New books, new policies

Castalia House has already announced that Tom Kratman’s Big Boys Don’t Cry will be published at the end of this month. In addition to that, we will have another book coming out as well. We aren’t ready to announce it yet, but I will say that it is longer than a novella and the first two words in the title begin with the letters Q and M. So, I’m looking for 20 volunteers, ten for each book, to commit to reading the books and then reviewing them when they go live on Amazon. Please send me an email with either BBDC or QM in the title. And if you aren’t already familiar with the science fiction world of Quantum Mortis, you’ve got a few weeks to read QM: Gravity Kills and QM: A Man Disrupted before the third volume appears.

And in other news, we certainly have not forgotten about Selenoth. If you haven’t already read Summa Elvetica, this is your chance to get caught up since Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy is free for the first time on Amazon today.

Castalia House has also reviewed its translations policy after speaking to our vast stable of authors as well as consulting with a number of professional translators. We have decided that our standard offering will be a 25 percent royalty to translators and 25 percent royalty to the authors on revenues from the translated editions. This approach appears to be satisfactory for all three parties concerned, as Castalia House now has 20 foreign language translations in progress.

Also, if you’re one of the reviewers of QM:AMD or QM:GK, please note that the missing reviews may have been preserved in your Amazon account even though they’re not appearing on the book’s current page. So, if you don’t mind, please check to see if you still have it and post it to the current book page.


Forthcoming

I have not forgotten that I said there would be fewer Castalia House announcements here and more over there, but this one is simply too big to resist sharing with the Dread Ilk. Castalia House is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of a Tom Kratman novella entitled Big Boys Don’t Cry, which is scheduled for release on 1 March 2014 and will be available in Kindle and epub format for $2.99.

If you are a Kratman fan and a native speaker of a non-English language, we will be very interested to hear from you and talk to you about translating Mr. Kratman’s work and thereby terrorizing the non-English speaking peoples of the Earth as well. I expect you will understand that the novella contains the occasional difference of opinion, settled, as one might anticipate, in the most civilized and peaceable of manners.


Not bad for week one

Perhaps it’s not the biggest bestseller list to top, but one can’t help but regard this as an encouraging start to Castalia House’s entry into multilingual e-publishing. We may be small, but we’re already massive in Portugal. How do we profit from these bestselling free ebooks? The answer is simple. Volume.


The translation challenge

Mint Wilson, the lady responsible for the Indonesian translation of Mantra yang Rusak, which was published today in epub format since Amazon does not sell books published in Bahasa Indonesia, has been maintaining a blog about the translation process. It makes for interesting reading for anyone with an interest in languages:

As I translated A Magic Broken, I tried to translate VD’s word choices as close to Indonesian root words as possible. It’s not hard but it is sure often to find that I translated words into its Indonesian form only to realized Indonesian has borrowed it from English word. For example:

 With the precision born of many hours of practice, the sleeve knife slid into his hand as he stepped behind the man rushing past him.

precision – presisi
practice – praktik

It will be all right using these loan words to translate the English ones, but Bahasa Indonesia also has some of the same meaning words that are not any where close enough in form to their English counterparts. Though I suspect they are also loan words.

precision- presisi- ketepatan
practice – praktik- latihan

Bahasa Indonesia has many loan words from other languages. The origin of Bahasa Indonesia is Malay Polynesian that has been used as lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries.  Bahasa Indonesia underwent several developmental process before becoming a modern language; the most influential of these was it’s contact with other languages. Such language contact influence language system lexically, phonologically, and grammatically.

The languages that influence Bahasa Indonesia are :

  • Sanskrit, Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms that reigned in Indonesian archipelago brought by Indian results in many Sanskrit words in Bahasa Indonesia.
  • Arabic, Persian and Arabic traders introduced the religion and as Indonesia became the country with largest muslim population in the world, over the centuries results in an extensive Arabic loan words.
  • Dutch, Dutch colonization and administration, lasting from the 17th century to the 20th, had an extensive impact on the vocabulary.
  • Portuguese, The Portuguese were among the first westerners to sail eastwards to the “Spice Islands” in the 16th century as they traded and then colonized later.
  • Chinese, Chinese traders and significant number of immigrants made their contributions on Bahasa Indonesia vocabulary.

Some interesting fact: for ‘god’ Bahasa Indonesia Bible translate it with 4 loan words: ‘Tuhan’, ‘dewa’, ‘ilah ‘and ‘Allah’. I think ‘Tuhan’ and ‘dewa’ are from Sanskrit, ‘ilah’ and ‘Allah’ are from Arabic. For God Creator Bahasa Indonesia bible translate ‘God’ into TUHAN (when the origin mention Jehova or Yahwe) and Allah (when the original word might be ‘ADONAI’). ‘Dewa’ and ‘ilah’ are for lesser gods.

