Tag: Castalia House

Readersource request

So, we’ve got something big to announce on Monday. And by big, I mean something that is going to enable Castalia House to take the next serious step forward as a publishing house.

While we have had a number of successes, from blowing up the Hugo Awards to Amazon bestsellers, the one area where we have been absolutely abysmal is in informing the media of anything we’re doing; despite being covered in every media publication from the Wall Street Journal to the New Zealand Herald, we have not sent out a single press release to anyone. So, while others are talking about us, we haven’t been publicizing our side of the story.

That’s going to change. But here’s where I need your help. I have a great list of media contacts in the game industry that dates back to 1988 and consists of literally hundreds of names and email addresses. My list in the publishing industry presently consists of 17 names and email addresses. That is genuinely pathetic.

So, if you’re interested in helping Castalia, what I would appreciate is if each of you would find ONE name of a journalist or blogger who regularly covers books or writes book reviews, and then email the following information to me:

NAME
PUBLICATION/SITE
EMAIL ADDRESS

Once you’ve done that, post the name and publication here so that others can see they’re checked off the list. And yes, it would be very funny indeed to send me John Scalzi’s email, but I’ve already got it, so you needn’t bother with that.

One useful trick, if you’re looking for the more esoteric publications such as military journals, is to see who has written about an author, or a similar author, before. For example, that list of 17 consists solely of journalists who have written about Martin van Creveld. If you happen to find a journalist that way, please mention the reference author and/or work as well. Thanks very much. I do appreciate it.

Also, Brainstorm Annual members, don’t forget that tonight’s event will feature Mike Cernovich talking about his latest book, Danger and Play: Essays on Embracing Masculinity. The event will begin at 5 PM Eastern.

Danger & Play Brainstorm

There was a little confusion as to time zones since Mike has been traveling. Just to be clear, the closed Brainstorm event for Mike’s new Embracing Masculinity book is on Saturday from 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM Eastern.

And in Castalia House news, I wanted to thank everyone who made the following possible. We’re doing our best to bring you the best books we can find and publish, but you’re the core support required to make them successful. And while the categories may be a little on the esoteric side, in the long term, don’t count us out for one day doing the same in the larger categories as well. But for now, two simultaneous #1 bestsellers isn’t bad, especially when you only publish one book each month.

UPDATE: It’s also worth noting that in the Military Strategy category, Castalia House currently publishes five of the top 40 bestsellers.

4th Generation Warfare Handbook

Written by the author of the landmark Maneuver Warfare Handbook and an
active-duty USMC officer with experience in Iraq, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook is the doctrine for a new generation of war. Over the last 40
years, the world has gradually entered into a post-Clausewitzian state
where the wars are undeclared, the battlefields can be anywhere, the
uniforms are optional, and the combatants as well as the targets are
often “civilian”. Conventional militaries have repeatedly attempted to
utilize technology to meet the new challenges posed, but even the most
advanced technology has provided little more than meaningless short-term
victories rendered futile in months, if not weeks.

This inability of Western governments and militaries to come to
terms with the changing nature of modern warfare has led to failed
interventions, failed occupations, and now even failed states everywhere
from Eastern Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And with the
recent mass movement of peoples around the world, 4th Generation Warfare
can be safely expected to appear in Western Europe and the United
States before long.

Drawing on their decades of experience with military history and
military action, the authors have distilled 4GW theory into a short,
concise, easily accessible handbook that provides the soldier, the
military analyst, and the civilian observer with a guide to
understanding and responding to the changing realities of this
challenging new form of war.

4th Generation Warfare Handbook is now available on Amazon for $6.99. If you preordered, you are eligible for a special Brainstorm event featuring the authors. Please send me an email with PREORDER in the subject if you wish to attend; the event has not yet been scheduled.

In an interesting juxtaposition, last night I finished putting the accepted submissions to There Will Be War Vol X in order. What was interesting was that the other non-fiction submissions tended to underline the importance of this handbook, as they both a) appealed to the use of new technology or a combination of 2nd and 3rd Generation tactics, and, b) indicated the need for the very sort of 4GW counterforce that Lind and LtCol Thiele describe in detail in 4th Generation Warfare Handbook. If you’re interested in reading more about 4GW theory, you’ll definitely want to read On War, which is now available on Kindle Unlimited, in which you can see how Lind gradually refined his thinking on the subject.

It will be interesting to see if this handbook eventually becomes officially adopted in the way its predecessor did in the 1980s. In any event, a belated Happy Birthday, Marines. Hope you like your new doctrine!

