I do not intend to make either the ebook or the audiobook available through Amazon, at least not at this time.
I hope you will enjoy the latest edition to the epic fantasy saga. If you discover any typos or errata, please do not send emails to me as you encounter them, but compile a list and send it to me after you have finished the book. As we did with A THRONE OF BONES, we will do iterative corrections and update the ebook accordingly.
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 been 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?
For those who are interested in following along what Castalia is doing with the Library, we’re going to make a concerted effort to keep the Castalia Library Collectors group up to date. The group is approved admission only, so feel free to sign up and then request permission to join the group. Among other things, it has official lists of what the past and present subscription books are for Library/Libraria, History, as well as the non-subscription books.
And while it’s too soon to announce any specifics, I’m very pleased to be able to say we have reached agreements with three major publishers regarding books we plan to offer as separate subscriptions. In a few special cases, one book, or at most two books, in the series will be offered as part of either the Library or the History subscription, but in such cases we will design the book(s) in such a way as to make it clear to which subscription it belongs.
On the bindery front, we still have one final issue to resolve, and two issues that we believe are resolved, but must be further tested to ensure they are, in fact, resolved, before we declare it fully operational and begin work on Heidi (Deutsch) and the two Homers.
TLDR: Since July 2014, Amazon has used Kindle Unlimited to transfer $5 billion to itself that would have otherwise gone to authors and publishers under the traditional ebook sales royalty arrangement.
Our original plan for Castalia House, launched in 2013, was to focus entirely on publishing ebooks. After all, ebooks were the future, the technologies were only going to improve, and the level playing field of Amazon allowed even a solitary self-publisher to compete with the star authors of the Big Five publishers. The industry analysts even projected that total US ebook revenues would rise from $2.34 billion to $8.6 billion by 2018!
Sure, there were some minor concerns about Amazon’s launch of 47 North and other genre publishing imprints in 2011, especially since its cherry-picked authors seemed to be sitting at the top of the various bestseller lists for inordinately long periods of time, but no one, besides the Big Five, was at all concerned about Amazon, which was making around 35 percent of every ebook sale, turning on the writers who were making the Kindle platform so successful and making bank by doing so. It was a win-win situation, or so everyone thought.
In retrospect, that unnecessary desire to take advantage of the ability to offer its own products on its own platform was the tell that everyone missed, including us.
Kindle Unlimited was launched in April 2014. And while many authors were dubious about putting their books into the exclusive Kindle Select program, Castalia House initially regarded it with indifference. It seemed harmless, and a potentially good way to reach new readers, who might become future buyers once they became familiar with new authors through the monthly all-you-can-read buffet. My original response was as follows:
However, by December 2014, I’d changed my mind on the last point.
Castalia House did end up dabbling a little in the Kindle Select waters for a time, but by 2018, we’d recognized that the situation was an unfolding disaster for every single writer and every single publishing house. That’s why we turned our efforts to direct sales, created Castalia Library, and pulled all of our books from Audible and Kindle Select. We don’t even sell our ebooks on Amazon anymore, much less participate in the Kindle Select program, and November 2023 was the best sales month we’ve ever had. Amazon is now entirely irrelevant to us.
But the overall situation in the publishing industry has turned out to be even worse than we believed it to be, and recall, we believed it was bad enough to entirely jump ship and start building our own distribution network before most people even thought there was a serious problem.
Considerably more details on the next page. If you’re a writer, you definitely need to continue reading.
Continue reading “The Literary Catastrophe of Kindle Unlimited”The December book of the month is THE THOUSAND WORLDS, a hardcover omnibus that includes three science fiction novels by Rod Walker: MUTINY IN SPACE, ALIEN GAME, and YOUNG MAN’S WAR. They are written in the style of Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels, with a strong emphasis on themes of freedom, responsibility, and self-discipline.
THE THOUSAND WORLDS will be on sale at a 20 percent discount on the Arkhaven store for the month of December. Shipping is free, and the purchase also includes all three ebooks in DRM-free EPUB format.
A sample from MUTINY IN SPACE.
The night everything fell apart, I was sitting on the couch in my mom’s apartment, watching a video on my screen, when Sergei stalked inside. He had grown a scraggly beard that he thought made him look like a revolutionary, but just made him look dirty, and he had taken to wearing the unofficial uniform of the Social Party activists—black T-shirt, black jacket, and a black stocking cap all marked with a red fist that was supposed to represent the blood of the oppressed or something.
It was too hot for the jacket and the cap, but I didn’t tell Sergei that.
“Mom here?” said Sergei.
I shrugged. “Haven’t seen her. I was with Corbin all day.”
He sneered. “That loser?”
“He’s not a loser,” I said.
“He’s a reactionary,” said Sergei. “A running dog of the old order. When the revolution comes, men like him will learn their place.”
