The Flight of the Sorceress

WHAT DO LAWYERS AND AUTHORS HAVE IN COMMON?

2012-02-06T09:45:00.000-08:00

While I was preparing my non-fiction trial guide, SEE YOU IN COURT! for publication, it came to me that it was a good reference work for writing fictitious court scenes. It is full of nuances and quirks that could lend credence to a narrative. And that got me to wondering what, if anything, lawyers and authors have in common. Go to the mystery and thriller section of a bookstore (if you can find one of those) and you will see that a lot of authors are actually lawyers who write novels. I came to the conclusion that there must be something they have in common. But what? Find out by reading the whole article at See You In Court!

A King's English Bookstore Reviewer weighs in.

2012-01-24T22:20:00.000-08:00

A page-turner of an historic novel! Wendy Foster Leigh

2011-12-30T17:23:00.000-08:00

HEADLINES FROM "AROUND THE EMPIRE" AN ANCIENT NEWS SOURCE

2011-12-26T13:17:00.000-08:00

Scrounging around some old archives, I recently uncovered a stack of long-forgotten stone tablets hoarded by a Roman news junkie more than fifteen hundred years ago. For those readers not up on their ancient history, "Around the Empire" was the premier news organ of its day, bringing all the latest stories to the cognoscenti in every province. The tablets were pretty dusty but I was able to make out the headlines. Here they are:

(April 410 A.D.)

SORCERESS FLEES PROBE INTO DEATHS OF MOTHER AND BABY

(August 410 A.D.)

RAPE AND PILLAGE! VISIGOTHS SACK ROME

(June 411 A.D.)

CHURCH RULES HUNDREDS OF BISHOPS ARE HERETICS

(April 415 A.D.)

DEATH OF NEOPAGAN PHILOSOPHER HYPATIA SPARKS RIOTS

(April 415 A.D.)

JEWS EXPELLED FROM ALEXANDRIA

Read all about these stories and more in The Flight of the Sorceress.

Two for One Holiday Offer!

2011-12-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

What will it take to put YOU between the virtual covers of a brand new e-copy of my new mystery/thriller, Burning Questions? All you have to do is buy a copy of The Flight of the Sorceress!

There’s murder, Russian roulette, burning hotels, Mafia, a NAZI general’s overcoat, a ghost town, witches, wild doggies, some sex, surfing, cops and donuts, crooked politicians and lawyers, some religion, a little bit of marijuana and pizza. It’s just the right length to read on a single plane trip across the country. Why settle for a crappy airline movie when you can read about all this good stuff? Part Two of this trilogy, A Shot in the Arm is coming up in April . Why not read part one first? Do you really want to be Left Behind?

Buy an e-book copy of Flight of the Sorceress from Amazon before Jan. 1, 2012 and I’ll give you a copy of Burning Questions free. So when you give that certain somebody that new Kindle this holiday season, they can have something to read on it. (Here's Amazon's "buy" link, Buy Sorceress get Burning Questions free! ) When Amazon sends you an order confirmation, email a copy to me at barrywilldorf@gmail.com with the email address of the person to whom you want me to send the gift copy. I will send them a copy. That's it: two books for $5.95.

Interview with Barry Willdorf!

2011-12-15T10:23:00.000-08:00

Inteview on Wild Child Publishing Blog

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Jenn Nixon

Today’s author interview spotlights Barry Willdorf. Author of the Historical Novel, Flight of the Sorceress.
WCP: What was your inspiration for The Flight of the Sorceress?
I was visiting Bath, England a number of years ago and went to the ruined Roman baths where I picked up some literature that said that within three generations of the Romans leaving England the population didn’t even know what the baths were, much less how to run them. I was taken by how quickly a people could lose all science and history and basically return to virtual caveman status. How did that happen? I began to look into it and that gave me the history. But the trick was to personalize it --to relate the history through what I could imagine were similar to real lives. What were the forces that crushed knowledge? And how would a real person have experienced that?
WCP: Do you have any other genre you’d like to try your hand at?
I also write mystery/thrillers. I love noir. I was a trial lawyer for 40 years but I began my career as an investigator for the NYC Legal Aid Society. I was trained by a retired NYD police detective. We’d go out investigating criminal cases for the defense. We went to some really sketchy places, just the two of us, with his one .38 special. You would be crazy to do that today. A .38 isn’t enough firepower to go where we went. It was very noir. I got off on it. But over the years, I really got into forensic investigation ¾things like forged documents, different kinds of chemical tests, scientific evidence. Plus I got pretty good a cross-examination. Most of the stuff I write in that genre is inspired from cases I had over the years. I make a lot of it up but the nuggets are perfect background for mystery thrillers.
WCP: Do you have any favorite authors? Or ones that have influenced you more than others?
I like Raymond Chandler for the ambiance. I like Dashiell Hammett for his spare stiletto-like writing. I have always been moved by Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. I like Jack London, the way he hits nerves.
WCP: Is there anything you would like the readers to take away from the story?
Absolutely. When zealots get into power, whether they be motivated by religion or a political philosophy that is basically intolerant, such as Nazism or Communism, the outcome will always be that disagreement will be viewed as treason or heresy. Dissenters will invariably be terrorized and eliminated. Their ideas will be eradicated. Eventually we will be pushed into a dark age. The best idea is to keep power out of the hands of people who can’t live with different opinions or beliefs.
WCP: Now for some fun questions: What about writing life/being an author took you by surprise?
How much like a business it is. I HATE promotion. I hate having to sell my writing as if it were a product. I like the writing part. I love doing the research and learning stuff. I love making up stuff. But selling it? UGH!
WCP: If you could be any one, living or dead, who would you want to be? Why?
That’s a hard question. When I think about it, I tend to go for anonymity. Right there, you can’t get much of an answer can you? All the famous people, the one’s most people pick when they answer this question, have baggage. You get famous, people tend to fantasize you, love you, admire you, hate you. Who wants any of that? Probably I’d want to be someone none of us ever heard of. Like I’d be living in a tropical paradise, kind of like a Garden of Eden shtick. (But close by a good ski slope and not far from some really nice mellow surf. A caterer at your beck and call. Etc. etc. You know what I’m driving at.) And the best part would be that no one would really know you were there, so they wouldn’t move in next door and screw up all the fun you were having, knocking on your door asking to borrow a cup of your “sugar” or just your “sugar” forget the cup.
WCP: Any last words? Um, for the interview, that is. (grin)
YEAH, I would like everyone who reads this to buy my books for themselves and everyone they know. If they want to sell them for me, I wouldn’t say ‘no.’ I’ll even cut them in on the action, such as it is. I can get them wholesale. I have an “in” with the publisher.
My website: A Gauche Press
Blog: The Flight of the Sorceress
Wild Child Books by Barry Willdorf:

Purchase link

THE FIRST POGROM

2011-12-14T12:46:00.000-08:00

“Pogrom”: an organized massacre of helpless people; specifically: a massacre of Jews. Yiddish, from Russian, literally, devastation. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary) “Pogrom” signifies “the destruction of Jewish life and property --through a thuggish or thug-like encounter of organized mob violence and vandalism-- against Jewish individuals, shops, homes or businesses that were directly or indirectly supported or organized by the government” according to K.K. Brattman of the Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project.

When we think of a pogrom, what springs to mind is a frenzied mob, whipped up by religious fanatics, descending upon a Jewish community as local government authorities stand by watching. Because the Jews have been dehumanized through the mob believe they are doing God’s work and the killing, maiming raping, looting, burning and destroying of Jews and their worldly goods is justifiable.

Although the pogrom is generally associated with massacres in Russia and the Ukraine, such anti-Jewish violence was of course not invented in 19^th Century Eastern Europe. Similar incidents were common during the Middle Ages and particularly during the Crusades. How far back in history did this go?

In the course of eight years of research for my historical novel, The Flight of the Sorceress, I was able to find a prototype for the stereotypical Eastern European pogrom, the expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria, Egypt in 414 or 415 A.D. under the leadership of Saint Cyril. Though history records a number of massacres of Jews before that time, they all had aspects similar to the traditional behavior of plundering conquerors -- armies engaged in warfare or in its retaliatory aftermath. The virulent anti-Semitic religious justifications were absent. It was not until the church and state combined to form a Roman Catholicism under the auspices Emperor Constantine that the violence took on a decidedly anti-Semitic context with calls for ethnic cleansing. Before that time, state/religious-sanctioned claims of a Jewish pariah were not common. (The reader should be aware that when discussing the Roman Catholic Church, I distinguish the institution from the flock.)

Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 47, describes the Alexandria pogrom of 415 A.D. thusly:

"Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the patriarch (Saint Cyril), at the dawn of day, led a seditious multitude to the attack of the synagogues. Unarmed and unprepared, the Jews were incapable of resistance; their houses of prayer were leveled with the ground, and the episcopal warrior, after rewarding his troops with the plunder of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the unbelieving nation."

The foundation for this new kind of ethnic oppression, based upon an inferior status before God, began a century earlier, with Roman Emperor Constantine’s dissembling Edict of Milan in 313. A.D. by which he freed Christians from the brutal repression they experienced under the preceding emperors. But with this edict, Constantine actually began empowering a Roman Catholic Church, giving it the green light to vilify and harass Jews. And soon this cacophony of hate preached from the pulpit began to dominate the public forum, laying the groundwork for further oppression.

From then on, anything but toleration prevailed for Jews in the Roman Empire. Soon after, others of Constantine’s Imperial decrees isolated Jews by prohibiting conversions to Judaism, primarily by banning inter-faith marriage, which often entailed conversion. He changed the Sabbath to Sunday. Later emperors restricted visitation of Gentiles to synagogues, barred repair of Jewish places of worship and instituted restrictions on Jews holding public office. Thus encouraged, by the latter half of the fourth century, CE, Roman Catholic bishops, such as John Chrysostom were spewing libels and hate against Jews that would rival anything Joseph Goebbels could crank out of his Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, such as:

“[The Jews] are inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil... debauchery and drunkenness have given them the manners of pigs and lusty goats. They know only one thing, to satisfy their gullets, get drunk, to kill and maim one another. They murder their offspring and immolate them to the devil ...The Jewish disease must be guarded against. The Christian's duty is to hate the Jews.”

For this hate mongering, John Chrysostom was canonized and is still revered to this day as a saint.

Though not as vituperative as Chrysostom, even St. Augustine got into the act. "Let them live among us, but let them suffer and be continually humiliated," he counseled.

Originally brought to Alexandria Egypt as soldiers seven hundred years earlier, just before the pogrom of 415. A.D. the Jewish population of Alexandria was said to have numbered between 40,000 and 75,000 --one quarter of the city’s inhabitants. Jews enjoyed the civil rights of citizens as decreed by Augustus and as a guarantee their rights were engraved upon a tablet of brass mounted in a public space for all to see. But as in Spain in 1492, once the Roman Catholicism became the state religion, such “guarantees” became meaningless.

Early Roman Catholic accounts of the Alexandria pogrom read like NAZI propaganda.

Socrates Scholasticus, the fifth century Roman Catholic historian claims that the expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria was provoked after a priest named Hierax shouted down a dance performance claiming it was blasphemous. Socrates claims that when Jewish audience-members complained Orestes, the city’s prefect, arrested and tortured Hierax. He writes that Saint Cyril…

“on being informed of this, sent for the principal Jews, and threatened them with the utmost severities unless they desisted from their molestation of the Christians. These menaces, instead of suppressing their violence, only rendered the Jewish populace more furious, and led them to form conspiracies for the destruction of the Christians. Having agreed that each one of them should wear a ring on his finger, made of the bark of a palm branch, for the sake of mutual recognition, they determined to attack the Christians on a certain night; and sending persons into the streets to raise an outcry that Alexander's church was on fire, they thus drew the Christians out in great anxiety and slew them readily distinguishing each other by their rings. At daybreak the authors of this atrocity could not be concealed; and Cyril going to their synagogue attended by an immense body of people, took it away from them, and driving the Jews out of the city, permitted the multitude to plunder their goods. Thus were the Jews, who had inhabited the city from the time of Alexander the Macedonian, expelled from it, stripped of all they possessed, and dispersed, some in one direction and some in another.”

Bishop John of Nikiu, an eighth century Copt, with little to support his account but the account of Socrates, embellishes further:

“(The Jews) added outrage to outrage and plotted a massacre through a treacherous device. And they posted beside them at night in all the streets of the city certain men, while others cried out and said: ‘The church of the apostolic Athanasius is on fire: come to its succor, all ye Christians.’ And the Christians on hearing their cry came fourth quite ignorant of the treachery of the Jews. And when the Christians came forth, the Jews arose and wickedly massacred the Christians and shed the blood of many, guiltless though they were. And in the morning, when the surviving Christians heard of the wicked deed which the Jews had wrought, they betook themselves to the patriarch. And the Christians mustered all together and went and marched in wrath to the synagogues of the Jews and took possession of them, and purified them and converted them into churches. … And as for the Jewish assassins they expelled them from the city, and pillaged all their possessions and drove them forth wholly despoiled.”

Not being completely satiated by their violent expulsion of Alexandria’s Jewish population, Bishop John delights in recalling how the Christian mob then went on to murder the Neo-Platonist librarian-philosopher, Hypatia. “They tore off her clothing and dragged her through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire.” (Other, more graphic versions recount that this mob ¾the same frothing band that were at the vanguard of the pogrom¾ actuality ripped her skin from her bones using broken clamshells while she was alive. There is no reason to suspect that she was the first such victim.)

It should go without saying that each of these surviving accounts comes down to us because the historian/propagandists were apologists for the institution that was the Roman Catholic Church. No other account would have been permitted to see the light of day and would more likely have been relegated to the fires. Indeed, during the reign of Emperor Theodosius I, it became a crime, punishable by forfeiture of all property to even possess written materials offensive to Christians. Many literate Roman citizens burned their entire libraries out of fear that their lands would be confiscated by Church stool-pigeons eager to enrich themselves by informing.

Thus the accounts that question the Church-sanctioned propaganda line, beginning with Gibbon’s, have to the result of historical interpolations¾reading between the lines, appreciation of the admissions and the writers’ contradictions clumsily slipping through the contemporary narrative.

That Jews dared to fight back against the “menaces” of Archbishop Cyril, would, of course, render them the aggressors in these propaganda pieces. We are asked to accept that this pogrom only occurred because a few Jewish theatergoers complained about the disruption of a performance. And further, those Jewish complainers instigated the punishment of the Christian disrupter by a non-Jewish prelate. However, the historical evidence shows that Cyril, from the moment he ascended to head the Alexandrian archbishopric campaigned to rid the city not only of Jews, but also of pagans and non-Catholic Christian sects. The ethic cleansing of Alexandria was on his plate all along.

We are then asked to believe that despite the fact that armed and allegedly well-organized Jewish “assassins” were in the field and had successfully massacred Christians all that previous night, this brave Archbishop rallied his allegedly unprepared believers and lead them to victory. How he was able to manage the defeat of these well-armed Jews (many of whom had military experience) even as his followers were simultaneously being slaughtered by them is never explained by the Roman Catholic chroniclers. Both Socrates and Bishop John are equally silent on how Cyril was able to burn every synagogue in town within a few morning hours without encountering resistance.

Gibbon, again in Chapter 47 of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, dismisses this nonsense.

“Having purged the official Church of Alexandria of its dissenting minority, (Saint) Cyril next targeted the Jews. This numerous community, he decided, should be expelled from the city and the privileges, which they had enjoyed for seven hundred years, since the time of Alexander the Great, rescinded. Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the patriarch, at the dawn of day, led a seditious multitude to the attack of the synagogues. Unarmed and unprepared, the Jews were incapable of resistance; their houses of prayer were leveled with the ground, and the episcopal warrior, after rewarding his troops with the plunder of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the unbelieving nation."

The evidence is overwhelming that what occurred in Alexandria in 415 A.D. was a quintessential pogrom instigated by a virulent anti-Semitic zealot who was canonized for his ethnic cleansing, just as John Chrystostom was canonized for his hate-mongering. Each of them remains sanctified despite the blood on their hands.

Egypt - The Vortex

2011-12-06T11:22:00.000-08:00

As told in Sorceress, the Dark Ages begin when religious zealots murder of Hypatia in Alexandria in the year 415 A.D. Their reasons? She was pagan and an independent woman. They were Christians then. Today, Alexandria is predominantly Muslim, and religious parties are set to take power. Do they have the same mindset as Hypatia's murderers? What can we expect from the new Egyptian paradigm? Read Arab Spring-Islamist Winter at A Gauche Press

“Burning Questions.” Now only $3.99 at Amazon!