There is a scene in A Magic Broken, where the word ‘gods’ appear when Nicolas the main character trying to get pass the gate guard:

 The friendly smile suddenly disappeared from the man’s face, and the guide was staring at him as if he’d suddenly turned into an orc. “You some sort’o wizard?” the guard demanded, even as he stepped back a pace and put a hand on his sword handle.

 “Gods, no, I’m a soldier,”Nicolas lied easily. The guard wasn’t the problem. It was the red robe he had to worry about.

Here, I translated the word into ‘dewa’ as I don’t think ‘Allah’ will fit nor the original meaning permit ‘Allah’ in a plural form.

In addition to publishing Mint’s first translation, I’m pleased to be able to say that Castalia House has another 11 translations currently in progress. The Blue SF revolution continues.


Mailvox: Castalia House questions

Some of you had questions, so here are the answers:

As opportunities become available will you be posting them here?

Initially, yes. As Castalia House develops its own readership, we will tend to gradually move more CH-related communication there. We will ALWAYS be looking for more translators and it’s hard to imagine a time when we would not be on the lookout for more excellent authors. We intend to be considerably more picky than what one tends to see from the likes of Tor and the other genre publishers. We’re not at all interested in the shotgun approach that many other small publishers take and we fully support those who elect the self-publishing approach.

The inclusion of the “obscure ancient military text” hints that Castalia
House may not limit its focus to the science fiction and epic fantasy
genres. Is this a fair assumption? 

This is correct. In fact, one author has already produced an intriguing proposal that combines those elements. We intend to experiment and try different things that have not necessarily been done before. Some of these experiments will work, some of them won’t, and some of them will be done simply because we think it is worth doing. That being said, SF/F has the best chance of being accepted for publication as it stands closest to the heart of what we are doing.

Can I be Wheeler’s editor?

No. Wheeler is the perfect example of the ideal self-publisher. We will, at some point, be offering various pointers to aid self-publishing on the CH blog. We can’t publish everything. We don’t want to publish everything. But we don’t see any reason why people shouldn’t publish themselves.

Will Castalia House make certain its books qualify the authors for SFWA membership, and possible future expulsion?

It will take at least one year before Castalia House could possibly become a qualifying venue. So, it’s not what we would consider a priority. We do expect to have the necessary 10 authors as well as meeting the minimum print run and revenue requirements.

What is the Italian conceptualization of the differences between
National Socialism and proper Italian Fascism beyond the obvious
racialist accretions?

Non credo questa domanda era proprio per noi. In ogni caso, posso raccomandare il Fascisti di Giordano Bruno Guerri per un esaminazione cosi.

Will there be dead tree versions?

Yes.

Will you be limiting Castalia House or eventually allowing for fiction as neither fantasy or SF? 

Our fictional focus will be on SF/F. But we will certainly consider works outside the genre if they are exceptional.

Any chance there might be music?

Only if it is recorded by a certain award-winning techno band.

What type of submission is required, Just summary, cover letter-summary- and manuscript (Double space or single).

We’re still working this out. On the one hand, it’s faster to be able to simply scan an epub on your reader. On the other, most authors don’t know how to produce epubs. But in general, a one-page synopsis, a one-page author bio, and a single-spaced manuscript all in a single Word-formatted file will suffice. As for the bio, we are less interested in credentials than learning who you are and what you stand for.

Do you have any insights on how you will be able to avoid the fate of other publishers? 

We have zero overhead and zero salaries. We’re already profitable. And we already sell more books than many small publishing houses. Thanks primarily to the support of the readers here, we’re on a path to sell more than 10,000 books this year, not counting free downloads, in-game sales, or other authors. From a time and labor perspective, publishing is absolutely trivial in comparison with game development and we had to do 80 percent of this stuff in order to handle the in-game publishing anyhow. We are a lean, mean, disruptive machine.

I would like to submit a story or two, written with the blood of my enemies. 

Go for it. Just make sure you get them tested before utilizing your “special ink”. (Note to self: THIS is why we utilize slush readers as “the first line of defense”.)

What would be involved in being a slush reader?

Reading submitted manuscripts and rendering your opinion on them in a timely manner. We want to feature very fast turnaround times. If we’re going to say no, we’re going to do it very quickly. And if we’re going to say yes, we want to do that almost as quickly. Also, risking the acquisition of various tropical diseases from manuscripts written in the blood of the author’s enemies.

Why is there no Kickstarter for Castalia House?

We don’t need one. If you would like to support Castalia House, we would encourage you to buy our books or to join our growing list of translators.

What better protagonist than a half-savage shitlord in a douche canoe?

Nothing, obviously. Please to accept a 10-book contract at your earliest convenience.

Can I submit works for consideration that I’ve already self-published online?