A belated collection

I’ve been wanting to get this collection of all the Selenoth short stories along with the first little novel together in ebook form since Marcher Lord published the hardcover, but I never quite managed to get around to it. But things have been going so swimmingly with regards to getting 4GW Handbook out the door – it’s pretty much good to go now, although we’ll spend the weekend going over it to see if we can clean up any more lurking typos – that I was able to spare a few hours over the last two evenings to add the additional six stories to the original Summa Elvetica, “Birth of an Order”, and “Master of Cats”. So if you want all the stories in one place, or if you haven’t read any of them, you can do so now in Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy & Other Stories. It’s also available via Kindle Unlimited, which makes this the obvious starting point for those thinking about dipping a toe into Selenoth.

Granted, dropping the neophyte reader into Latin pseudo-Aquinas with chapters headings such as IA Q. VII A. I ARG. I is probably not what the marketing experts would recommend, but if that sort of thing doesn’t at least make an epic fantasy reader curious, he should probably stick with Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks anyhow.

One of these days we’ll get it out in hardcover too one of these days. I have to say, of all the books in my library, the hardcover that Marcher Lord put out right before it was bought has the prettiest and most spiking spine of them all. Kirk did a great job of making it match the ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT covers while also setting it apart.

We also had a little Kindle Select confusion which temporarily resulted in our removing of both QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted and QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills from Amazon, but the matter was quickly resolved and both books are now up and available conventionally as well as through Kindle Unlimited.

It’s been so long since we bothered making any use of Smashwords that I simply forgot the books were up there. It’s really remarkable how completely Amazon has steamrolled the opposition. You would think that the Big Five publishers would have teamed up with Barnes & Noble to set up an online alternative by now, but they are too frightened to take the hit to their sales that collectively pulling their books from Amazon would entail. That’s why they will glide gracefully into literary history, in total denial all the while.

We’re under no illusions that it couldn’t happen to smaller independent publishers too, but we’re protected by declining marginal utility. Amazon can take all of the business away any time it wants, but why bother when it can simply take one-third the revenue for none of the effort involved beyond providing the infrastructure?

#1 in Strategy

The level of interest in 4TH GENERATION WARFARE HANDBOOK has truly been encouraging. I have to admit, I did not expect this:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #904 Paid in Kindle Store
    #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Military > Strategy  

That’s pretty incredible for the first day of preorders. We probably should have figured out this preorder thing sooner, it would appear. Although I like to think there is a certain inept charm to our “well, it’s done, so let’s whang it up there and do a blog post” approach. The least-organized book launch in the entire history of publishing doesn’t seem to have hurt SJWAL much, anyhow. And one of these days, we are going to actually get around to doing our first press release.

But since there is so much more interest in 4GW than anticipated, I thought it might be a good idea to make ON WAR: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009 more readily accessible to those who aren’t familiar with William S. Lind or the four generations of post-Westphalian warfare. So, we have made ON WAR available on Kindle Unlimited; if you’re on Prime or KU, you can check it out at no charge to you. And if it piques your interest, well, there is a bestseller-to-be that you may want to preorder.

And for those of you who are curious why we’re so suddenly enamored of KU, well, it works very badly for short, expensive works of the sort that independent scam artists and scam artists who are published by certain SF publishing houses who shall remain nameless were publishing, and that Amazon wished to deter. And it happens to work rather well for long, inexpensive works of the sort we publish. And by “rather well”, I mean that we actually do better with a KU copy that is read than a copy that is sold either on Amazon or Castalia. So if you really want to help us out, read one of our books on KU first, then buy it.

4th Generation Warfare Handbook

Written by the author of Maneuver Warfare Handbook and an
active-duty USMC officer with experience in Iraq, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook is the doctrine for a new generation of war. Over the last 40
years, the world has gradually entered into a post-Clausewitzian state
where the wars are undeclared, the battlefields can be anywhere, the
uniforms are optional, and the combatants as well as the targets are
often “civilian”. Conventional militaries have repeatedly attempted to
utilize technology to meet the new challenges posed, but even the most
advanced technology has provided little more than meaningless short-term
victories rendered futile in months, if not weeks.


 
The inability of Western governments and militaries to come to
terms with the changing nature of modern warfare has led to failed
interventions, failed occupations, and now even failed states everywhere
from Eastern Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And with the
recent mass movement of peoples around the world, 4th Generation Warfare
can be safely expected to appear in Western Europe and the United
States before long.


 
Drawing on their decades of experience of military strategy, military history, and
military action, the authors have distilled 4GW theory into a short,
concise, easily accessible handbook that provides the soldier, the
military analyst, and the civilian observer with a guide to
understanding and responding to the changing realities of this
challenging new form of war.