2011-11-27T12:29:00.000-08:00

Give yourself or a friend my new mystery, “Burning Questions.” Get the special $3.00 holiday discount for the E-Book version. Now only $3.99 at Amazon.
For immediate download to a Kindle or other e-reading devices, use this Amazon Kindle Store link:BURNING QUESTIONS purchase

“A poor fisherman’s daughter must fight for her life when her wealthy boyfriend is found dead and she is blamed.”
•    A terrific crime mystery!   I can’t wait to read Parts II and III of the “1970′s Trilogy.” Steve Rohde, Los Angeles, CA
•    I was especially taken with the characters and atmosphere. Mark Curchack, Philadelphia, PA
•    Just the right amount of wide-eyed innocence/hard-boiled detective and sarcasm! Janie Tyre, Menlo Park, CA
•    I can’t put down Burning Questions. Maggie Livings, Fredericksburg, TX
•    Bravo!! It kept me up long after I should have turned out the light and gone to sleep. Todd Endelman, Ann Arbor, MI

JOIN ME AT 1970S TRILOGY

2011-11-11T08:59:00.000-08:00

This post is especially to the followers of this blog, but also to everyone who reads it. Please consider becoming a follower of my other blog for the 1970s Trilogy. 1970s Trilogy Blog

Activity on that blog is picking up. Part 2, A Shot in the Arm, is currently in editing. I will soon be looking for blurbs. If you are a regular reviewer of books, author, publisher, agent or have a book-related blog, you can get a free ARC if you agree to write a review of Burning Questions for Amazon and Goodreads and a free ARC of A Shot in the Arm (when I get it) if you agree to do a blurb for the cover. Such a deal!

Bird & Beckett reading time is THREE P.M.

2011-11-04T11:08:00.000-07:00

Well, if anything can go wrong.... Somehow I got the time wrong for my own reading, I've been saying 2:00 p.m. and it's should be 3:00 p.m. Now you can finish watching a football game and still make it to

BIRD AND BECKETT BOOKSTORE

653 Chenery Street, San Francisco, CA 94131-3033 (415) 586-3733

Sunday, November 13, 2011 @ 3:00 P.M.

NOW AT THE GLEN PARK BRANCH OF SFPL

2011-10-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

Flight of the Sorceress is now at the Glen Park Branch of the SF Public library. It should show up on their online catalog.

2011-10-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

"Sorceress is just the sort of book I never want to end."
Mark Curchack, Philadelphia, PA

READING IN SAN FRANCISCO

2011-10-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

Come hear a reading from my award-winning historical novel, The Flight of the Sorceress at Bird and Beckett Bookstore, 653 Chenery St., San Francisco, CA, on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2011 at 2:00 p.m.

As an extra zinger, you'll get to hear "One hundred years of Roman history in twenty-seven hundred words."

Maggie from Fredericksburg, Texas Loved Sorceress!

2011-10-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

I have finished Sorceress and I am in awe. Sorceress is a work of art and any award out there for such a book, you should have it! The story telling, the historical research, the insight and the writing--I am completely blown away. And the women are such powerful, expressive creatures. You bring them to life in such a sensitive way. You are a kind and observant fellow, Barry.

As I was reading yesterday morning, I didn't want to the story to come to an end. I wouldn't let myself entertain the idea that there would be a completely disagreeable ending to such an incredible story. I was boo-hooing and could barely read the words and came to the line:
"From that day until this, our people have been doomed to wander, just as we are doing now."

This line so typifies each one of us in some small way, doesn't it? To be sure, most of us don't experience the horrendous persecution and forced wanderings of the Jews and the women of your story, but each of us wanders, weaving through our lives. So, though Sorceress is a specific story of long ago, this thread, and others, makes it the universal story of mankind. I think the ability of a writer to develop that kind of empathy in his/her readers is one of the main characteristics that creates memorable literature.

What a gift you have and what a talent you have for developing it.
Maggie Livings, Fredericksburg, TX

SORCERESS NAMED A FINALIST FOR EPIC 2012 AWARD

2011-09-25T13:14:00.000-07:00

This just in.....THE FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS has been named a FINALIST for a 2012 ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING INDUSTRY COALITION (EPIC) award.

FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS WINS GLOBAL E-BOOK AWARD FOR BEST HISTORICAL LITERATURE!

2011-09-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

At the beginningof the fifth century, church and state united in a failed attempt to preservethe Roman Empire. Instead this union crushedall creativity and brought about the dark ages. Winner of a Global E-book Award and critically acclaimed, The Flight of the Sorceress is the storyof two women who fought valiantly against the oncoming darkness.

Available fromWild Child Publishing: www.wildchildpublishing.com

and also fromAmazon, Barnes & Noble or order from your local bookstore.

Readings currently scheduled:

Oct. 19, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. at Aqus Café, 189 H. St. Petaluma, CA
Nov. 13, 2011 at 2:00 p.m. at Bird and Beckett Bookstore, 653 Chenery St. SF, CA

SORCERESS WINS GLOBAL E-BOOK AWARD!

2011-08-24T05:48:00.000-07:00

I am delighted to report that Flight of the Sorceress has won a 2011 Global E-book Award for best historical fiction. It only took eight years of research, writing, learning to write better, great editing from my publisher and good luck. If you haven't read it yet, I hope you will soon and I look forward to your comments. Oh yes, Glenys and Hypatia thank the judges too.

SORCERESS IS A FINALIST!

2011-08-11T07:04:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce that Flight of the Sorceress is now a finalist in the Global E-Book Awards competition. Final results are soon to come.

AN INTERVIEW WITH COVER ARTIST CRIMSON VERMILLION

2011-08-08T18:10:00.000-07:00

On Friday, August 5, 2011, in Missoula MT I interviewed Sarah Zbinden, AKA Crimson Scarlet Vermillion, the cover artist for the Flight Of The Sorceress cover you can see above.

Sarah and Barry with her cover art

Hi Sarah, thanks so much for giving me this interview. Can you tell me a little about yourself?

I grew up in Great Falls MT. My family was very poor. When I was young, my father worked odd jobs but after a while he became a saddle-maker, which is what he does now. I went to Great Falls High School where I was an up and down student. I hung out with the kind of kids that today are called Goths but back then we were called “hoods” which meant we drank and smoked and stuff.

Did you go to college?

I went to the University of Great Falls for a while, then transferred to Montana State at Great Falls and then transferred again to the University of Montana where I graduated with a BA in English Lit. I put myself through school.

You did a great cover for The Flight of the Sorceress. Do you have any formal art training?

Not really. I took a course at U of MT but didn’t do very well in it.

So how did you get into your art?

Mostly, I was encouraged by my mother but along the way, I saw some work by a Montana artist named Jason Beam and he inspired me. I learned his technique because I liked what he did and got a lot of his work to study from.

What do you call the kind of art work you do?

It’s called digital art, photo manipulation. I use a photo I like and project it onto a white background. Then I manipulate the photo. I select a background and layer the photo over it. I layer colors, change textures and put in brush strokes and shadings. When I’m through it doesn’t look like a photo anymore.

Do you know the woman who is the sorceress on my cover?

Yes. Her name is Mari. She’s not Celtic. I believe she’s Ukrainian.

Have you done other book covers than Sorceress?

Yes, about fifteen, but mostly for people who have self-published. I’ve also done CD covers for local bands in Missoula and calendars.

So basically, someone either gives you a photo they want you to work with or you find one they like thematically and then you manipulate it until you get the image that works for t

That’s about right. Sometimes I provide the photo or they search out free for commercial use stock and we use that photo. So long as they have the copyright and/or permission to use it I then manipulate it to make it the look and feel they want.

Where can people see your work?

I have some of it displayed in a site called http://.crimsonvermillion.deviantart.com . But you can also contact me crimsonscarletvermillion@gmail.com.

Thanks, Sarah, I hope you get a lot of work in the future. Your cover for Sorceress has gotten raves.

Thanks so much, Barry

Burning Questions is available

2011-07-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

PART ONE of the 1970's Trilogy: BURNING QUESTIONS is now available from Whiskey Creek Press.

When the teenage heir to a Yankee fortune is found shot to death, the local authorities quickly declare it to be a suicide by Russian roulette. But just a week before, he witnessed the torching of a hotel. Was he murdered by the arsonists? The family's law firm puts bumbling summer intern Nate Lewis on the case and soon he and Christina Lima, the deceased’s beautiful girlfriend are running for their lives in this mystery-thriller set in Gloucester, MA.

Go to The 1970s Trilogy Blog to read an excerpt.

PART TWO: PROLOGUE TO THE FLIGHT

2011-07-27T12:11:00.000-07:00

And so it came to pass that Constantine became Emperor.

The next thing he does is issue an Edict of Tolerance. All religions within the Empire were now supposed to be safe from state persecution. But that was a fig leaf. All along Constantine angled to give Christians the edge. He thought it might be a good idea dangle the prospect of Christianity becoming the state religion for Rome. After all, if he could get these “Christians” to believe that Rome was scheduled to become God’s Kingdom on earth, he’d have himself a bunch of zealots willing to die for Rome. And the name, Roman Catholic was born.

One of the things that Constantine wanted was a Church that he could work with. He wanted Christian soldiers. So he needed a church behind him that could take care of making sure those soldiers toed the line. So a few years later (325 A.D.) with Constantine’s approval, a bunch of newly legitimized Christian bishops held a meeting in the town of Nicea in Asia Minor. At this conclave, they endorsed a church structure that they knew would please their patron. The clerics cooked up a church hierarchy that looked a whole lot like a military institution. There’d be the Commander-in-Chief, the Pope. Then there’d be a “general staff” of cardinals. The archbishops would be like commanding generals out in the field and they’d exercise their power through a web of senior officers (bishops). Priests were their junior officers, but officers nonetheless. And the masses, well they were the grunts.

Since they were thinking army, it followed that there had to be both rules (lots of them) and discipline. That required offenses to be defined and proclaimed. The doctrine of the Trinity was proclaimed the only true dogma. So now you’d have your heresy. And since the church would mirror a military organization, you’d have a proscription against debating dogma as handed down through the chain of command. Whatever the turd was, once the pope and cardinals sent it down through the plumbing the junior officers and grunts would just have to eat it or taste fire. You’d have blasphemy and sins.

The Roman ruling class was a very male-dominant, military-cultish bunch. Whether they were military or religious, most Roman men don’t see much benefit in having women around with power over them. And so the Nicean bishops took the opportunity to declare war against women. They made it illegal for priests to have sexual relations with women out of marriage. They erected a whole bunch of barriers to priests getting married. The decreed that women couldn’t be priests. Only men could dispense the sacraments. They worked overtime to cut women out of any possible civil exchange where a female might give an order to a male. And they promoted this ethic to the grunts as gospel. And from that time forward Christianity adopted misogyny as integral to its dogma.

By the time Constantine passed away, Rome still wasn’t quite ready for the Full Monty when came to Christianity. There were just too many adherents of the old paganism. In some places like the Celtic lands, women had been healers, magistrates and soldiers since time immemorial. Eradicating these inter-gender customs and relationships that were offensive to the new Roman Christianity was going to take some time and dissembling. And so Constantine, consummate politician, never bothered to convert to Christianity (unless you believe convenient post facto accounts claiming that he, like the Bronx racketeer Dutch Schultz, accepted Jesus in a deathbed baptism.)

But even if he did undergo the deathbed conversion number, it is pretty clear that the Jesus Constantine would have “accepted” was not the turn-your-other-cheek guy. He wasn’t the same dude who drove money-lenders out of the temple. Constantine’s Jesus never would have cooked up an argument about rich men finding it more difficult to get into heaven than a camel passing through the eye of needle. No, Constantine wasn’t a tree-hugger Christian. He was a warrior-emperor who needed an army that would fight and he turned to the only people willing to fight and die for a cause. He cynically welded their cause to his, gave swords to the “Christian” adherents of the “Prince of Peace” and set them on their way to world-ruling.

The Edict of Tolerance was supposed to apply to all religions, but it turned out that Christians, who most benefited from it, given that previously they were the plat du jour for the Imperial lions, quickly dumped the toleration ruse the moment they got the upper hand. (Much in the way Hitler dumped democratic elections once he got control of the government.) In 380 A.D., they got themselves a fairly unbalanced emperor, Theodosius.

And when the Pope asked, “Hey Empy, you wanna do me a favor? You wanna declare Roman Catholicism the state religion? I do you a favor. I say ‘render unto Ceasar’ all of the time, and before you know it Empy, you got yourself a bunch of fightin’ fools on your side.”

Theodosius responds, “Yeah, sure.”

They have a deal. Between 381and 391, Theodosius lets the dogs out. He passes decrees against pagan sacrifices. It becomes a capital offense for pagan priests to do their thing. He dismantles pagan congregations and destroys pagan temples. He confiscates pagan valuables. He cancels pagan holidays, prohibits pagan worship even in the privacy of one’s own home and institutes new decrees declaring pagan practices to be a form of witchcraft punishable by death.

Now the good a peaceful Christians squander what Roman military resources remain to crush pagan worship, to watch their backs as they provoke and attack Jews and to enforce their decrees of heresy against dissenting Christian. Not coincidentally, in the two decades that follow travel becomes less safe in the western half of the empire. Barbarian brigands flourish. Roman property in the provinces gets plucked like ripe fruit. Vaunted Roman law is ignored. Roman infrastructure, its roads, bridges and aqueducts start wearing out and not being replaced. Rome’s leaders —increasingly ineffectual, vapid, slothful, and venal —fight among themselves for power that grows weaker and more worthless year by year. No one dares speak out against the Roman Christianity without fear of persecution by the military power of the state. (Is all this sounding eerily familiar?)

It’s now 410 A.D. There’s this Visigoth barbarian guy named Alaric, who notices all of these things. He’s a Christian, but not a Roman Catholic. He’s pretty pissed off and he’s got a slew of pissed off men with him. It seems that Emperor Honorius, one of Theodosius’s sons, had a panic attack and thought that some of his own legions were out to get him. Maybe he was right. We’ll never know because he managed to actually bump off 30,000 of his own army. But the rub is that these 30,000 dead soldiers had a lot of relatives and friends in other Roman legions. That, and the fact that soldiers don’t particularly like getting stabbed in the back by their own people, meant Honorius had a big problem. They come together under Alaric and are soon bearing down on Rome like a herd of Hannibal’s pachyderms, in full gallop.

Honorius, who it turns out enjoys playing with roosters (really) finally looks up, smells the elephant feces and pulls his last troops, bureaucrats and clerks out of Britannia. “Look to your own defenses,” he tells the Brits as his legions wave goodbye to the startled Britanno-Romans taking a lot of ships and military supplies with them. Four centuries of fucking with the local tribes are over. Adios.

So, a lot of underhanded things already had come to pass by the time Glenys begins reading that Draconian edict of the Vortigern — nailed to the portal of the decaying pagan Temple dedicated to Sulis Minerva —that deprived women human rights and a right to a livelihood much in the manner that Jews were similarly de-humanized under the Third Reich. And when Glenys, a woman in what now has been decreed a man’s profession, is made the scapegoat for a stillbirth, it is clear that she is going to be persecuted. There has been a tragedy. There must be a wrongdoer and it sure isn’t going to be the husband. In such cases, it is helpful to have a sacrifice— to make an example. The priest will condemn Glenys as a witch, a sorceress. He will assure the people that “God wants such people to be stoned to death.” And the fearful masses will light their torches, brandish their pitchforks and get set up for a good old fashion stone-the-witch festivity.

Throughout the ragged empire, Glenys, and women like her will soon be on the run, underground, harassed, stoned, burned, cast out into the cold, shunned.

And their victimization will not cease for more than a millennium. Millions of women will be put to the fire, or stoned. It is the dawn of the Dark Ages.

Nan Hawthorne's Booking History: Historical Fiction Roundup for July 2011

2011-07-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

Nan Hawthorne's Booking History: Historical Fiction Roundup for July 2011

Prologue to the Flight of the Sorceress

2011-07-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Part 1

When I first wrote The Flight of the Sorceress, I included a prologue. I figured that most readers’ knowledge of the 5^th Century was pretty thin and that a little background might help. Pre-publication opinion was loud. “Get to the story,” it shouted. So, despite my craving for context, I took it out, stuffed it in my files and waited for a day of reckoning. Now, here it is — the long suppressed, totally dehydrated, deconstructed, digested, “Prologue to The Flight of the Sorceress” — one hundred years of Roman history compressed into twenty-five hundred words (including snarky commentary.) That that Gibbon!

But first, here’s my point of view:

From time-to-time, down through the ages, men have plotted to rule the world in the name of God. These days, we tend to think of Muslim jihad when we ponder the goal of ruling the world. But if we look under the rocks, we will easily discover lots of historical precedent. Since the beginning, men have plotted to rule the world and were not above using religion as a tool to accomplishing their objective. There have been times when Christian zealots roamed the land with just such a mission in mind.

Many among us do not like to think of Christianity that way. They have a blind spot when it comes to introspection. For such people, Christianity is universally “good.” Rejection of their brand of Christianity is evil, sinful, heretical and blasphemous. They demand conformity to their version of the religion. Opposition to their agendas makes them enemies of God. Thus all opposition must be crushed. And because God seems to consistently ignore His own best interests by allowing subversion in His kingdom, it is pretty clear He needs help eradicating the infidels. Who better to serve God in this way, to institute a reign of terror against the unbelievers than the men tasked by the Almighty of founding God’s Kingdom on earth? And so, since the dawn of religion, self-proclaimed righteous servants of the Lord have commissioned themselves executioners, insisting that the mayhem they create is justified because they are merely attempting to rule the world in God’s name.