“He’s a starship mechanic,” I said, turning my attention back to my screen. “Men like him make three times more money than Mom.”
“Mom helps advance the cause of the revolution,” said Sergei. “Corbin repairs the machines of corporate profiteers.”
“Yep,” I said. “And when the revolution comes, he’ll repair the machines of the revolutionaries or they won’t be going anywhere.”
Continue reading “DECEMBER: The Thousand Worlds”Today is the last day of the extremely successful Castalia Library Thanksgiving Week Sale, in which Castalia is selling four Library books at a discount price of $69.99 for everyone in the USA and the UK. This includes both subscribers and non-subscribers alike; no discount codes are necessary or applicable to the books on sale. Free shipping is included.
Castalia Library is also selling four Libraria books at a discount price of $199.99. The same rules apply.
I can attest from personal experience there are very, very few Christmas gifts that are better received than a beautiful leatherbound book. So, it’s something you might want to consider even if you already have one of the sale books in your personal collection.
The sign is up and the Bindery is rapidly approaching full operational capability. We’re still waiting to resolve one issue, and to confirm the apparently successful resolution of two others, before we can seriously contemplate getting started on The Iliad and The Odyssey for the backers. But we are getting very close to full E-F-F-E-C-T otherwise known as EFFECT.
In the meantime, in case the announcement somehow escaped you, there are four Library and four Libraria books on sale for $69.99 and $199.99 respectively, including what may be the best value ever offered by Castalia Library, which is both THE LAWDOG FILES and THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES bound together in a single hilarious edition. Based on our experience in listening to the audiobook on a long trip in a car full of children, THE LAWDOG FILES would make for an excellent Christmas gift for any teenage or precocious reader with a sense of humor.
An excerpt from “SQUEAKER’S TALE“S, THE LAWDOG FILES
Many, MANY moons ago—and don’t even ask, ’cause I won’t tell you—when I was still a pup, the family lived in Nigeria. We had a bungalow at the Odibo Estates, out near the Biafran border. Every evening peddlers, called traders, used to walk up and down the main road, offering various knick-knacks and merchandise for sale or trade.
Ali Cheap-Cheap was one of the busier traders, and he spent a lot of time on our front porch haggling with Mom. Now, Ali Cheap-Cheap was very proud of his ability to acquire just about anything you might want or need.
One evening, Mom was visiting on the front porch with the visiting wife of one of the English engineers. Said wife had never been outside of London before, and as a consequence, she loathed Africa. She and Mom were chattering and griping when along came Ali Cheap-Cheap. Old Ali Cheap-Cheap didn’t have anything that Mom or the English lady wanted, so, before he wandered off, he asked if, “Madams want for anything?”
The English lady got a funny look in her eye, tapped her snake-hide purse and said, “I want one of these.” “Yes, madam,” replied Ali, and off he trotted.
About three weeks later, Mom and her new English friend were on the front porch again, when along came Ali Cheap-Cheap. With a friend. Ali and friend had a cane pole slung over their shoulders, and there was a burlap bag hanging from said pole.
Now, at this point I should mention that also on the front porch, in addition to the two ladies, was a Mongoose-a-minium, in which lived our pet kusimanse, or as it is known to science, Helogale parvula, the pygmy mongoose. This Mongoose-a-minium had a Plexiglas ceiling which Dad had assured us was unbreakable.
Riiiight.
Up to the porch came Ali Cheap-Cheap and his buddy.
Mom was eyeing the burlap bag with some trepidation, having had some nasty experiences with what the locals tended to store in burlap bags, when Ali and buddy proudly lifted the burlap bag and announced to the English lady, “Oh, madam! We have your beef!”
I should interject here that “Beef” is bush slang for any animal.
Wait for it.
Mom had risen to her full height, and was about to order Ali to get his beef away from her house, when Squeaker, our pygmy mongoose, wandered out of his apartment, and screamed in sheer outrage. It was always amazing how much sheer volume that little hairball could put out. Ali and his buddy were startled by the shriek and dropped the burlap sack onto the Plexiglass roof of Squeaker’s residence.
The unbreakable glass promptly shattered and caused the burlap sack and its contents to fall into the Mongoose-a-minium. It turned out that inside said sack was one observably scared 15-foot python.
Squeaker, who was about the size and girth of a tennis ball, offered up a brief prayer to the Mongoose God for the meal he was about to partake of, and latched onto the snake’s tail with tooth and claw.
The snake discovered that he has been dumped into a place which reeks of mongoose, panicked and attempted to slide up the side of the Mongoose-a-minium and down onto the porch, but was hindered in doing so by Squeaker, who was not only still firmly attached to the python’s tail, but was bracing all four legs against the wall to prevent his meal from getting away.
Did I mention that the snake was approximately fifteen feet long?
Squeaker didn’t even slow him down.