We’re handling this book launch a little differently than we have in the past. The handbook is now available in preorder for release on 23 November and will only be available from Amazon as a result. Those who preorder should hold onto your digital receipts as those who preorder will be invited to attend a special Brainstorm later this year featuring both Mr. Lind as well as the lieutenant colonel discussing the new handbook. (Registration will be limited to preorders and Annual members.) If you require an epub version, buy it from Amazon, send us the receipt AFTER the book comes out, and we will send you an epub.

This is a handbook intended for soldiers, not a book of new and expanded theory, so don’t be surprised that much of the base doctrine will be familiar to those of you who have read On War, The Four Generations of Modern War, and Victoria. What is new are some of the practical aspects and applications, particularly the focus on developing and utilizing the light infantry required to meet the challenge posed by 4GW. But given the course of recent events, there can be little doubt that 4th Generation Warfare Handbook will prove every bit as influential as Maneuver Warfare Handbook did in the 1980s.

A paperback version will be published in Q1 2016.

Economics and science fiction

But I repeat myself. Speaking first of the latter, all three QUANTUM MORTIS novels are now available for free for Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Prime subscribers. If you were vaguely curious about them, but not enough to actually go out and buy them, here is your chance to test drive them. I’d particularly recommend checking out QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED, which is the literary update and remix of my all-time favorite SF novel, THE PROGRAMMED MAN.

From an Amazon review: “Space Noir. That’s what this is. It’s a classic spy vs spy tale, but this time the stakes are much higher and there are enough twists and turns to make a Finnish rally driver happy.”

QUANTUM MORTIS: A MAN DISRUPTED and QUANTUM MORTIS: GRAVITY KILLS are also available via KU.

And for those who are more interested in economics than in science fiction (to the extent that one accepts the idea that the former is not a subset of the latter), here are the first week’s readings in my draft econ curriculum. Don’t ask me where you can find the texts, if you can’t figure out how to do that, you needn’t bother with the readings.

1. What is Economics    

  • RGD Introduction
  • MURPHY Part 1 Lesson 1
  • HAZLITT Part 1-1

RGD: The Return of the Great Depression, Vox Day
MURPHY:  Lessons for the Young Economist, Robert Murphy
HAZLITT: Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt

The Most Dangerous Book in America

A new book review of SJWs Always Lie:

It begins with a primer on the forces of intolerance and thought control that are currently active in today’s society, and provides a revealing look at the hearts and minds of those at the forefront of shutting down open and honest debate. It uses the on-going saga of GamerGate to provide an in-depth analysis of one front in the culture war, and to illustrate the standard playbook of those who prosecute the modern day Salem Witch Trials. The book then segues into effective counter-strategies that can be used against them. Generally the counter-strategies are defensive in nature, but if practiced on a wide-spread scale by individuals and small groups, they result in a powerful offensive strategy capable of pushing back against the totalitarians in our midst.

While the background and tactical studies portions of the book are worth the cover price, the real value of this book lies in its clarion call to like-minded individuals who have long been silenced by the insidious tactics of those who would outlaw dissent. The seemingly endless string of successes by those who support destructive public policies can often lead to feelings of resignation and cynicism among those who oppose the modern day tyranny of censorship, but this book underlain by an energizing message of hope and optimism meant to inspire the reader to fight the good fight, and by that measure it is a wild success.

It may not directly inspire an earth-shaking demonstration that single-handedly changes the world, but it is easy to imagine “SJWs Always Lie” inspiring countless acts of quiet resistance that together add up to a powerful and undeniable pushback against the entire culture of thought-crimes. In that way, this book helps serve as a bellows heating up the spark of freedom that still lurks in the hearts of all men, which – if we are lucky – will fan the flames of an honest debate between those who hold a defense of truth, real justice, and the American way against those who believe the spread of lies, false justice, and slavery are virtues.

SJWAL in paperback

In case you happen to be interested, or if you want to help arm a friend or family member against a potential SJW attack, SJW’s Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police is now available in paperback from Amazon. It’s $11.99 for 256 pages of powerful conceptual ammunition. Described as “The Art of War for the Digital Media Generation” by Prof. Nick Flor and “well worth the money” by Hugo-nominated author Mike Williamson, it’s something anyone who expects to encounter SJWs on campus, in the office, or online needs to read. Ebooks are one of the greatest inventions since the printing press, but there are some books you want to be able to hold in your hands… if for no other reason than to beat SJWs over the head with it.

A few more comments by reviewers:

  • “an instructional classic, a counterweight to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.”
  •  “This book provides good practical advice on how to deal with dishonest and twisted thinkers.”
  • “This book should be required reading in any freedom based society.” 
  • “the *content* is more valuable than I can say” 
  • “This book is a necessary buy for anyone who finds themselves under attack for their politics.” 