Well that’s what commenced to happen in the fourth century, about 100 years before the Romans quit Britannia, a century before Glenys of the Silures is declared a sorceress and Christian fanatics torched the great library in Alexandria, Egypt. As the Roman Empire rotted, Christians read their tea leaves and prophesized that a holy kingdom of God on Earth with its capital in Rome, loomed on the horizon — if only they followed God’s commandments.

Sometime between 305 and 310 A.D. Constantine, the Roman General in charge of all the legions in northern Britannia, saw the handwriting on Hadrian’s Wall. His legionnaires looked out across the moors from their parapets on the Wall and saw waves of angry, face-painted Pict warriors—a never-ending opposition. And they wondered whether there was any point in hanging around the grim north of Britannia, soaking wet and cold, when they could be sucking oranges on a Mediterranean beach. Everyone seemed to sense that the days of Pax Romana were numbered. Citizens and slaves alike we’re pretty sure the vaunted Roman Empire had seen better days and that pretty soon, their walls, like the walls of Jericho, could come a’tumbling down. Rome was falling apart. The Empire was on its last legs.

“What am I doing freezing my balls off in Eboracum?” Constantine asked himself. Then, one dark, dank, nearly-Nordic winter, a light came on. “I can be emperor. And this is how I’m going to do it….”

He calls a counsel of his officers. He leans in close to the fire. A dozen scarred, sun burnt, grizzled faces follow suit so that the glow is captured within the circle. It’s bright as day while he’s speaking.

“We all agree the empires going to shit. Our Roman citizens don’t want to fight for it anymore. So, if we want to keep our empire, we’ve got to hire the army. We’ve got to rely on mercenaries, or,” and he leans back now, far enough that his officers have to strain and tilt so that they can see around the flames, see the face of their general as he speaks to them, “we can recruit the most zealous folks who now live among us.”

His minions frown, grimace, scratch their noodles and wait for the punch line.

“There’s basically this one group of people out there with zeal, and a willingness to die for their beliefs,” he tells them. “Diocletian kicked the shit out of them for years – feeding them to his lions. But God bless’em they keep stickin’ to their catapults.”

He pauses; looks each one of them in the eye. “Don’t you wish we had more soldiers like that?”

They nod and make animal sounds of agreement with his every word.

“Well we can,” he assures them. “All we have to do is get the hell out of here and take control of that sorry imperial government.”

Leaving Britannia though is the easy part. Lots of Roman generals, like Julius Caesar have done that. They just pack up their kits; order their legions to march; rip off every ship they can find; cross over to Gaul and invade Rome. But there’s always competition for the top job. To become emperor, you’ve got to fight for it. You’ve got to cross your own Rubicon. And Constantine it is no exception.

It’s late October, 312 A.D. Constantine is about to engage Max, another wannabe emperor, at a place called the Milvian Bridge. Max has a lot of seasoned troops. He’s done pretty good so far, in defeating other challengers. Constantine knows he needs an edge.

The story gets a little confusing here. One Roman historian claims it was the dead of night and Constantine is taking a stroll. Another Roman historian pipes up thirty years later and says “No, it was daytime and Constantine saw it just right next to a brilliant sun.” Anyway, lo and behold, whether night or day, Constantine looks up into the sky and sees this giant cross with the words “In hoc signo victus,” (“By this sign conquer.”) kind of looping like an overly dramatic pole dancer around it.

“Eureka!” he exclaims.

And so he gets all his army together and tells them, “I just had a vision.” Curiously, if it was the nighttime version, despite the fact that there are literally tens of thousands of soldiers lying there on their backs that night, looking skyward because they can’t sleep, because they’re scared shitless that they’ll end skewered the next day, or the day after that for no good reason, no one besides Constantine happened to witness this message from God. And if it was the daytime version, it’s just as strange that only the general saw it, and he failed to mention it right then and there. It’s not like he was travelling alone. It’s also a little curious that he is spending his time blinding himself by looking directly into the sun. No matter. According to myth, everyone believes him.

And so the next morning or that afternoon, or the next day, whatever, they get up, take paintbrushes in hand and upgrade their shields with crosses. Thus fortified with the patronage of the one true god, off they march, jazzed up with the promise of victory or eternal bliss. (No mention yet of 72 virgins. That’s the Muslim upgrade and not yet available on the market.) They’re building a fucking Kingdom of God on Earth after all!

Yup. You guessed it. The Christian soldiers win at the old Milvian Bridge.

The Flight of the Sorceress is available as an E-book or in print from Wild Child Publishing: wildchildpublishing.com or from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

A limited number of signed copies are available from the author. Click on the "Buy Now" Paypal button below to make a secure purchase.

Sorceress is now in print? You Betcha!

2011-07-13T16:11:00.001-07:00

It is my pleasure to announce that my historical novel, The Flight of the Sorceress is now in print!

For a limited time only, I am selling a small quantity of signed copies of the novel, including tax, mailing and handling for $15.00. This is a savings over the list price of over $2.00. Unfortunately, this offer is only good for purchases within the United States. Click on the "Buy Now" Paypal button below to make a secure purchase.

Or you can purchase from my publisher, www.wildchildpublishing.com or at Amazon

Two more authors give Flight of the Sorceress a thumbs up!

2011-07-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

Barry Willdorf spent years studying this period and it shows. The world he presents is frighteningly real. His characters are vivid and true to their period and their backgrounds. The writing is crisp, with clear and distinct voices. There is some graphic violence that is integral to the plot. …This is an era that is seldom addressed in fiction, but endlessly fascinating, even more so because the bad guys won, plunging the world into the Dark Ages. You will root for Glenys, Hypatia and Aschi and hope throughout that they will survive because they are such compelling characters living in turbulent times. By all means, buy and read this book. It will change you. Alyssa Lyons author of Last Wishes: Jordan Davis Mysteries, Book 1; Clubbed to Death: Jordan Davis Mysteries, Book 2; Stabbed and Slabbed: Jordan Davis Mysteries, Book 3 http://www.alyssalyons.com

Complex characters. Sophisticated dialogue. Understated action. A plot that's easy to follow. The conclusion is humbling yet effective. The impact stays with you long after the last page is turned: Mr. Willdorf has written a superb tale with thought-provoking dialogue and enough research to make it a compelling history lesson. Flight of the Sorceress is a rare book--it holds the reader captive via its intelligence alone. If you're looking for a great historical fiction book, you can't do much better than Flight of the Sorceress. Jeff Gonsalves, Author of Fork in the Road to Apocalypse. http://jeffgonsalves.com/

The Importance of Verisimilitude in Fiction

2011-07-06T18:21:00.000-07:00

The other day, my eye was caught by a book promo. I am on many lists and perhaps 500 email promos show up on my computer screen every week. It takes something special to get my attention. (The more promos I get the more I begin to understand how easy it is for agents, editors and publishers to miss good stuff because they are swamped.) Anyway, this one particular promo got my attention…because I knew the facts in the promo excerpt were patently wrong.

What this author did was move the homeland of a particular ethnic group from one place to another that was three to four thousand miles away, in a distinctly different environment. It would be like placing the Oglala Sioux (Indians of the Great Plains of North America) in Tierra del Fuego. I emailed the author, asking whether this was a mistake or intentional. The author replied that it was intentional, and that it was within bounds because it was fiction. This response gave me pause. Just cause you can, don’t mean you should. I don’t think what this author did was a wise choice.

That an author should make a conscious decision to take a group or character from one era or location and place them/it in another, just because you can, I find, rather strange. Obviously, my thinking doesn’t apply to a plot point. It’s fair game to imagine what would happen to a particular person or say, ethnic group if they were plunked down in another place or have travelled in time. But if you are just in need of a protagonist or perhaps a victim, you ought to have a good reason to drag a real group or person into a story.

I spent years doing research for The Flight of the Sorceress. Authors, reviewers and historians all have commented on the thoroughness of the work. I have earned the confidence of my customers so that I can better make my point and accomplish my goal of using fiction to expand the reader’s knowledge.

I have a new work of fiction, Burning Questions, about to be released. Even though I lived for many years on location so to speak, I spent a lot of my time doing research. I wanted as much verisimilitude as I can get. I wanted my settings to be accurate both in time and place. I wanted the ocean conditions to be right for the time of year. I wanted the flowers to be blooming or the leaves to be falling as one who knows the location might expect. I wanted the characters to be typical of the kind of people you’d expect to find in the locations I have selected for the story. I want my characters to eat for breakfast the same things that people who actually live on location would be eating. And if the location is fictitious, I still want it to have some of the same sort of features that give the place credibility, so that the reader can have a mooring. My made-up place ought to look like someplace familiar even if it is a spoof of that familiarity.

This is simply saying that even in my fictitious world —unless it is somehow part of a plot line —I would tend to make the leaves of trees green. My skies would be blue or gray and if I went with clouds, I’d be prone to putting them up there in the sky. Water would float boats, and people would drink it. And so, if I were to decide to populate my novel set in Tierra del Fuego with indigenous peoples, I wouldn’t import some random tribe from eight thousand miles away. If there once were actual indigenous peoples at my location I’d try to research legend and lore from the proximate neighborhood. I’d want to build that into my story, to give it a location-based verisimilitude that I would hope might interest a reader. If not, I’d go with my author’s license and make up some phony tribe. But I’d do it in a way that would allow my reader to continue to believe that skies were blue in this land, just as they are in his or her own land.

Fiction works best when the facts and premises are credible. Characters and props, talking points, descriptions, whatever, should all require a plausible explanation for being in a story. I want my readers to be confident in my research. I want them to find my descriptions of time and place accurate. I want them to accept that people in these particular environs are realistic and capable of acting in the way I have them act in my novel.

And when, as a prominent part of my tale, I stick a naked Fiji Islander in the tundra of the Northwest Territory, I better have a damn good reason for freezing this poor guy’s balls off or having him die of excessive mosquito bites. I just can’t bring myself to stick the Fijian in a snow bank because I’m too lazy to find out what an ethnic Tierra del Fuegan really looked like and whether or not such indigenous folk were habitués of snow banks. And I’m too invested in creating a credible work to just shrug, palms up, and say when someone wonders why I did such a thing: “Hey, it’s fiction man, let it happen. Don’t be so fucking uptight.”

So my verdict is: do your homework. Build your novel with as much accurate content as you can and don’t leave yourself exposed to criticism by somebody who knows you could have done better, or worked harder, to make the story more real. For me, better fiction involves research to make a story credible to a person who grew up in the neighborhood you are trying to use as the setting for your story.

I buy books. I will pay my money for works where I have confidence that the foundations are solid. I won’t buy a work of fiction where an incorrect fact slaps me in the face. There is no “take” from such a work. For me with my consumer hat on, your final product is sure to benefit from verisimilitude. So this author lost a sale and may find that savvy reviewers are happy to throw darts at the premise. There’s no upside in doing the hard work of writing a novel but passing on research that can make it the best you can possibly create.

BURNING QUESTIONS

2011-07-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

As you probably know, the first volume of my mystery/suspense 1970s Trilogy, Burning Questions, should be published by the end of the month. I have set up another blog for the trilogy, at 1970strilogy.blogspot.com. All of you "followers" out there are invited to become followers of that blog too. As the books go into production and I begin to do my promo, you will be treated to some interesting stories about Cape Ann, MA in the 1960s and 70s. Then, in volume 2, we'll go to the Mission District of SF in the early 70s and you might even catch a glimpse of a young Carlos Santana. In book 3, We'll be going to the wine and weed country for more murder, mayhem and relationship angst. So here's the probably new cover for book #1. Let me know what you think.

BLOG PRAISES FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS

2011-07-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

Thanks so much to Joel Gates, who blogs:

"I have been fortunate enough to wander across a really great book!...I picked up the novel and after finishing up "Bitter Seeds" recently (Great book!!), I dove into "The Flight of the Sorceress". It is far, far better than I had even expected. I had not read anything of Mr. Willdorf's before so I did not know what to expect. Here is what I got.

The historical research is fantastic! And the settings just "breathe" they are so real.
The characters are so well developed and my heart bleeds for them during their travails.
the heroines are plucky, ... in extremely admirable ways that never cross the line into annoying.

(I)t is a really exciting and engaging book and one that I highly recommend!

http://greengatesinc.blogspot.com/2011/03/flight-of-sorceress.html

What do The Flight of the Sorceress and Grimm’s Fairy Tales have in common? A Grimm decision.

2011-06-30T15:19:00.000-07:00

Folks, remember that I’m a lawyer, so have a little pity on me as I drag you down the dark path of Scalia-think. I was so bemused when I read the recent First Amendment decision of the Subprime Court, BROWN v. ENTERTAINMENT MERCHANTS ASSOCIATION, which, in an opinion by Antonin Scalia, used the example of the Grimm Fairy Tails as a reason why violent video games that are hawked to children are protected by the Bill of Rights. I couldn’t help but draw a connection between his reasoning an the message of The Flight of the Sorceress.

The Flight of the Sorceress tells a story about the Church’s successful attack on women — one of the big achievements of the Catholic hegemony. The universality of the Church would quickly usher in the Dark Ages.

In The Flight of the Sorceress, the Church declares Glenys to be a sorceress because she knows how to mix herbs, spices and various animal parts and to brew them into poultices and medicines. She was taught these secrets — the healing powers of roots, berries, leaves and minerals — by matriarchs, who handed down this knowledge, mother to daughter since time immemorial. But the new Church could not tolerate such power in the hands of a gender from which it required submission, so it decreed that the skills involved in healing were supernatural as they allowed women to “undo” what God had created, including illness and injury. Women in possession of such power had to be eradicated.

When I think of the Brothers Grimm and their fairy tales, I think mostly of Hansel and Gretel. I think of dark woods, of thick-trunked, gnarly deciduous trees, with their broad heavy leaves casting opaque shadows on a forest floor. I think of tiny, well-kept cottages tucked away in small glens, colorful candies dangling from their eaves. I imagine a pair of wart-faced, elderly women, dressed in black, like widows, flashing gap-toothed smiles like the grins of jock-o-lanterns. They beckon. Their sugar-adorned door is ajar revealing a boiling cauldron within. Pungent smoke billows from the chimney. Everything seems benign, but the Brothers warn things are not as they seem. Ugly old women eat little children!

The witches depicted in Bothers Grimm Fairy Tales icons of evil. They dwell in the woods because they have been cast out of good society, and to a very real extent, such shunning did come to pass in the Dark Ages. Some sources claim that millions of women — a holocaust— were killed for possessing the healing arts because they The ability to mix herbs and entrails into ancient remedies were deemed to be the Devil’s secrets and to possess such knowledge was to be in league with Satan. So the Brothers portrayed them as ugly old crones who lured and deceived innocent, trusting children by plying the inscrutable wiles of women.

The Grimm Fairy Tales survived — flourished indeed — because their tales did not offend the Church. Rather, the iconography reinforced misogynist Church propaganda and the Bible admonition that we should not suffer witches and sorcerers to live. Women, especially elderly, widowed women —females not under the control of men— couldn’t be trusted. If left unattended and free of male supervision such old ladies would use their satanic heritage to lead children astray.

I think his decision came out right, but I have to snicker when I think of the antiquated imagery Scalia relied on to arrive at it. He had to draw on medieval witchcraft precedent to get there. If his Church, beginning in the fifth century, used hyperbolic witchcraft propaganda against Glenys and Hypatia, as recounted in The Flight of the Sorceress, and later in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, to advance its misogynist agenda, then our Founding Fathers must have been thinking about protecting such denunciations from lawsuits by the witch-class under the First Amendment.

In Scalia-world, big corporations are really not unlike churches. If they want to spout witchcraft imagery to make a buck, well as far as Scalia is concerned, there’s medieval precedent for protecting that kind of speech. After all, Grimm’s stories are basically eighteen century and for Scalia, when it comes to constitutional precedents, you can’t get any more up-to-date than that.

Who are the Alevis?

2011-06-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

Not really Flight of the Sorceress stuff, but I have a post on http://agauchepress.com/category/whats-new/ that might be of interest to some of you who are wondering what's going on in Syria.

THE NEW BOOK COVER IS HERE!

2011-06-16T14:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, Friends of the Sorceress. Check out the new book cover for the POD and all further E-Books. Thanks so much for all your input. This is an exciting change.

Judging A Book By Its Cover

2011-06-13T12:55:00.000-07:00

My historical novel, The Flight of the Sorceress, currently an E-book, will soon be released by Wild Child Publishing in print. Sales so far have been modest. The cover, shown here is essentially colorless, of a Roman frieze depicting the conquest of Rome over Britannia. I chose it originally because it symbolized not only the victory of an imperial force over an indigenous people but the gender connotation. Rome, the victor, is masculine, while Britannia, the vanquished is depicted as feminine. Indeed, many of the Celts who resisted Roman conquest were female and my novels protagonists are dominantly female. So the metaphor was apt.

But as we head for a print version of Flight of the Sorceress, I have come to realize that good metaphors do not necessarily make for good covers. That old sop, “You can’t judge a book by its cover” may be true enough, but readers do buy books based upon the covers. And you can’t judge a book until you read it. So the first step is to get the potential buyer to pick it up. Color helps there.