Sure.

How much experience with sci-fi or fantasy do you want your slush
readers to have? And do you even WANT a woman’s opinion on these
things?

A reasonable amount would be desirable. If you haven’t read Tolkien, Lewis, Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury, at a bare minimum, you probably don’t have a sufficient grasp of the field to read for us. If, on the other hand, you are familiar with Stephenson, Gibson, Shikibu and Hesse, so much the better. We already have female readers. What we do not have, and do not need, are feminist, equalitarian, and left-wing readers.

Can you shed light on why an author should consider Castalia rather than self-publishing?

There are four primary reasons. First, it is a non-trivial pain in the posterior to go through the process of creating and administering a book. I’m not going to exaggerate the difficulty as it is perfectly doable by anyone who is computer literate, but there are certain economies of scale there and we’re already stuck doing it due to our other commitments. Few authors want to spend their time dealing with these things and we offer sufficiently high royalties that most authors will be happy to off-load the administrative work on us.

Second, there is the issue of credibility and exposure. I may be notorious throughout the genre, but even some of my worst enemies have freely admitted that I have pretty good taste in literature. Not even the SFWA members who purged me from its ranks had anything negative to say about my performance on the three Nebula Award juries upon which I sat. If Castalia House publishes a book, there are thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, who will recognize that it very likely contains something worth reading. These days, that is considerably more than one can say of Tor or most publishing houses in SF/F.

Third, our growing ranks of translators means that there is a reasonable chance that your novel will be translated into another language, thereby increasing your prospective royalties. The growing gap between traditional translation expenses and average expected ebook revenues means that other publishers are going to have to adopt our translation model or simply give up on translating anything but the biggest selling novels.

And fourth, we have better cover artists than most of the established publishing houses. You will get a good cover. You will have considerable input into that cover. Having been victimized by a major New York publisher that threw out a beautiful Rowena work-in-progress in favor of an ineptly imitated Left Behind  look, I fully understand the significance of cover to the author.

It’s possible you might exclude me. I’m a libertarian and a federalist,
and I expect my work to appeal to traditionalists. However, I’m also an
atheist, and while I respect and write about people of faith, that’s
bound to turn off some blog visitors.

We are perfectly willing to publish atheist authors. We will not publish evangelical atheists or atheists whose work denigrates Christianity, advocates secular humanism, or wallows in nihilism.

Is this a compliment to, or an integral part of, the First Sword concept? Is that a picture of Markku’s house?

It is an integral part of it. That is not a picture of Markku’s dwelling.

Would love to submit something for a cover. Can you give some parameters. 

The minimum resolution is 1667×2500. We are always looking for good artists, so feel free to submit something for review. However, our cover work is all custom and we expect the artist to read the book before producing the cover.

What is Castalia House’s policy towards publishing under pseudonyms?

Fine by us. If you’re an established author concerned about retribution from the Pink SF gatekeepers due to public association with us, we would even encourage it.


The new iron dream

It was amusing to learn about a new Kickstarter entitled The Old Iron Dream, which is intended to be “an in-depth piece of long-form journalism, a no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled look at the sci-fi far-right”. The author mentions dangerous right-wing figures from John Campbell and Robert Heinlein to Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, as well as Orson Scott Card and me.

They haven’t seen anything yet.

Castalia House is my new publisher and we intend to give Mr. Forbes and his fearful left-wing friends a good deal to worry about over the next few decades. We are working off the new publishing models which will provide authors better royalty rates than they can get anywhere without self-publishing, and we are encouraging the participation of the various readerships involved. We are intentionally keeping prices down with an eye to maximizing the ongoing technological disruption of the existing publishing companies; we do not view every free reader of one of our books as a lost potential customer, but rather, as a reader who has been rescued from the confining intellectual chains of the SF/F gatekeepers.

We are asking everyone who has ever wondered whatever happened to the golden age of SF, who has ever felt ripped off by being subjected to yet another left-wing lecture instead of being entertained, who has ever wondered how on Earth that dreadful PC schlock was ever published in the first place, who has ever bitten his tongue rather than say something that might end his career, to not only support us, but to join us in this neotraditionalist rebellion. Remember, the future belongs to those who show up for it.

We are looking for excellent authors. We are looking for committed translators. We are looking for merciless slush readers. We are looking for talented cover artists. We are looking for people who will spread the word that an alternative to what John C. Wright so aptly described as the relentless heart of darkness exists.

By the end of this month, Castalia House will be announcing the addition of four new books to the existing arsenal of science fiction and epic fantasy, one of which will be mine, one of which will be a novella from an even better-known author, one of which will be an out-of-print novel from the public domain, and one of which will be an obscure ancient military text.

If you have any questions about Castalia House or our future plans for it, please feel free to ask them here.