UPDATE: In only 10 hours, SJWAL is the #1 New Release in Censorship and Politics

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,462 in Books

#3 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Censorship
#4 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Political
#28 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Commentary & Opinion

Interestingly enough, the ebook edition is right behind it at #5.

    Appendix N: conclusions

    Jeffro has completed the initial pass of his quixotic masterpiece. Some of his conclusions:

    • Tolkien’s ascendancy was not inevitable. It’s really a fluke that he even became the template for the modern fantasy epic.
    • A half dozen authors would have easily been considered on par with Tolkien in the seventies.
    • Our concept of “Tolkienesque” fantasy has little to do with Tolkien’s actual work. Likewise, the “Lovecraftian” stories and games of today have little to do with what Lovecraft actually wrote. Our concepts of swords and sorcery have had the “weird” elements removed from them for the most part. Next to the giants of the thirties, just about everything looks tamed and watered down.
    • Entire genres have been all but eliminated. The majority of the Appendix N list falls under either planetary romance, science fantasy, or weird fiction. Most people’s readings of AD&D and OD&D are done without a familiarity of these genres.
    • Science fiction and fantasy were much more related up through the seventies. Several Appendix N authors did top notch work in both genres. Some did work that could be classified as neither.
    • It used to be normal for science fiction and fantasy fans to read books that were published between 1910 and 1977. There was a sense of canon in the seventies that has since been obliterated.
    • Modern fandom is now divorced from its past in a way that would be completely alien to game designers in the seventies. They had no problem synthesizing elements from classics, grandmasters of the thirties, and new wave authors.
    • Ideological diversity in science fiction and fantasy was a given in the seventies. We are hopelessly homogenistic in comparison to them.
    • The program of political correctness of the past several decades has made even writers like Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore all but unreadable to an entire generation. The conditioning is so strong, some people have almost physical reactions to the older stories now.

    And at Castalia House, Jeffro has posted a not-unrelated retrospective on the topic of Tolkien’s influence on Dungeons & Dragons:

    This list has been held up as conclusive evidence of Tolkien’s
    influence on the formation of original D&D.² Taking all of the
    game’s influences into account it’s just not that convincing, however.
    Certainly, players of this rule set would have been able to recreate The
    Battle of Five Armies and The Battle of the Morannon. And unlike
    anything you’d see in the coming D&D rule sets, Bard the Hunter’s
    ability to take out a flying dragon with a single shot is accounted for
    here. But while wraiths here are clearly inspired by the Nazgul, raising
    the morale of their allies, causing their foes to make morale checks,
    and paralyzing men with fear, these special abilities also failed
    to survive the transition from miniatures supplement to role-playing
    game.

    Other staples of the D&D zeitgeist are in evidence even at this
    early juncture: the chromatic dragons are out in force, along with the
    chlorine gas breathing variety from the de Camp and Pratt’s The Roaring Trumpet.
    The clearest example of Tolkien’s diluted authority in Gygax’s views
    would be in the matter of Trolls. “What are generally referred to as
    Trolls are more properly Ogres,” he explains. To Gygax, “true Trolls”
    are more in line with the one in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions.
     
    Similarly, the wizards of the Chainmail Fantasy Supplement are unlike
    anything from Tolkien’s corpus; they unleash “Cloudkill” on enemy
    armies, create hallucinatory terrain, “haste” friendly units while
    “slowing” enemies, and disrupt the opposing force’s command and control
    with “confuse”. Tolkien’s stark contrasts between good and evil are
    replaced with Poul Anderson’s and Michael Moorcock’s Law to Chaos
    alignment spectrum, with the most surprising implication of this
    system being that the question of whether Elves will come in on the side
    of Halflings or Wraiths is determined entirely by the roll of the dice!

    It’s very easy for wargamers to see the wargaming roots that underlie all role-playing games, but rather less easy for non-wargamers to recognize them. This is actually something I cover in my game development course; the students tend to be very fascinated to see how one can trace the developmental lineage of some of today’s biggest games all the way back to the arcade games of the 1980s. As for literature, I always find it amusing when people assert that Warhammer was an influence on Selenoth because I don’t play Warhammer or any miniatures games nor have I ever read even a single book from the Black Library. The influences they think they are seeing actually stem from board-and-counter games that influenced both Games Workshop and me.

    Selenoth began life as a wargame called “Warleader” which was my attempt to write rules for Fantasy Advanced Squad Leader. Perhaps one day I’ll return to it.

    Speaking of Castalia House, we are looking for some more high-quality writers to join Jeffro, Morgan, and Daniel there, but we are only interested in potential contributors who already have a blog and a track record. If you’re a book reviewer or a game writer interested in expanding your audience, touch base.