Although my editor, Marci Baun, and I have reached a consensus: The Flight of the Sorceress needs a new cover, front and back, this make-over has proved to be no easy task. We have honed down our goal. We want a picture, preferably a stock photo that includes a young, pretty redheaded woman, who might represent Glenys, the heroine of the story. The picture must be time-sensitive, as the story is set in the fifth century A.D.

My search involved several key words: Woman, Druid, Sorceress, Celt, Roman, ancient, classical, priestess, alchemist, Goddess, antiquity. I searched Google. I looked at all the stock photo sites. Then, when I found something that might be appropriate, I confronted

But I started with a big mistake —Photobucket. A lot of people put pictures up on Photobucket. The site requires that the posting person have copyrights, but that doesn’t mean much because the site doesn’t seem to police the postings. You will find the same picture being used on several different websites. You frequently will not find any reference to copyright holders. Are these photos in the public domain? Can you use them as a cover picture on your book? Do you want to test the issue by getting a lawyer letter and then deciding whether to pull back all your print versions, or to fight it out and spend way more than you’ll ever make on your book? Here are some nice photos that I found on Photobucket but couldn’t use because there was inadequate copyright information.

Maybe you can negotiate. Pay a licensing fee after the fact of printing. It is possible. But that lawyer the copyright holder has paid to enforce the copyright wants to prove his worth and knows he has you over a barrel. On the other hand, the copyright holder is getting a lot of free exposure for her work. Good book cover exposure can’t ever hurt, and the better the book does, the better known the copyright holder of the cover rights will be.

Marci and I looked as a couple of very nice potential cover photos.

They are the work of fine artists.

Licenses for these images as book

covers are prohibitive.

I looked at a stock photo site for a rendition of Pharos, the Alexandria lighthouse and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The copyright agent that licenses rights wanted over two hundred Euros for the rights. It’s a standard, non-negotiable fee, regardless of print run, likely sales, or any economic reality I can see. Crazy.

So that brought me down to stock photos.Stock photos though are no panacea. Though there are literally thousands available, many simply show up as too contemporary. Facial expressions are frequently inappropriate. Poses seem contrived. Costumes, where they exist at all, are garish, or the women look like whores. Some are cartoonish. Some are kitsch. Wrong messages abound.

I looked at www.istockphoto.com/, www.dreamstime.com/ www.shutterstock.com, www.123rf.com/, www.photoxpress.com/ and www.bigstockphoto.com/, I spent hours plowing through their trash photos. It was like I was the victim of some crime and the cops set me down with twenty-five years worth of mug shots. But the alternative is to hire an artist. I’ve done that. I even supplied a cover photo to help it along. It cost me around $500 and that was in 2001. I think that cover could have come out better. But it was also a big chuck of change considering that I made 1000 sales in total.

I know we need a new cover for The Flight of the Sorceress. I know it will improve sales. So here is the rough outline of what we came up with. Obviously, it will be tweaked. Go ahead. Judge the book by this cover. Does this work with the title, and what you know about the book? Let me know what you think.

THE PELAGIAN HERESY, A THEME IN FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS

2011-06-07T11:32:00.000-07:00

One of the major characters in The Flight of the Sorceress is Pelagius, also called Morcant in the novel. Morcant is an alteration of the name “Morgan the Celt” an a.k.a. for Pelagius. The character in the novel is an actual person. Born around 354 A.D. in South Wales, Pelagius came from a Christian Romanized Celtic background and was the son of a Roman official. As such, he came from a culture that had a history of women in positions of influence and power. His teachings are known in theology as “The Pelagian Heresy” and this “heresy” is reflected in the themes woven into the novel.

Pelagius, aka Morgan (or Morcant) the Celt

“The Pelagian Heresy” was a challenge to the Church’s business model. Let’s say you’re in the business of “saving souls” and you’re selling tickets to heaven. In the mid-to-late fourth century, the Catholic Church was anything but catholic. There were numerous Christian sects and cults. You don’t want just anyone to sell those tickets. And you certainly don’t want people to get in on their own. You want to max out your profits. What do you do?

What you need is a reason for folks to buy “Catholic.” Enter Augustine, with his Original Sin theory. Everyone born is a sinner. Sinners can’t get into heaven. And God, according to Augustine, is a real stickler on this original sin. Under the Church dogma, to get to heaven you have to be absolved through the receipt of properly administered “sacraments.” So you tell your customer base (which is everybody) that there’s only one place to get a genuine ticket to heaven: from an authorized dealer, a priest duly ordained by the Catholic Church. No other clergy can do it and you can’t do it yourself. God doesn’t care if you’re a newborn or led the life of a saint. All God cares about is whether you got your soul inspected and cleared by one of his authorized franchisees. If you buy at another store, before you know it, you’ll be standing in front of those Pearly Gates and St. Pete will be going “Tsk, Tsk. You bought yourself a counterfeit, sucker. Tough shit. I know you led a good honest life and all that, but you can go the Hell. Oh excuse me a moment. I see Hitler and Stalin waiting in line. They got themselves absolved on their deathbeds. Go right in gentlemen. God’s glad to see you.” That’s the Augustinian business model. Anything else is heresy, punishable ultimately by death.

Well Pelagius was having none of that. A monk, not ordained, and thus technically a layman, Pelagius first got into trouble with the Church when he visited Rome around 380. Appalled by the showy wealth of the Church hierarchy and especially the Papacy, he railed against its profligacy and corruption. He attributed this hedonism to Augustine, who in his Confessions taught that mankind is basically evil, that good works do not count toward salvation and that sexual desire was inherited depravity. He disputed Augustine’s doctrine of original sin arguing that man’s nature was not tainted by the sin of Adam. He advocated free will and that anyone could get into heaven by being a good person. No one needed the assistance of a Church administered sacrament. Pelagius placed on each individual the burden of and blame for every sin as a fully deliberate act. He held that everyone is born free to make one's choices as one will. A person can be saved if he or she makes up his or her mind to live a correct, moral life, to choose good and reject evil. For Pelagius, Jesus was more model than savior. He contended that the Christianization of the Empire was not making true Christians of people, rather only 'conforming pagans.’ Contrary to Augustine and subsequent Christian theologians who have almost always taken a negative view of sexual pleasure and women in general, Pelagius did not believe sexuality was tainted and argued that it could be enjoyed fully within marriage. His outspoken opposition to the prudishness, misogyny and opulence of the newly developing Church attracted a following and he soon became a well-known spiritual adviser and influential theologian.

In 415 Pelagius was accused of heresy by Augustine and St. Jerome, the editor of the new Vulgate Latin Bible. He was acquitted twice but his treatise, "On Free Will" got him into trouble again in 417. Finally he was convicted of heresy by a council in Carthage in 418 and was excommunicated by Pope Zosimus. He and his followers were banned from Rome and after they left the city were never seen again.

ALCHEMY: Science or Sophistry?

2011-06-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

ALCHEMY: Science or Sophistry?

When you hear the word “alchemy” do you think of a wizened, myopic geezer toiling over smoldering ethers while attempting to turn base metal into gold? Do you think of sorcerers? Witches? Do you conjure up images of evil? Would you be surprised to learn that the very earliest theoreticians propounding an atomic theory called themselves alchemists? Or that they came up with their atomic theories nearly three thousand years ago! Would you believe that their theory was essentially correct? Can you imagine that alchemy once was synonymous with reputable scientific inquiry?

For those who have read, or intend to read The Flight of the Sorceress, you will find several references to alchemy. My research, in preparation for writing the novel revealed that Hypatia, who is portrayed in my novel as a philosopher, mathematician and scientist, was accused by her enemies of being an alchemist. By the time of the novel, (410-415 A.D.) “alchemy” was becoming associated with magic and the occult as a result of a Church-instigated campaign to destroy the study of science. Why? What the hell happened that turned science into magic? What was the Church worried about? To figure that out, I delved into the history of alchemy and learned something about how its suppression as the study of science caused it to be warped into something occult.

Alchemy didn’t start out as a pastime of kooks, crazies, magicians and sorcerers. It had its origins in the search for knowledge.

“The word “alchemy” is actually a combination of two words: Al means the Mighty Sun. Chemi means Fire. Khem was the name of ancient Egypt, where alchemy is believed to have begun. Someone named Hermes Trismegistus is supposed to have invented the concept of alchemy. Whether this was a single person or a group of “initiates” is in dispute. Hermes is a generic name associated with “initiates.” Trismegistus means "Thrice-Great." Whether one man or a group, Hermes Trismegistus produced a collection of writings, at least 42 volumes, called the Books of Hermes. Supposedly, this encyclopedia contained all of the knowledge of the world at that time, including six volumes specifically dedicated to medicine.

As early as the seventh century B.C. the Books of Hermes was being used to teach by Greek philosophers including the noted Greek alchemist Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras was the originator or an atomic theory. He taught that space was filled with a countless number of atoms and that the atoms formed physical substances. Later alchemists refined this atomic theory by theorizing that these atoms were always in motion.

The practice of alchemy seems to have become so popular that by the third century A.D. Diocletian felt threatened. In the year 296, he set out to destroy all Egyptian books on alchemy. Despite this attack by Diocletian, neo-Platonists adopted alchemy as part of their philosophy in the fourth century A.D. By then, the word “alchemy” was in common usage.

Since alchemy claimed to be able to explain the secrets of creation, the newly empowered Catholic Church declared it to be (knowledge) a forbidden fruit, given to humanity by the fallen angels. Acquiring such knowledge, like eating the apple, allowed man to become more like God. As such, investigations into the hidden works of nature were deemed sacrilegious. In addition, since a large body of alchemy originally had to do with the healing arts the Church was not only attacking an entire compilation of everything people knew, it was specifically attempting to eradicate the teaching of medicine. [1] In many parts of the civilized world, healing was an occupation allowed to women, and thus this attack had both scientific and misogynistic impact.

It took the concerted efforts of the Church over the next two centuries to eradicate alchemy’s association with real science. This involved the systematic destruction of hundreds of years of research and experiments. When The Flight of the Sorceress takes place (the early fifth century A.D.) the Church was well into its own campaign to wipe out all teaching and references to this subject.

The destruction of the records of scientific discoveries paved the way for a bastardization of alchemy, allowing for the publication of a work called The Divine Art of Making Gold and Silver in the early fifth century. No longer would alchemy be portrayed as the study of pure science in combination with philosophy. Now it would become associated with greed: a search for devilish knowledge on how to transform God’s creations into physical wealth. This was the beginning of the end for alchemy as a science and the beginning of its transformation into a cult of magic. And it permitted the Church to ban alchemy (meaning the quest for scientific knowledge) as an evil, even diabolical activity of witches and sorcerers who were condemned to death by stoning in the Bible.

Hypatia was a neo-Platonist. That is why, as related in The Flight of the Sorceress, Cyril, the Alexandrian prelate, accused Hypatia of teaching from the Book of Hermes and of being an alchemist. Her murder in 415 A.D. caused pagan scholars to flee Egypt for Athens where they managed to survive until 529 A.D. when Emperor Justinian closed down their last academy.

From then until the present alchemy has evoke images of wizened crackpots toiling over steaming cauldrons while attempting to find a solution that would turn base metals into gold —precisely the image the Church desired to pin on anyone who might have the temerity to search for knowledge through scientific experimentation.

[1] . A facsimile of one of these medical treatises of Hermes apparently exists at Astor Library of New York and contains descriptions of over 700 medicines, some of which can not be identified.

Read How I Turned into THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

2011-05-31T12:19:00.000-07:00

Read how Hurricane Carol turned me into THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and caused me to attack a restaurant. A true story right out of the 1950s. http://agauchepress.com/category/whats-new/

THE LATEST E-BOOK STATS:

2011-05-25T13:50:00.000-07:00

In February 2011 e-books ranked as the #1 format in all categories of trade publishing,
In January/February 2011 e-book sales represented 27% of book sales.
2010 e-book sales almost reached $1 billion.
E-book sales were up in 2010 by 400-600% from 2009.
2010 e-book sales revenue was 7-10% of total book sales.
2009 e-book sales revenue was just 1%.
13 million e-book readers were sold in 2010. 50% of those sales were in last quarter of 2010.
Only about 4 million e-book readers were sold in 2009.
The average reader of e-books currently reads about 41% of his/her books in digital form.

OPEN INVITATION

2011-05-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

If you have a book group, study group or chat group and any of the topics raised in this blog or THE FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS involve something you want to discuss or debate, feel free to reply to this blog and I am happy to work out a schedule for a time when we can connect. I am available on Gmail video chat as well as through the blog. Barry

COMING SOON! THE NINETEEN SEVENTIES TRILOGY

2011-05-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

New novels by Barry S. Willdorf to be published in print and as E books by Whiskey Creek Press.

BURNING QUESTIONS: Someone is burning down all the old resort hotels in Gloucester, MA. Has the son of a town matriarch been killed because he knows who it is? Did he commit suicide by Russian roulette as the town fathers claim? Or did his girlfriend, Christina Lima, the daughter of a poor Portuguese fisherman have a hand in his death? Nate Lewis is hired to find out, but when he falls in love with Christina they both become lethal targets for powerful interests. (Publication date: August 2011)

A SHOT IN THE ARM: Nate is hired to defend a black militant who is charged with murder after he confronts drug dealers who are flooding San Francisco with potent Asian heroin. When he discovers that the dealers are just the distribution arm of a covert government operation to finance arms dealings with Southeast Asian anti-communist guerrillas his life is in play and only Christina can save him.

THE FOURTH CONSPIRATOR: Soon after Christina takes a job as the PR representative at her cousin’s winery in Mendocino County an inheritance fight begins over its control and Christina is dragged into it. Meanwhile Nate is retained to represent a winery executive charged with killing a thief who is raiding the executive’s marijuana garden. Are the two events connected? It will take more murders to sort this one out.

NOW AVAILABLE AT BARNES & NOBLE!

2011-05-20T22:28:00.000-07:00

FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS is now available as a NOOK book at Barnes& & Noble. Please let your Nook friends know and, if you have read it, I would appreciate your posting a customer comment on their site. Thanks so much, Barry

Another Satisfied Reader!

2011-05-16T10:41:00.001-07:00

"I've really enjoyed reading your writing, Barry - you transport me to those places and understand the nuances of the various situations you describe - extremely well done and insightful!"
Loi Eberle, MT

SPECIAL RAPTURE REBATE OFFER

2011-05-14T14:03:00.000-07:00

According to the billboards, the Bible “guarantees” that May 21 will be JUDGMENT DAY. You only have seven days left to download your very own copy of The Flight of the Sorceress. I have it on very good authority that you CAN take it with you. The lines will be long. There will be plenty of down time to read it, I assure you. And for those of you who are lucky enough to make the trip, I have a very special offer! Present me with proof of rapture and I will personally refund your purchase price. Keep the book. For you, it will be free. DON’T LEAVE EARTH WITHOUT A COPY!
BUY IT AT Wild Child Publishing

COPTS AND SALAFIS FIGHT IT OUT IN EGYPT

2011-05-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

Recent headlines from Egypt tell of raging battles between Coptic Christians and Salafi Muslim fundamentalists. The other day 12 people (seven Copts and six Salafis) were killed when Salafis, acting on rumors that a Christian woman converted to Islam and was then kidnapped by Copts, attacked and burned a Christian church. The Copts do not permit women to divorce. The only way a woman can break out of a bad marriage is to leave the church. Hence, there is a lot of rumor-mongering that women are being “imprisoned” by the Coptic Church.

The Copts are the same intolerant Christians who ruled Alexandria in the fifth century when the story of The Flight of the Sorceress takes place. It was this Christian group, headed by Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, who murdered Hypatia, Alexandria’s last librarian and who set out to exterminate pagans and Jews, as is recounted in the novel. This is also that same sect of Christians who, a short time later, attacked as dissidents and heretics, the Arian and Nestorian Christians. By the mid-to-late fifth century the Copts had split with both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches and named its own pope. Currently, the 117th iteration of that pope is Shenouda III.

While the Copts may be portrayed in the Christian world as the victims of the majority Muslims, this is no sect of shrinking violets. Indeed, despite the Muslim conquest of the country, Egypt remained mostly Coptic Christian until the 12th century. The Copts currently represent about twelve million of Egypt’s eighty million people and they live mostly in the northern part of the country. They are headquartered in Alexandria.

The Salafis in Egypt are extremists and supporters of Osama Bin Laden. They adhere to the reactionary, Saudi Wahabi strain of Islam that is as oppressive to women as the Copts. Salafis believe that it is okay to kill infidels (along with secular Muslims.) These are the folks who went into the streets after Bin Laden was killed and protested his “martyrdom.” Yassir Al-Burhami, a Salafi cleric in Alexandria, was recently quoted as saying “bin Laden was a ‘martyr’ who ‘was killed with his head held high, and God did not hand him over to his enemies.” He does not explain how God permitted whomever to hand bin Laden over to his enemies.

The clash we are witnessing in Egypt currently is between two of the most fundamentalist, zealous, narrow-minded, intolerant groups of religious fanatics presently on the map. Except for their dogma, they are birds of a feather. As long as they keep the feud to themselves, who can complain if they wipe each other out?

ST. AUGUSTINE: SOURCE OF DARKNESS

2011-04-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

“St. Augustine the Blessed," he is called. This saint and pre-eminent Doctor of the Church, lived between 354 and 430 A.D. Though he is almost entirely off-stage in its pages, his theology and the influence he wielded over the cultural landscape of the times drives the plot of The Flight of the Sorceress. But unlike the effusive official accounts of Augustinian iconography, the Augustine in my The Flight of the Sorceress is anything but a positive force. For me, Augustine represents a lurking ominous evil spreading a black, diabolical cloud over hope and curiosity, over learning and freedom. It is Augustinian thought and deed that move the story, bringing on a horrific darkness. It is his influence that altered the benign feminist-tolerant Celtic culture and the intellectually vibrant Greek civilization sewing the seeds for the rough misogynist, fear-based landscape of repression and ignorance that would be reaped for the next millennium.

It would be all but impossible to write a serious historical novel set in (410-415 A.D.) yet fail to address the impact that St. Augustine made upon those times. This was a period of intense religious and political conflict and Bishop Augustine of Hippo was at the epicenter of the temblor. His two big works, Confessions and City of God were critical to justifying the consolidation of the Christian Church into a State-enforced operation. But rather than rave about these works, as do his myriad of admirers, I find them indicting. I am a contrarian and my The Flight of the Sorceress is a contrarian novel. I have no doubt that Augustine would gladly cosign me to hell.

But here’s my case, and I will make no bones about it, I am a critic and a skeptic when it comes to this man. I wouldn’t buy real estate from him. I wouldn’t believe him if he told me it was daytime. I wouldn’t grant him parole on the grounds that he has rehabilitated himself. I have spent most of my professional life uncovering fraud, identifying dissembling and observing human behavior in its rawest forms. I’ve come across his MO many times.

Let me begin with my own confession. I haven’t read most of Confessions. Confessions has been called the first modern memoir and I have an aversion to memoirs. When I think of memoirs, I think of James Frey’s phony memoir A Million Little Pieces, of Herman Rosenblat's hoax: Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived and now Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. I find them self-serving and unreliable, except to the extent that they contain damaging admissions. I have no reason to believe that Augustine was any more reliable with his memoir than his progeny. Augustine wrote Confessions in 398-9 A.D, just ten years after he was baptized and two years after he was consecrated a bishop (which he claims, was forced on him by his admiring congregants.) This theme of newly-minted modesty, of having greatness thrust upon one’s self upon conversion is so common, it’s become cliché. Confessions, it seems to me, is nearly a template for most of the best selling memoirs that have followed, even to this day. We get the youthful bad boy (or girl) who ultimately sees the light and is redeemed —a comforting, inspiring morality tale that century after century, never fails to take in the gullible.

So how did this fellow, who by his own account, claimed that there were few, if any Carthaginians with whom he could hold an intelligent conversation, rise so fast in the Catholic hierarchy? The answer is he created a winning business plan for his company — “Original Sin” —a marketing miracle. Let’s say you’re in the business of selling tickets to Heaven. Well, you want to make the product desirable. You want everyone to need it. So you start with dogma: no one is born free of sin, but you need to be free of sin to get into heaven. Then you tell them they have to qualify.

How does one get rid of that sin, so that they qualify? Absolution. Can you do it yourself? Nope. What about just being a good person all your life? Can you do good things? Work your butt off to help people? Nope. Won’t work. Sorry, God won’t accept just being a good person. You’ve got to be baptized.

Where can you get that? Only one place —the Roman Catholic Church — by an authorized service representative, an ordained priest. Using any other type of priest voids the warranty. But what if you died immediately upon your birth? What if there’s no Catholic Church in your neighborhood? What if you died before there was a Catholic Church? Tough luck. Lodge your complaint with God, we’re only doing his work here — following orders. Augustine becomes a Roman Catholic and cooks up original sin, the world’s first franchise operation, selling genuine, officially licensed, brand-name absolution. He gets promoted to the top. It makes me a skeptic.

But to me Confessions reveals an even more insidious side of Augustine’s human nature than clever marketing strategies. Augustine had a wife of at least eleven years. Though he apparently created a family with her, he wouldn’t marry her formally because she was beneath his station in life. He ultimately ditched her in an effort to find himself a suitable trophy wife, meanwhile continuing to browse the herd. He also had a son who, after being baptized at Augustine’s insistence, is lost to history. Like many people who find themselves with an inconvenient spouse, getting religion is a pretty neat cover. You go into the repentance mode, discover God, and you come out clean and moral. There’s nothing like being “born again” to get you over your moral lapses. Confessions seems to be a “How To” book that just about every celebrity and politician can benefit from.

After his conversion, one must look in vain for any “good works.” Rather, upon being elevated to bishop he chose the role of moral arbiter, devoting his energies into a series of repressive campaigns against divergent theological positions. His father was a pagan. He attacked pagans. His benefactors for more than a decade were Manicheans. He skewered them. Though he dabbled in neo-Platonism, he went after this group of former friends with a vengeance. He joined a religion that was half Donatist at the time. A sect that had stood firm against the corruption of Roman state interests the Donatists put loyalty to faith over temporal concerns and paid for their resistance in the lion’s den. In 411 A.D. Augustine instigated their purge and used the power of the Roman legions to crush them. When Pelagius and Caelestius challenged him on the dogma of original sin, he had them declared heretics and Pelagius soon disappeared. He was on to the Arian Christians when he died. Augustine indeed could not tolerate dissent. Everyone was stupid but him. God was on his side and his alone.

In Confessions, Augustine recounts his membership in what we’d call today a street gang. He was a petty criminal, by his own admission. I don’t believe that tigers change their stripes. I think recidivism is the more common behavior and that people who grow up to thuggery, lying and stealing (as Augustine admits he did) will not shrink from using such behavior in service of a new set of beliefs. Whether you do it for the street gang, as he did in his youth or for the gang in the Vatican, I don’t see a lot of difference, except that you get way better PR all the way down through the Ages if you do it for an outfit that has staying power. As far as I’m concerned, it was Augustine’s good fortune to move up from the minors and get a shot with the Yankees.

This brings me to Augustine the misogynist, the man who went out for a pack of smokes, so to speak, and never returned to his wife of eleven years. I think of misogyny as the canary in the mine of civilization. Misogyny and general intolerance, leading to the destruction of knowledge, go hand in hand. If you can shut up one half of humanity, you can shut up the other half as well.

For me the original “original sin” begins when some nefarious human being(s) put stylus to sheepskin and cooked up a creation myth where the supposed first man (Adam) “bore” the supposed first female (Eve.) Okay, it was a rib. Not a vaginal birth. But then, Eve gets seduced by the snake and uses her wiles to entice Adam into taking a bite of the forbidden fruit. From here on out, every human being is born vaginally, through sex (leaving aside the Christ story.) Accordingly, it makes sex the original sin and women the original sinners, the font of all sin.

From there you get portraiture of women like Jezebel, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, all schemers and connivers, all women who used their sexual prowess to confound and seduce men and thus justify retaliatory, oppressive behavior against women. So it comes as no surprise that the great philosopher/theologian, the premier pundit of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Augustine, a man admittedly fixated on lust and the sins of the flesh, would glom on to original sin.

Let’s take a look what he said about the victims of rape during the sack of Rome in 410 A.D in his great work, City of God- Cidade de Deus (quoted in italics):

“No one can dispute that if a woman remains firmly opposed to the act upon her, no violation of a woman is her fault as long as she cannot avoid it without sinning. But because, a woman’s lust may be gratified during such and act, the woman will experience shame, even though she is pure of spirit and truly modest because such an act cannot be experienced without some sensual pleasure, and people will believe that she gave her consent.”

In Augustine’s view, all sexual conduct is a sin committed by each participant because they each must receive pleasure from it — pleasure is sinful. Women receive pleasure while being raped. A woman’s lust is gratified during a rape because it is cannot be anything other than an act of sensual pleasure. And likewise, women provide pleasure so therefore they must be sinful.

On the subject of hypocrisy, here, again from City of God,) he says:

“Many pagans appear to forget that they would now be unable to denounce our Church had they not escaped from the enemy by finding safety within our sanctuaries. Our holy places bear witness that during the sack they were sanctuaries for all, whether Christian or Pagan. Thus the ones who today are now able attack our religion, and blame Christ for the sack, ignore the fact that it was Christ who saved them rather than mere good luck.”

What Augustine refers to is that the Visigoths who sacked Rome respected the Christian sanctuaries and spared the many people took refuge there. Implicit in this rebuke is the dire admission that though Christ would save a Pagan, Augustine would not. He all but admits, had he been in charge, he’d have locked out of his church pagans to face annihilation at the hands of barbaric hoards. What I find amazing is that Augustine brandishes this veiled threat without apparent recognition of his playing God. He goes on to sit in judgment.

“Those Romans who now so viciously attack the servants of Christ would not be alive today had they not fraudulently pretended that they were Christians.”

The interesting thing about this pronouncement is that by 410 A.D. Augustine held the position that only those adherents of his Church were Christians. He’d already been more than a decade at rooting out all manner of heresies. Indeed the invading Visigoths thought of themselves as Christian, but Augustine though of them as heretical barbarians. They were frauds only because they believed in a different Christianity than him. Beyond that, what kind of “servant of Christ” administers a loyalty oath to save another human being from slaughter at the hands of a ruthless invader?

“Christians must reflect on the excesses of wicked, immoral, and ungodly men, those very sins which provoked God. Every man, however laudably he lives, yields in some points to the lust of the flesh.”

Where are we going here? The lust of the flesh is the reason that the Visigoths sacked Rome? It had nothing to do with the blood feud caused when Emperor Honorius slaughtered 30,000 of his own soldiers and that their kin wanted revenge? Somehow God was provoked because the sexual appetites he bestowed on all fauna actually worked! And the upshot of that provocation was to decide in 410 A.D. that one sorry city in an entire world deserved indiscriminate havoc? Augustine’s God just gets pissed off and has a tantrum.

“It seems to me the good had to suffer along with the wicked not because they spent an equally corrupt life, but because we all love life, when instead they ought to have held it cheap.”

But let’s look at whether Augustine himself held life cheap? As Possidius, his contemporary biographer describes his end of life, even as the “barbarian armies” (Arian Christians) were laying siege to Hippo, he died happily in his sleep, well-nourished in good old age. Tell me that Augustine held his own life cheap. How come he didn’t have to suffer?

It makes me wonder how Augustine could even get away with calling himself a Christian. I find it very hard to discern a confluence between Augustine’s deeds and the teachings of Sermon on the Mount. This was not a man who cared one whit about judging not, or the turning of cheeks. He, unlike Christ, would impose a loyalty oath on admission to sanctuary. Though he repeatedly admits to being a sinner, he never shirks casting the first stone.

In sum, the youthful Augustine was a gangster and thief. He led a lascivious life. He thought he was smarter than everybody else in Carthage. He had a spouse he wouldn’t marry because she wasn’t upscale enough for him. He dumped her after eleven years in search of a trophy wife. While he was thus engaged, he had other affairs. He received financial support from Manichean friends then turned on them. He cooked up a business model for his new cronies, the Church. In this model, original sin, he gleefully consigned new born babies, the un-baptized since time immemorial, including the likes of Moses and Abraham, not to mention his own father, to eternal damnation. He asserted that the victims of brutal rape were really sinners because they must have enjoyed it. He would gladly have turned out of sanctuary to certain death anyone who disagreed with his dogma. He willingly used military might to enforce conformity with his theological opinions. He never performed any demonstrable good works; rather he devoted his life to rooting out differing opinions within the Church, never shrinking from the persecution of those with whom he disagreed. Though he railed mightily against the sins of the flesh, he knew those “sins” intimately and there is no reason to think that he became celibate before old age caught up with him. Indeed, it is often the case that such pontificators are precisely the ones who indulge. In a Church that espoused poverty, Augustine died in wealth and comfort, wanting for nothing.

When Augustine was born, there was a functioning library in Alexandria. There were numerous and diverse religious sects, including many species of Christianity. By the time Augustine died in 430 A.D. there was no longer a functioning library in Alexandria. Jews had experienced a pogrom in that city. Teaching was becoming perilous, especially when it came to knowledge imparted by pagans. Books were being burned. Many Christian dissenting sects had been eradicated or were forced underground. Constantine’s Edict of Toleration that allowed Christians to live openly had been shredded and Roman legions were actively involved in enforcing Catholic religious dogma. Heretics were disappearing or being burned. Women’s traditional occupations, particularly in Celtic lands were becoming circumscribed and often described as sorcery, punishable by death. Europe was quickly descending into a millennium of darkness. That was Augustine’s legacy and it was enough to inspire me into making Augustine the villainous, antagonistic force in The Flight of the Sorceress.

Some General News

2011-04-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to an interesting article from Poisoned Pen, regarding book reviews. It's worth a read: good-book-reviews-are-no-longer-enough

I am also delighted to announce that my publisher, Wild Child Publications, will be releasing The Flight of the Sorceress in print at the end of May. If anyone in the Bay Area has a book group and would like to schedule an author appearance, please contact me. Also, I can do author appearances/interviews via Gmail Video Chat.

WHEN POPES WERE PEEPS: FUN “FACTS.”

2011-04-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

When I began writing The Flight of the Sorceress, I was sort of forced into learning a bit about the early popes, most of whom ended up being martyred. So, one thing led to another and I fell into a rabbit-hole, rumor mill of papal anecdotes. In the spirit of Lent, Passover and Easter, I decided to do a “diversity tour d’pope.” Now some of you may ask: “Why is he picking on popes? Why not be more ecumenical?” The simple answer is that the popes were the ones who declared papal supremacy and papal infallibility. Having assumed top billing on matters related to the Kingdom of Heaven, it seems to me that they made themselves fair game. Anyway, here are a few diversity stories, I turned up.

POPE JOAN: THE WOMAN POPE

In the town of Mainz, Germany around 800 A.D. English missionaries who were attempting to convert the pagan Germanic tribes to Christianity founded a monastery called Fulda, which became a center of education, but it was only for boys. However, a monk named Martin Polonus tells of a young woman from Mainz who learned Greek and Latin and became "proficient in a diversity of branches of knowledge." It is believed that to get this education she disguised herself as a boy.

Such a disguise may not have been as hard a task as it seems today. Back then, personal hygiene was virtually nonexistent. Nobody bathed. There were 12-year-old popes and a 5-year-old archbishop. In fact, there are credible accounts of over 30 saints' lives in which women dress as men. They are called "transvestite nuns." In one such case, St. Eugenia became a monk while disguised as a boy. She was so convincing in fact that she was brought to court on charges of fathering a local woman's child. She was forced to prove her innocence by baring her breasts in public. In the ninth century, the Vatican was home to cross-dressing saints.

Polonus wrote that this woman from Mainz was "led to Athens dressed in the clothes of a man by a certain lover of hers." Indeed, the heroine of Flight of the Sorceress, Glenys, does something similar. Joan, known as John Anglicus, or English John, became secretary to a curia, a cardinal, and then, according to Polonus, "the choice of all for pope" in the year A.D. 855.

Pope Joan was only discovered to be a woman when she gave birth unexpectedly in the middle of a procession. Accounts vary on whether she was immediately killed or shuttled off to a convent. The Church and many historians dispute the accuracy of this story and call it a myth. But apparently there is an unaccountable 2-year gap in popes around that time. So a Pope Joan is not so far fetched.

A BUNCH OF “JEWISH” POPES

Obviously, the very first pope, Peter, was a Jew. His original name was Simon.

The next one I was able to locate was Pope Zosimas, 417-418 A.D. Zosimas is mentioned in The Flight of the Sorceress. His father’s name was Abram, which is the big piece of evidence in support of his being Jewish.

About seven hundred years after Zosimas, Anacletus II, was elected as pope (1130) by a majority of the College of Cardinals.

Originally named Pietro Pierleone, he was the great-grandson of a Roman Jew, Baruch Pierleone. Anacletus II studied in Paris and was made a monk in Cluny, France. He was named a cardinal in Rome in 1116 by Pope Paschal II. His reign as pope was one of the most tumultuous in the history of the Church. At the time of his election, a minority of cardinals elected as pope Cardinal Gregorio Papareschi, who chose the name Innocent II. This initiated a serious schism in the church. Bernard of Clairvaux, who was a zealous supporter of Innocent in France, apparently forgetting about St. Peter himself, wrote ironically of Anacletus II: "to the shame of Christ a man of Jewish origin was come to occupy the chair of St. Peter."

There are two other popes who reigned before Anacletus who were also descendants of the Pierleone family: John Gratian Pierleone, known as Gregory VI, 1045-1045;

and Gregory VII, 1073-1084.

Gregory VII. Gregory contested the right of lay leaders, such as the Roman emperors, to grant church officials the symbols of their authority. Gregory VII was elevated to sainthood and canonized in 1606.

NOW ON TO THE GAY POPES

First up is Pope Paul II. Pietro Barbo was born in Venice on February 23, 1471 to a rich merchant family. His uncle was Pope Eugene IV and by 47, he too became pope. He liked to call himself Pope Formosus, from the Latin meaning, "beautiful, handsome". However, as you can see from his profile, he was anything but. It took some persuasion but he finally settled for Paul.

Paul had quite a sex life, not just for a pope, but for anybody. Paul has been accused of preserving a certain unsavory papal “tradition.” Allegedly, for several centuries, popes maintained a convent full of sex slaves who were particularly adept in staging satanic sexual orgies as well as producing babies for sacrifice. Although this is not really supported by documentation and sounds like the kind of stuff that would be whispered in the medieval alleyway, we all know what can happen with “evidence” especially when the powerful want to get their mitts on it. But there is apparently substantial written material attesting that Paul liked to keep the company of attractive young men while shunning women. Easily moved to tears at the sight of his favorite boys, Paul’s cardinals referred to him as "Our Lady of Pity". Paul supposedly died of heart attack while being sodomized by a boy lover.

Paul was succeeded by Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484), another gay pope:

Educated by the Franciscans, Fransesco della Rovere was a priest and skilled theologian by the time of Pope Paul II's death. When elevated, he took the name Sixtus. Immediately after his election, he appointed two nephews, Pietro Riario and Giuliano della Rovere (who later became Pope Julius II), as cardinals. In all, Sixtus elevated six of his nephews to cardinal. Nephew Pietro was the Pope's lover, and Sixtus lavished riches on him.

And last, but certainly not least among the identifiable gay popes is Julius III (1550-1555)

Giovanni del Monte was born in Rome, September 10, 1487 and took the name Julius III. Julius was always “out,” but in his sixties he got really far out. He brazenly plucked a cute 14-year-old boy, ironically named Innocenzo, off the streets of Parma, had his brother adopt the kid, and then promptly named him a Cardinal. The Venetian ambassador reported that Innocenzo shared the pope's bedroom and bed. The relationship became a staple of anti-papal polemics for over a century

AFRICAN POPES: SOME DARKER THAN OTHERS

According to Church historians, there have been three “black” popes. Though they are described as “black,” the pictures more accurately would portray them as “dark.” They definitely were Africans, but the old chronicles use of the term “black” really tells us more about what the ancients though of as white, than anything else.

Pope Victor I (186-198 A.D.)

Until Victor's time, Rome celebrated the Mass in Greek. Pope Victor changed the language to Latin. Other than that, he got himself martyred.

Pope Miltiades (311-14 A.D.)

This pope was probably a Berber. It was during his short tenure as pope that Emperor Constantine presented him with the Lateran Palace, which became the papal residence and seat of Church government. Also during Miltiades’ reign, Constantine granted Christians freedom of religion and restored church property.

And finally:

Pope Gelasius (492-496 A.D.)

Gelasius did much to provoke the split in the Church between East and West, asserting the primacy of Rome, which needless to say, pissed off the more powerful Eastern Emperor and the Archbishop of Constantinople. Not satisfied with stirring up international shit he also created a ruckus in Rome suppressing ancient pagan festivals and declaring the Manichaean sect to be heretical because they refused to take communion in the form of wine, knowing the sect believed using alcohol to be sinful. But once he got rid of the Manicheans, the old method of communion—just bread—became okay again. Such high-jinx earned him sainthood. But, more telling is that there have no dark-skinned, black or African popes since him.

Cherie Reich: A Resource Worth Checking Out.

2011-04-14T11:08:00.000-07:00

Check Out: Cherie ReichWriter, Freelance Editor, and Library Assistant
http://cheriereich.webs.com
http://cheriereich.blogspot.com
http://surroundedbybooksreviews.blogspot.com
She reviews, edits and writes. She's a member of the Wild Child Bunch. Her work: Once Upon a December Nightmare is Now available from Wild Child Publishing

GOOD CHARACTERS IN NEED OF A NOVELIST

2011-04-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

Are you blocked at the moment? Can’t think of something worth while to write about? Well, I know, because of your names and photos that unless you are doing a pretty damn good job of hiding it, most of you are women. And a lot of you lament the absence of women as heroines, especially in historical contexts. After all, except for such rare notables as Eve, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Jean d’Arc, Queen Elizabeth and Abigail Adams, women pretty much got written out of history, didn’t they?

Well, I’ve got a couple of good ones that some of you ought to take a crack at if you’re up for it. Me? If got other things on my plate, but believe me when I say I’m tempted. But, Id sure like to read about them, after some enthusiastic novelist does her research.

First, for those of you into the Celtic thing (and I know you’re out there) how about Queen Boadicia. Her story is briefly told in The Flight of the Sorceress.

Queen Boadicia: Photograph 1999 by George P. Landow.

Celts called her Victoria. Her husband was the king of the Iceni tribe. She had two teenaged daughters. Her husband trusted a Roman notary draw up his will bequeathing half his lands to the Emperor Nero while reserving the remainder for his wife and daughters. But under Roman law, unlike the laws of the Iceni, women couldn’t inherit if there was a male heir. So after the king died, the Roman prefect decided that Emperor Nero was the male heir, and therefore all the king’s lands belonged to him. Queen Boadicea and her daughters received nothing. When she protested this injustice, she was beaten in public, and her two daughters were raped. Queen Boadicea raised an army that numbered 200,000 whose ranks included many fierce Celtic women. They marched on the Roman settlements, destroying Camulodunum (modern Cambridge.) Though the Romans sent a powerful legion against her, she defeated it, and then went on to conquer Londinium (London) and Verulamium (St Albans.) In all, her armies killed more than seventy thousand Romans before she was finally defeated in battle. She took poison to prevent her capture.

And for those with a more classical Roman bent, my other suggested heroine is Princess Placidia.

Princess Placidia: Museo Civico Cristiano in Brescia

Placidia plays a small role in The Flight of the Sorceress, but deserves a lead in a story of romance and intrigue all her own. This twenty-tow year old sister of Emperor Honorius who fled Rome in just ahead of the advancing Visigoths in 401 A.D. was left in charge of Rome but her terrified brother took the whole army with him leaving her without any organized military to defend the city. Nevertheless, and without any military experience whatsoever, she successfully held off a vast invading force that had already conquered all of Gaul and northern Italy. The city was only taken by the Visigoths by a ruse, and then after a spate of cannibalism within its walls. Placidia was taken captive by Alaric, the King of the Visigoths, but he died shortly after and his brother, Athaulf, took his place. For inexplicable reasons Athaulf turned his army around and returned to Gaul taking Placidia with him. Did she go as wife or prisoner? Was she somehow responsible for saving southern Italy from a Visigoth invasion?

Athaulf was murdered in 414 A.D. Placidia was then treated like a slave and ransomed back to Emperor Honorius. She was then married to a general who became co-Augustus. Meanwhile she fought with her brother, with whom she may have had an incestuous relationship. In 423, Honorius died and Placidia was made Augusta — empress in the West. She had two children, one of whom later became Emperor Valentinian III. The creative options are endless.

Book Promotion: POD As A Marketing Strategy

2011-04-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

There is no question that e-Books represent the future of publications. On March 21, 2011, The Association of American Publishers reported that e-sales more than doubled from $32.4 million in January 2010 to $69.9 million in January 2011. Meanwhile, hard cover sales fell from $55.4 million to $49.1 million, and mass market paperbacks, a format that's declining as baby boomers seek books with larger print, fell from $56.4 million to $39 million. E-book sales were as high as 50 percent of the total for some works, not just for commercial fiction, but even for so-called "midlist" books that depend on reviews and word of mouth. And there is a lot of evidence that sales of e-Books in children’s and YA genres are skyrocketing. That also stands to reason. Youth are more tech-savvy and comfortable with the hardware. They have no especially fondness for the recollected reading experiences of the over-forty crowd. Science fiction is also doing well because of the “techie, trekkie” connection.

We know that certain genres sell in e-Book format better than others. Romance and erotica do quite a flourishing business in e-Books. In December 2010, Sourcebooks, said that its third quarter reports showed that e-book sales accounted for 27-percent of its romance inventory even though total e-book sales account for around 10-percent of total book sales nationwide. E-book sales at Random jumped 250% in 2010 and accounted for 10% of sales in the U.S. (about $140 million). Penguin also had a big jump in e-book sales, 182%, which generated 6% of Penguin's worldwide sales, or $101. Simon & Schuster's e-book sales rose 122% last year, helping to offset a decline in book sales in the adult group, and e-books represented 8% of revenue, roughly $63 million. Hachette Book Group had strong e-book sales gains in 2010, the format accounting for 10% of its sales last year. Clearly, e-Books are set to outpace all print formats soon. Even the NY Times Book Review section has begun to take account of e-Book sales.

There are also the travel and reference books that one used to lug around on vacations. Now it is more convenient to download them onto your Kindle of iPad, along with maps, itinerary, and foreign language dictionaries. (Like me, you may also want to download a Bible, Quran, or other useful cultural adjunct for your destination. They weigh nothing and these are available for free from the Gutenberg Project.) Marketing e-Books for these potential buyers just makes good common sense.

Do these statistics tell all? Part of the attraction for an e-Book is that the purchase can be made with relative anonymity. Books that once were kept behind the counter and sold in plain brown wrappers are right out there now in the e-Book world. It is not hard to envision that promotion of romance and erotica involves different strategies than other genres.

But what if, like me, you have a traditional historical, or a murder/mystery, a cozy or a conventional thriller? Do the same considerations apply? Can I, with a historical thriller, simply ignore a print market? Should I, even when after sending out several promotional emails I received back responses from approximately 15% of the recipients saying they would wait for the print version? This could amount, conservatively, to 20% of total sales alone, not counting potential sales at the kind of public events I described above and subsequent recommendations.

To determine the value of POD as part of my marketing strategy, I have undertaken some research, which may be useful to others as well as to me. My investigation and conclusions though are not a universal endorsement of POD and come with a caveat: the usefulness of a POD as a marketing tool is genre-dependent. It may be totally inappropriate for a different genre. However, to cut to the chase, as they say, I conclude that for those seeking to promote literary fiction, traditional mysteries, who-done-its and straight historical novels, you may want to consider the POD instead of putting your money into a website ad.

I have come to the conclusion that investing in a POD version of The Flight of the Sorceress is probably the best promotional investment I can make. I am going to do it. It is not a question of vanity. The Flight of the Sorceress has a five star rating now on Amazon and plenty of good reviews. Since you are already reading this on the blog, you can easily see that the book is quality. The feedback from published authors has been great.

The Flight of the Sorceress was published in Oct. 2010s only as an e-Book. Previously, I published in print a semi-autobiographic novel, Bring The War Home! that sold approximately 1000 print copies and has somewhere over 2500 downloads in e-Book format, although most of those are give-aways. I currently have a list of folks who want a print version of The Flight of the Sorceress. I want to provide these people with a print version of The Flight of the Sorceress. But doing so requires an investment.

I began my inquiry by asking members of my writers’ groups what they thought. One told me he sells three e-Books for each print copy, but that he considered the POD version a mark of the credibility of his work. Another pointed out that the print version is essential for public appearances. This, he noted, did not include bookstores, where, after you deduct production costs and the bookstore cut and the publisher’s cut, leaves the author a meager royalty. On the other hand, there is profit to be made if the venue for readings is a solon, reading group, book party or something similar. I sold hundreds Bring the War Home! at such events, because I had a stack of books and a pen to autograph them. Both of these very fine writers agreed that the ability to deliver the product in multiple forms has an incremental value that ultimately enhances e-Book sales.

In July 2009, Bowker reported:

57% of book buyers were women and purchased 65% of the books sold in the U.S.
Mystery books were the most popular genre for book club sales, with 17% of all purchases of mystery books coming directly from book clubs
Generation X consumers buy more books online than any other demographic group, with 30% of them buying their books through the Internet
21% of book buyers said they became aware of a book through some sort of online promotion or ad
Women made the majority of the purchases in the paperback, hardcover and audio-book segments, but men accounted for 55% of e-book purchases

Admittedly, these statistics are stale. (I tried unsuccessfully to find on-line statistics on e-Book sales by genre. There are no charts or graphs to compare.) But, with respect to The Flight of the Sorceress, they remain relevant. The Flight of the Sorceress is a historical thriller and its two protagonists are heroic women, valiantly resisting the combined forces of church and state who are striving to even further subjugate women and to snuff out classical knowledge.

I like to think I know my potential reader market. Older women are more likely to buy this book and are more likely to want to read it in print. They still like to browse in bookstores. They grew up reading books under the covers, using a flashlight to fool mom and dad. They tend to relish their Luddite-side. Though they are older, they are not dead and they tend to have disposable income when it comes to books. They are more likely to be members of book clubs and to participate in book groups. They talk to their friends about books and recommend books. The older they get, the more sedentary they become and the more books they read. So despite the trends overall in e-Book sales, there is a clear, residual market for print in my genre.

Earlier, I mentioned that one of the attractions of e-Books, especially with romance and erotica is the anonymity associated with the purchase and the reading experience. You can sit on a subway with your Kindle and read without anyone snickering at a cover displaying oiled-up six-packs and air-brushed silky breasts. My potential readership though may be quite different. They would not be at all embarrassed to read The Flight of the Sorceress on the subway. I think of my cover as a mini-billboard. I want it to be seen, lying openly on an office desk for a week or so. I want my readers to carry it with them as they commute. I want them to show it to their book groups. Getting one of them to read my book would be the tip of a marketing iceberg. I want book buzz and there’s a lot to be said about the demographic that still reads print and talks about what they read.

Another consideration one needs factor into a decision whether to go to print is reviews. Many reviewers will not accept an ARC in e-Book format. The Historical Novel Society, a natural review and promotional site for The Flight of the Sorceress is not e-Book friendly. And even though my novel delves deeply into the destruction of the great library at Alexandria, the ALA was not interested in reviewing it. Step-by-Step posts a list of reviewers. Many of them will not accept e-Books. See: http://www.stepbystepselfpublishing.net/book-reviewer-list.html. Most newspapers will not review e-Books. Indeed, I have been unable to get The Flight of the Sorceress reviewed by Litseen in San Francisco, even though they eagerly reviewed my ten-year old novel Bring the War Home!

Up to now, I have refrained from discussing bookstores. You know where things are headed with a business model when you see signs saying “Support Your Local _______” Fill in the blank. It could be drug store, appliance repair or blacksmith. Currently, it is bookstores. I have a wonderful local bookstore just down the street called Bird and Beckett. It is author-friendly when it comes to readings. It prominently displays local authors. It has jazz nights and poetry reading nights. It trades second-hand books. It is a wonderful, valued community resource and I am on a first-name basis with Eric, the proprietor. He will welcome a reading from me with a POD. He doesn’t want an e-Book reading. I respect that business decision. I also know that I wouldn’t make much money from a reading at Bird and Beckett. I would do worse at more distant and unfamiliar bookstores, the further I strayed from home, to the point where I’d end up driving a couple hours and spending $15 on gasoline for four hours away from family or other activities. Authors who go to bookstore events are very lucky to sell a couple dozen books. If that happens, they’ll make $25 and maybe net $10 while copping a headache from the cheap wine. I have been to some of these events to support friends who are fine, published authors. I have shared their disappointment as they stoically press forward, reading to five or six listeners, three of whom have already read draft versions of the work in their writers’ group. I have done bookstore appearances where I’ve sold as few as a single copy.

Bookstores show very little upside for an author. We may lament this, but the bookstore, I am afraid, is a losing proposition for most authors. It is really a consignment business. They want to be able to return unsold books. They need at least 50% of retail to cover their overhead. Unless you have amazing clout, all that’s going to happen is that they will take one or two of your books and put them on a shelf, spine out, where they will languish before being returned.

In my experience, the most profitable time an author can spend is at book parties, thrown by friends and acquaintances, or in cultivating book groups who will by your book and then recommend it to other readers as well as events such as San Francisco’s Litquake. Authors can also make the most money there because they can often purchase their POD books at an author’s discount from their publisher. At such events, each sale of a publisher-published book can earn the author as much as $6.00/book for a $15 retail product. Moreover, attendees are both readers and recommenders. There is potential for post-event buzz.

POD from the point of view of a marketing strategy that supports an e-Book marketing plan makes good sense. If you have a publisher your typical POD royalty should be no less than 15% of wholesale price or 7.5% of retail price, as determined by them. A book from that retails at $15 will wholesale for about $7.50. In either case the author should net about $1.125 per book. Publishers take care of the fulfillment.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a publisher or if, for whatever reason, your publisher does not want to put your book into print, you still have an option, and it’s not a bad one —self-publishing. Lightning Source can print a good quality POD book with a full color cover for about $4.80. Amazon and B&N will want 55% of cover price to sell it. If the retail book price is $15, the author will get around $3.45 per book sale provided the author does the fulfillment and charges for delivery and packaging.This cost is about $3.00 per book, tacked on to the price.With a self-published POD book, an author can make $10.00+ per book at events and $3.45 through outlets like Amazon. Through a publisher, the author would receive a royalty of $1.125 on direct sales and slightly less on an Amazon or B&N sale.

But even that is not the whole story. Having a reputable publisher adds value, including credibility, to the product. While POD can get an author in the door with more reviewers, having a reputable publisher opens the door even wider, and it creates consumer confidence that is essential to marketing. This combo of POD + publisher credibility stands a good chance of picking up the 20% readership that would not ever see the book, recommend it or ever talk about it. And that 20% may actually make the tipping point that we all want so desperately to reach.

So if you are planning on investing in your marketing, you can choose conventional on-line ads. There are so many different blogs, websites and social networking sites that there is no point in making a cost/benefit analysis. Especially since demographics and genre have to be factored in. However, depending on your market, don’t overlook the POD market as a promotional opportunity.

I view POD as a promotional expense, as valid as any other form of publicity. I think that for my book, The Flight of the Sorceress, I can generate more e-Book sales if I have a POD product available for public events. And I think that a physical book sells books because it is seen. Beyond that, with a print version, I even stand a chance of making money back in the process, rather than just seeing the cash flow out to websites and PR advisors who promise promotional exposure.

For The Flight of the Sorceress I think it’s a better deal than an ad, and in any event, I wouldn’t spend money on an ad in an e-venue, unless I can sell in both formats. Why spend money on any promo that doesn’t sell your product in all its potential iterations? So, I look forward to producing the print version of The Flight of the Sorceress in the very near future.

Ancient Robots? No Way!

2011-04-02T15:11:00.000-07:00

Ancient Robots? No Way!

Did you ever imagine that Alexandria had coin-operated vending machines and viable plans for robotic kitchen help, nearly two thousand years ago?

In my historical novel, The Flight of the Sorceress, you will find a brief reference to an inventor named Hero of Alexandria, who lived contemporaneously with Jesus Christ. Hero constructed the first known steam engine and also a rudimentary rocket engine. He invented the first coin-operated vending machines. In about 60 AD, Hero built the first programmable robot, a cart that could carry a group of automata to the front of a stage where they would perform for an audience. He developed plans for a robot that could automatically pour wine.

But even Hero stood on the shoulders of inventors who came centuries before. Some historians point to the Greek, Archytas (428–347 BC) as the earliest of these. Called the founder of mathematical mechanics, Archytas, whose own writings do not survive, was reputed to have designed and built the first artificial, self-propelled flying device propelled by a jet of what was probably steam. It was said to have actually flown some 200 meters.

Two centuries later, Ctesibius, who lived between 285-222 BC, wrote treatises on how air could be compressed and used for pumps and even to fire cannon. He invented a clock that kept better time than any clock created thereafter until the pendulum clocks that were developed in the 17^th century. He is called the father on pneumatics.

Although he was affiliated with the Library of Alexandria, the works of Ctesibius do not survive. Nor do most of the works of Hero. We have only a portion and those were saved by the Muslim conquerors of Alexandria.

The Flight of the Sorceress tells the story of the consequences of religious intolerance and the destruction of inconvenient knowledge by religious extremists of all stripes. It can easily be postulated that because the Church-sponsored Dark Ages, humanity is at least a thousand years behind in its state of knowledge. Religious zealotry destroyed so much classical learning, burnt so many books and wiped out the work of so many brilliant minds, all in the name of God, that our scientific and cultural losses cannot even be estimated.

Today, I read the paper to find that two very stupid ministers, Wayne Jones and Terry Sapp, ministers of the (absurdly misnamed) Dove World Outreach Center in Florida burned a Quran in Florida in front of their flock of very stupid parishioners. And upon hearing about this book-burning, three very stupid mullahs incited hundreds of very stupid followers to go on a rampage and kill Americans. When the mob couldn’t find any Americans upon whom to vent their rage, they settled for four Nepalese, a Romanian, a Norwegian and a Swede. Another ten people were just murdered in Kandahar (races, genders and religions to be announced.)

It’s not like this stupidity came out of the blue. Last September, Gen. David Petraeus warned Wayne Jones that burning the Quran would set off this kind of rioting. Yet he and Sapp went ahead with their book burning, with the apparently enthusiastic support of their cretin following. They all knew that their actions would incite people to riots that could lead to deaths. And the equally narrow-minded mullahs in their mosques in Afghanistan knew that haranguing the idiots who listen to them with hate-filled sermons would summon up a murderous rage.

Not all followers of Islam or Christianity are like these people. Actually the inciters and the rioters have more in common with each other than with their supposed co-religionists. They think alike in their intolerance. They act alike in their appeal to hatred and violence. And they have the gall to place all the responsibility for the consequences of their personal behavior on God. All of them are co-conspirators in an incitement to mob violence. They are felonious miscreants and accomplices in murder.

The Flight of the Sorceress, though a novel, seeks to impart a timely warning. We will reap much more of this if we allow ourselves to stumble into the quicksand of religious intolerance. If we continue to sow the seed that the U.S. is a Christian nation and not a secular state, we will only accelerate that process. We will become a nation of book-burners, ever in need of the sword, always living in fear, behind walls and parapets, mistrustful of each other, ready to cast blame everywhere but upon ourselves. And when the bonfire of words dwindles to embers we won’t flinch tossing on people to keep the flames a-burning. That’s what happened during the Dark Ages, and there’s no reason to think that civilization has completely recuperated from that first go-round. After all, from a scientific standpoint, we’ve not come a lot further than first century Alexandria with its coin-operating vending machines and rocket engines.

FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS: THE LIBYAN CONNECTION, JEWS AND QADDAFI

2011-03-30T15:27:00.000-07:00

One of the major theme points of The Flight of the Sorceress resolves around Original Sin and its relationship with the Pelagian Heresy, the counter doctrine that good works alone can win the Kingdom of Heaven. St. Augustine, the great proponent of Original Sin, is a moving force in my novel. His work City of God provides a dramatic backdrop to Glenys’s revelation of sexual trauma.

St. Augustine was a native of town in what is now eastern Algeria. In 396 A.D. he became the Bishop of Hippo Regius. This area, along with modern Tunisia and much of Libya is in the province that the Romans called Numidia. The Roman province of Numidia lends itself to many scenes in my historical novel, The Flight of the Sorceress. Major scenes take place in ancient Carthage and the Auras Mountains in Tunisia. Numidia, what is now called Al Maghreb, in the years of The Flight of the Sorceress was a Christian land. Its spiritual leadership was in the hands of men like St. Augustine, pillars of the Roman Catholic Church and they held power under the auspices of the Roman legions.

But Numidia was also a land inhabited by Jews, a large number of whom were refugees from the pogrom of Alexandria in 415 A.D., a story that is recounted in detail in The Flight of the Sorceress (although, in the novel, only the westward migration of refugees is related.)

Readers should be aware that there was a Jewish presence in Numidia for several thousand years. But that is no longer true. Libya, in the last century, before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, had about 40,000 Jewish citizens. By 1967, that number deceased to 7,000. In 1961, all but six Jews were deprived Libyan citizenship. By the time Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi came to power in 1969 only about 100 Jews remained in Libya. Under Qaddafi’s rule, the last remnant of the Jewish population was forcibly expelled. All Jewish property was confiscated. All debts to Jews were canceled. Emigration for Jews was legally prohibited. Today, there are no Jews in Libya. It is the only North African state that can make such a claim. Indeed this ethnic cleansing of an ancient minority population was so complete it would make a Nazi drool with envy. In fact, Qaddafi was so hung up on this Jewish thing that after he took power he demanded that the U.S. Air Force, which then had a large airbase (Wheelus AFB) close to Tripoli reassign its Jewish personnel (about 135 of them) out of the country. The entire base closed down shortly afterward.

When the faction dominated by the Augustinians kicked the Donatists out of the Catholic Church by force of Roman arms in 411 A.D. did it lay the groundwork for a military enforcement of religious dogma? Did that set a precedent for the forcible expulsion of Jews from Alexandria four years later? Did it preface the subsequent demise of Christianity in Al Maghreb at the hands of Muslim conquerors two centuries later? Is it a stretch to think that Qaddafi is an inheritor of that very same state of mind? Does intolerance have a half-life longer than Cesium?

ENERGY : ARE WE IN A FIX?

2011-03-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

I know this isn't exactly Flight of the Sorceress material, but I thought I'd redirect readers for a moment to my website at A Gauche Press and the article: .Energy: Are We In A Fix
http://agauchepress.com/category/whats-new/

Although you might not have noticed, we are still in the midst of the Daiichi disaster and now the radioactivity is getting into the water supply as well as marine life. The immediacy of the disaster is being pushed onto the back pages. The "news" has determined that "there is nothing to see here, so just move along." And that's the problem with nuclear disasters. The radiation just settles in an kills silently over long periods of time. No big tsunami photos, no toppling buildings, just people and animals wasting away in agony. That's not news.

So I just though I'd do a brief summary for those who may be interested about what our energy options really are these days. I do hope you'll take a look. In perspective, it kind of makes the Dark Ages look balmy.

New Novel Raises The Question: “Are We On The Cusp Of A Second Dark Age?”

2011-03-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

New Novel Raises The Question: “Are We On The Cusp Of A Second Dark Age?”

CREATING BELIEVABLE CHARACTERS

2011-03-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

“Spectacular women characters.” Jonah Raskin, author of Natives, Newcomers, Exiles, Fugitives.

“Compelling characters” Holly Shumas, author of Five Things I Can’t Live Without, and Love and Other Natural Disasters

“Very realistic characters.” Coffee Time Romances Review.

“The central roles played in particular by Glenys, Aschi and Hypatia, revolved around each other to create a plot tension and foreboding that did really work.” John Nash, Molokai, HI.

“You can’t help but feel for these women, who are so grossly over-matched but who still do not give up.” Historical Novel Review.

“The Sorceress is an enlightened mind… her tenacity will impress you, but it is her will to flourish that will make you want more." Ransom Stephens, author of The God Patent.

Reviewers, blurbers and readers have uniformly described the characters that I created in The Flight of the Sorceress in such terms. I do not hold an MFA. I’ve taken writing courses, yes, but what I am doing is drawing on over forty years of experience as a trial lawyer when I create my characters.

Lawyers, and in particular trial lawyers, have a unique experience when it comes to assessing states of mind and human emotions. We get the opportunity to question people and to demand answers under oath. This power is not limited to adversaries, or even witnesses, but extends to jurors. I have taken the testimony of more than a thousand witnesses. I have been counsel in well more than a hundred trials. I have questioned innumerable jurors. In some of the more significant cases, I have had the benefit of insights from jury-selection experts and focus groups.

What am I looking for? Well, besides the truth, I am looking for how people react when I put them under stress. And I want to know whether I can replicate those reactions. When that occurs, I know that I have found a behavioral trait that signals an emotion. It is what poker players call a “tell.” Does the person habitually evade eye contact when feeling pressed and uncomfortable? Does she attempt to zero in and make eye contact? Do knuckles go white? Do hands instinctively fold across chests? Do veins in the neck constrict?

Trial lawyers know that these subtle behaviors are subliminally processed by jurors when they are assessing whether or not a witness is lying. People are “read” as much as they are heard. So it stands to reason that when creating a believable character, the task of the author is to provide realistic and appropriate “tells” within scenes, rather than to attempt to describe emotions.

But these skills are not unique to trial lawyers. Many of you have day jobs that qualify you to draw better characters. Maybe you are or have been a therapist, a shoe salesperson, a waitperson, a teacher. You have opportunities to witness behavior and to draw conclusions. Will this person tip well? Is she really out to buy shoes? Is he evading in his responses to your questions? You notice little things that tip you off.

We, as authors always hear the advice, “show” don’t “tell.” Well there is a tendency when writing description to tell. It is easier in some ways. We tell about facial hair, physical features, dress. But what we really do in life is evaluate what we are being shown. So it is possible to show, and let the reader do the same evaluation of your characters as you do when you deliver a plate of spaghetti to a cheapskate you know in your heart is going to stiff you on the tip. If the author does her job skillfully in describing the character’s behavior, little more need be done in expounding on the emotions. In this respect, the readers are your jury.

That is not to deny the importance of description, especially when it comes to the descriptions of significant characters in a book. It goes without saying that characters should be distinct from one another, to avoid confusion. But I personally go for detail work, rather than rough brush strokes. Saying, for example, that a character is “heavy set and oafish” doesn’t do it for me. I would prefer to know that his sweat-stained size forty-six belt had been extended even further through the addition of a few poorly placed auger holes. Now I know much more about the man, based on a single sentence.

And I want to take that image with me into the next scenes where the character appears, so don’t load me up at the first sitting with a lot of description. Let me digest that bit before offering me another bite. The author should manage the portions and allow plenty of time to dole it all out. This is especially true when there are contradictions within a character. And, there should always be contradictions. I’ve gotten criticized for the absence of contradictions and flaws in my characters more than their presence. Readers know that no one is perfect, flawless, airbrushed. Or that the villain must be all bad 24/7.

When an author draws such a character, unless it is intentionally cartoonish, editors and agents will begin to cringe. I have plenty of personal knowledge on that front.

If you have the time and interest, I’d like to offer you a hands-on demonstration. I have linked this article to a news spot from a legal case I recently completed. I provide it here not to toot my own horn about the case — although I am extremely proud of the work my colleagues and I did on it over the past eight years. (I am no longer in practice and not taking any clients.) Here’s the link: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/03/22/ex-tenant-bay-area-landlord-didn%E2%80%99t-fix-roach-problem/

(Note: there is both a print report and a video. Check out the video.)

This defendant, whom I will call Hugh Swindle, (a real name actually) might serve to inspire a potential villain in a novel. What shall we take from him for our novel? Certainly not an accurate description of the whole man, but perhaps some mementos.

Before you read on, take a few moments to jot down how you would describe Hugh Swindle if you were planning on making him a character in your novel. Send it to this blog. Hopefully we will get some real feedback on this and be able to compare notes.

Now that you’ve done your bit, here is mine: "He came at the camera with his hand outstretched to block photography. "You'll have to leave," he said, in a monotone as cold as a Canadian wind blustering over an icy lake in the dead gray of winter. It was a meaty hand, a hand that meant business. And the etchings on his face betrayed little experience with joy."

One of my favorite writers of all time is Dashiell Hammett. He could do that with his descriptions. His books rarely exceeded a couple hundred pages, but his characters persist in my imagination because he compelled himself to be creatively spare. There is no mind-wandering allowed when you read him. Skip a few words and you risk missing the boat. I know a lot of us are mostly writing eBooks these days so the metaphor I’m about to impart may be a bit inapt but I’d say that writing believable characters involves saving the forests.

So, I’m not the final word on this subject. I want to learn from you. Send in your character sketches and we might just all learn a little something beneficial from each other.

THE COMING DARK AGES: WHAT THE FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS HAS TO DO WITH THE TEA PARTY

2011-03-14T15:37:00.000-07:00

Dear friends and followers,

Over on my website, http://agauchepress.com/category/whats-new/ I've posted a long political essay entitled THE COMING DARK AGES: WHAT THE FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS HAS TO DO WITH THE TEA PARTY. You're of course welcome to go over and take a look, but WARNING it is political and you're entitled to at least a PG notice. (There's no swearing, porn or anything kinky, so if that's what you are into today, look elsewhere.) But if you 're troubled by things like Wisconsin and the other stuff that is going on now across the country, from assassinations of abortion providers, judges, attempts to kill elected representatives, bombings of MLK peace marches, if you are wondering where this all may be heading, you might be interested in the frame of mind that created The Flight of the Sorceress. And I'm hoping that even though it's just available as an ebook at this time and you may be waiting for print, you might restrain the Luddite in you, take a look at it now in its available format and become familiar with some of the urgency that I am feeling, in these increasingly troubled times. Sorry to politically rant you all out. Can't help myself.
Barry

ANOTHER READER WEIGHS IN!

2011-03-09T11:10:00.000-08:00

I had no idea how cool the setting for this novel was until I read one of the other reviews and realized that this was set at the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire. The time period (Britain ~410 AD) was almost post apocalyptic to a lot of people in Britain with the Roman Empire abandoning the British Isles and the old ways clashing with Christianity and that sort of thing.
The setting is really exciting.
The characters are extremely well done and one finds oneself really getting to know them and fear for their fate as the novel progresses.
There is also a lot of really intelligent discourse between characters in the book and a lot of it is highly relevant to modern society. That may be what I am enjoying the most. Modern elements viewed from the "safety" of the distant past. As one reads some of the conflicts about religion, women's (and minority) rights and notions on acceptance and/or blind hatred, one can see how the lessons in Flight of the Sorceress can be applied to life in 2011.
I picked this book up to better explore Britain in 400AD. I have found a meticulously researched historical fiction novel that is both captivating and thought provoking.
Well done!

Joel Gates, NC. Green Gates

GETTING HEARD OVER ALL THE NOISE OUT THERE – author self-promotion

2011-03-09T10:34:00.000-08:00

Are we all screaming so loudly that no one is hearing us?

You will notice that I have not punctuated the title of this commentary. I don’t know whether to make it a question or a declarative sentence.

I hadn’t heard the word “noise” used in the context of PR until a few months ago. I was talking to one of my daughters. Nina happens to be the editor-in-chief of Budget Travel. She offhandedly asked my how the sales of The Flight of the Sorceress was going. I told her that I was on fourteen Yahoo Groups, five Amazon discussion groups, that I had a blog and also a website. That I had put so many promos on Facebook I was surprised that I hadn’t been universally de-friended. Shunned. Cast out of the electronic community. I shook my head and said “eh.”

“There’s a lot of noise out there,” she replied with a bemused twinkle in her eye. Nina’s got a finely sharpened stiletto of a wit and some people don’t get it. It can pass for snarky or condescension, but it’s not that at all. She gets to the nub of things with a few spare words. Until she said that, I had been a faithful believer in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. I began to reassess his thesis.

“Noise. Hmmn.”

If you’re an author and you have a book out there, chances are purer than the old 99.44/100% pure Ivory soap ads that you’re self-promoting your asses off. And if you’re like me, you’d much rather be writing, researching, creating, sharing ideas, reading stuff to one another, talking about what you learned. You’re not a salesperson. You probably are pretty shy. Self-effacing and fragile about your skills, Are you any good? Really. Can you believe what people tell you about yourself? Are they just patronizing you? Can you trust your friends?

You are not alone. I don’t know if it does any good to say that. It’s a kind of misery-loves-company sort of thing. But I know a lot of artists, writers, actors and musicians. They all feel the same way, despite how they present themselves. We are a moody bunch, we obsessively creative types. And the truth is that we see the cracks and crevices, the bad work and the poorly-formed phrases in our own work better than others. For us they are emblazoned in neon and ten feet high. We know we can do better and we are pissed that we didn’t see or foresee. And when that happens we tend to think our lives are in ruins. We are humiliated. Your number one job at that moment is to stave off depression. You can’t sell anything if you look like a haggard and harried wretch.

Now, in the current environment, it is we, perhaps the least qualified among us to toot our own horns, who find ourselves wandering the virtual wilderness in droves to promote what we have written. Unless you inhabit the rare pinnacles of commercial success, you are flung out by your publishers, your elbows poking against one another in desperate paroxysms to get some space.

Every day, I receive somewhere between fifty and one hundred promotional emails from authors much like myself, trying to be heard, seen, appreciated, invigorated and validated. True, some of us are not all that talented, but there is really no way to tell that until you actually read the work. And you have to really want to do that.

I think of myself as a discriminating reader. I have to be with all the noise out there. So I don’t generally select my reading material from email promotions. Yet there I am pounding the keyboard, adding my own little cacophony to the general noise. What the hell am I doing?

If you are anything like me, you’re close to wearing out your delete button. You’ve got so many filters working that it remains amazing anything at all gets through. But there they are every day, fifty, sixty, seventy promos.

I have a number of author friends. I hear their laments and disappointments at their own numbers. This is not a business where a sane person can expect to get rich. Sometime you’ve got to wonder whether you are sane. Sometime you can legitimately question whether, from the author’s perspective, it is even a business. Especially when you end up eating the cupcakes you bought for the crowd that didn’t come and all you get is fat. “What kind of American dream is this?” you cry.

As I said, I didn’t bother to punctuate the title. It’s a tease. I don’t have any answers. I don’t have an MFA and even if I did, I’d probably need an MBA to make money at this gig. (Plus a very crass and cynical personality that would disqualify me on the creative end.) I don’t like PR people. I find them disingenuous and mercenary. I am skeptical of their ability to deliver. I think that if you looked at the results, client by client, and not simply their three or four testimonials, the truth would tell a very different tale. Every day, on every group and every blog, I see them trying real hard to sell to a market that is primarily us. That’s enough evidence for me.

I’d actually prefer to deal directly with authors. But the fact is that skills do not necessarily cross over. You don’t want a proctologist doing your brain surgery. Michael Jordan was the best basketball player of all time, but he couldn’t play major league baseball. And that is what authors across the board are being asked to do. What a conundrum.

What do I do when I get into this funk? I remember when I was in college. I was a varsity athlete and when asked what position I played, I said “bench.” While some thought I was being funny, it was actually sarcasm, which really isn’t funny at all … but then it is. I am a firm believer that it is way better to be on the bench than in the stands. Sometimes— every once in a while —you do get to play. More importantly, getting to bench means you know how to play. It means you’ve worked as hard as the starters. It means you’ve sweated the same pints that they have. And it means that even though you might not be the best, you’re head and shoulders above the rest. You are not in the stands. You are actually playing the game, and that puts you in a very special minority — the people who seriously try and do not lead a Walter Mitty life. I take encouragement from that, a residual faith in a kernel of Tipping Point truth and a little bit of lottery fantasy. What the hell else is there? When you boil it down, the American Dream is to get struck by lightning.

But that doesn’t happen to most of us. So let’s all face the truth. Nearly every publisher, for nearly every author, with only a few notable exceptions, is de facto a vanity publisher. They may give you an advance. They may pay you for the rights to your work. But they can’t pay you even minimum wage for a good novel. And that’s nothing compared to the time you’ll have to put in, away from all of the other things you love to do in life, trying to sell your work. Beyond that, if you paid someone to do that shit for you you’d need your own personal government bail-out just to keep food in your stomach. So in every way, we authors are subsidizing our own works.

I knew all of this when I began the unpleasant task of promoting The Flight of the Sorceress. I think it’s a great book and I get positive feedback that reinforces that belief. But empirically I know that reviews, great blurbs and internet promo won’t sell a lot of books. There is just too much noise out there. We are suffering from a wealth of creativity, all of our own damn making. And the noise that does get heard gets made by big budgets. If you’ve got a big budget, my recommendation is that you buy real estate now while prices are low and the rates are good. You’ll certainly be glad you did. Don’t spend it on a book promotion budget.

Yet I still flail and thrash. What else can be done, I ask. My book is too good to get lost in the slush. I write reviews for Goodreads and Amazon. When I hear from people who read the reviews and like the way I write, I write them back, one person at a time. Perhaps one or two may even buy a book or join my blog. I try to write things that interest people, or at least I’d like to think I write things that interest people — sometimes I’m not so sure. I reject give-aways because it devalues the product and diminishes the work. I won’t do that. I write because I want to. I take solace in the fact that a publisher will invest anything in me. It has to be a sign that I am doing something right— or to be more accurate, worthwhile. Yet another reason to keep the faith baby.

I’m sorry. I’ve got no panaceas here. I’ve got no special “how-to” gimmicks or 50-item check lists or power-point presentations. That’s probably because I’m not selling anything — other than my book that is. (Don’t forget, after you read this, to be stunned by my writing abilities and hypnotized into buying a copy from Wild Child Publishing.) And if past history is any predictor of future performance, I’m not likely to do very much of that.

Writing is, and really should be, a labor of love. It should be a gift to civilization from a grateful member of society — a way of teaching and an encouragement to our posterity. We write because we want to be a person who writes. We want to say something that we so strongly believe needs to be said that we will put aside a large part of our lives to do it. That is primary. I do believe we should do our best to promote, but without bringing on utter depression, despondency and desolation to our lives and those of our loved ones. Most of all though, we should continue to do what we love, to write and to take our gratification from the creation rather than the royalty check. Otherwise we’ll be the worse for it. Glenys, one of the heroines in Flight of the Sorceress speaks for me when she says: “Even if only one single person reads it a century from now, couldn’t that make a difference?” That keeps me going.

PUBLISHER'S SPECIAL ST. PADDY'S DISCOUNT!

2011-03-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

For the next 10 days, Wild Child and Freya's Bower will be offering 25% off any ebook purchase over $5 with the coupon code "green". The code is good until the 17th of March because we are celebrating St. Paddy's Day.

Just go to Wild Child Publishing find The Flight of the Sorceress under "historicals" and buy it for less that four and a half bucks. You won't be disappointed.

The Future of Publishing: Part 3 of 3

2011-03-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

The Next Big Move in Publishing Will be Geographical

Ransom W. Stephens, Ph.D.
Legacy publishers have several inimitable core strengths. The question is: Are these strengths sufficient to keep them alive as they navigate the altered landscape? The thing that historically trips up legacy players is the inability to see past their own sense of validity in the face of technical disruption. The role of the publisher is to make books available to the people who want them. In the absence of that role, none of the others – the cultural filter, content development, quality control, employer, protector of shareholder value – are relevant.
In this, Part 3, we concentrate on legacy publishers’ immediate strengths, a few mistakes they’re making, an obvious weakness, and one huge oversight that speaks of the industry’s myopia.
Details, details – no one can handle the mess of details that the stature of books in our society demands. From ISBN and Library of Congress cataloging to legal issues like copyright, plagiarism, and most important of all, the inter-human details of book promotion.
A myth has propagated in the wake of the transformation of the music industry. People steal music. They steal movies. The volume of theft crippled the industry until a reasonable price model was developed by Apple at the iTunes store. The legacy players either died, followed suit, or are still lingering in corporate hospice. There are two fundamental differences between music and books: the customers and usability. The vast majority of music buyers are 18-24 years old. As for book buyers? We’d rather not discuss our ages, thank you. And it’s not that book buyers are aging, the demographic has always been thus.
Second, when you buy a song you expect to listen to it dozens, maybe hundreds of times. A book? Get through the whole thing if it’s good, twice if it’s really good, several times if it’s outstanding.
The fact is, people do not steal literature. It’s not like music, doesn’t have the same customers, doesn’t have the same usability. If people stole literature, libraries would be packed. The only part of the library that is packed is over at the computers.
It has never been particularly difficult to copy a book and then reprint, bind and sell it. This has been a small problem for the US publishing industry, hardly worth mention. Ebooks, of course, are the issue.
Legacy publishers are wringing their hands over Digital Rights Management (DRM) – a technique for preventing piracy of text files, that is, ebooks. It’s a massive waste of time. More people share hardcopy books than ebooks, it’s easier. The only area of piracy that needs to be monitored is redistribution of ebooks. Anyone can buy a copy of an ebook, turn around and sell it on the internet. Preventing this flavor of piracy requires skills that legacy publishers lack: software and web-sniffing algorithm development. Skills that are integral components of the businesses models of Google, Apple, Smashwords, and Scribd.com.
In an irony that is typical of these types of business transitions, the new players have solved the problem but rather than adopt the solution, the legacy publishers are suing them. It’s a corporate temper tantrum that is disturbingly reminiscent of the legacy music industry’s business model of suing their best customers.
To prevent copyright violations at Scribd.com they developed technology that automatically checks whether an ebook uploaded to their site was truly the property of the person who claimed authorship. It’s impossible for you to upload Eat, Pray, Love because the technology knows it’s not yours; more importantly, it’s impossible for you to upload The God Patent because Scribd knows it’s mine. Legacy publishers demonstrated their appreciation for the new kid looking after their rights by suing them. You see, Scribd’s technology compares uploaded text to a vast database of known copyrighted works. The publishers are suing on the basis that Scribd.com’s database itself violates their copyrights because the database contains excerpts of copyrighted work. Forget that no one can access the database for something as trivial as reading. It’s just there to protect everyone. Even me, probably you, too.
There is something sinister in the way that publishers handle the elusive details of legal issues like libel and defamation. Every contract between an author and publisher places the legal responsibility for any conceivable lawsuit at the feet of the author. Legacy publishers are good at handling the details, but they do so to protect themselves, not their authors or their customers.
In fact, there are other backhanded gifts handed down from publisher to author. One of the perceived perks for an author signed to a legacy publisher is the advance on royalties. But the advance is more shackle than perk, at least for those authors who could benefit most. Should the title earn less than the advance, the author frequently becomes anathema to the publisher. It’s an odd way to run a business: fire the developer for a mistake made by the marketing team. In publishing’s glorious past, they trusted their initial judgment of an author and provided a steady hand through the bumpy ride of the first few titles. This is now more often exception than rule.
But, you say, pounding the keyboard, how else can a writer be paid? How can new books be written by competent authors? How can writers make a decent wage?
Ultimately, in the course of an author’s career, whether they are paid before or after a title earns money only matters for their first title. It’s called a bootstrap issue in Silicon Valley, “chicken and egg” in the heartland, “advance on royalties” in New York City.
The new model flows more logically. My publisher, Numina Press, LLC does not pay advances. Instead, they pay more than three times the royalties that legacy publishers offer and they pay them promptly each month. Google, Smashwords, Scribd, Amazon, etc take a commission, anywhere from 20-45%, and the author collects the rest. Yes, the author must finance the first title, but that’s always true. You can’t get an agent, much less a publisher without the manuscript in hand. After that, the first title finances the second, the second finances the third, and so forth. Successful authors build a trail of royalties that increases organically with their readership and will support them at whatever level that readership provides.
The advance is coveted by authors, but it is ultimately a red herring used against them.
None of this means that authors and, for the moment, readers don’t need publishers. There is one vital component of the process that the legacy publishing industry simply dominates: wetware.
It’s part skill set but, as they say, it ain’t what you know, it’s who you know.
When Random House sends a press release to NPR, or complimentary copies to Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, etc, the person at the receiving end recognizes and trusts the person at the sending end. When the director of promotions for Numina Press sends out press releases, there is no response. Neither Smashwords, Scribd, Apple, nor Google are likely to ever send such a press release and, if they did, they wouldn’t know to whom to send it.
Radio, television, and print sell books. There are a lot of details to cover and, with well over a century of experience, legacy publishers know how to manage them: reviews, awards, author appearances, book tours, timely placement of excerpts in ideal places, tradeshows, sales calls on booksellers – all these things, not to mention the long list that I didn’t mention, are utterly foreign to the likes of Apple, Google, Scribd and Smashwords.
The most poorly written book in history, if its author appeared on Oprah, would spend at least one week on the major bestseller lists. Of course this wouldn’t happen; back in the real-live handshake-and-meet-for-lunch world things are vetted. The problem is that the vetting is still small-statistical-sample subjectivity. How long until Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, etc, realize the power of democracy and choose books to review based on how they are received by readers? Or will reader reviews altogether replace them? And why not? Is their opinion more relevant than yours?
How effective are reviews? The God Patent got a stellar review in the San Francisco Chronicle, but the 50+ reviews by actual readers posted at Amazon provide a much more accurate snapshot of who likes it.
The Six Sisters get major reviews for all of their titles and more than 75% of those titles fail to return their initial investment. By “investment” publishers only include the author’s time investment up to the advance on royalties. Most advances these days don’t pay the author minimum wage for the hours spent writing (when royalties on The God Patent reached minimum wage on the time it took to write, I had a party! If you weren’t invited, you should complain bitterly to: ransom at ransomstephens dot com).
A new type of marketing acumen may prove far more important than the wetware-handshake-and-lunch-based model that has served legacy publishing so well. Programmed targeted marketing builds a model of your preferences based on the web pages you surf, the stuff you buy, the questions you ask of Google, your social networking profiles and standard demographics like age and zip code. The model calculates the probability in terms of a confidence interval that you will buy a certain item. The best current example is Netflix’ method for predicting what movies you’ll like. The beauty of targeted marketing is that it makes narrow niche items profitable. In annoying corporate parlance: it monetizes the long tail. With known probabilities and their uncertainties, promotion budgets can be produced with known risk.
Where success in legacy marketing results from who you know, success in targeted marketing results from how much math you know. Legacy publishers do not employ an excess of mathematicians, physicists and software engineers – the people who understand data analysis and mathematical modeling. On the other hand, at Google, Apple and Yahoo you can’t spit without hitting one of these guys.
At last, to the point around which we have danced: The publishing industry operates with a blockbuster profit model. They are homerun hitters who survive on that less than 25% profitability batting average by having a few big hits. In addition to this model being subject to fluctuations, there is a deeper more essential weakness.
Consider three different authors. First, a guaranteed bestseller: Janet Evanovich. Rumor has it that she has demanded $50M advance for her next books and St. Martins has denied the offer. Does she need a publisher? If she were to toss a manuscript to iUniverse, Lulu or any other self-publishing house wouldn’t she make more than by having St. Martins run the show? Janet Evonovich doesn’t need the marketing acumen of a legacy publisher. The instant gratification of the internet will propagate her work with little effort on her part. Bookstores will grapple for copies, even if they can’t get them on the archaic consignment/returns model.
The question is more interesting when rephrased: Does the legacy publisher need Janet Evanovich? A homerun hitter who has lost the ability to hack a hanging curve out of the park is soon riding the pine (i.e., yes).
A more telling example is Mark Morford. Morford is a columnist online version of the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com. He is brilliant, hilarious, outrageous and so edgy that you have to sand down his sentences to avoid cutting your retina on them. Morford self-published his book, The Daring Spectacle, a collection of his favorite columns supplemented with fresh details including samples of the hate mail he has received from people of opposing political opinion.
Morford is the guy that legacy publishing needs; someone who jumps over the transom with 50,000 ardent fans in tow. But, does Mark need the publishing industry? Why take 7-12% royalties that are delivered 6-18 months after they are earned when he can take 50-100% right now? What makes Morford’s story intriguing is that he’s in the middle. A big publisher probably would finance a substantial marketing campaign and that 50,000 could go up by a factor of ten. Of course, then Mark would have to answer to editors and if you read his column you’ll detect reticence to subject himself to censorship of any flavor.
What about the emerging author who lacks celebrity? Writing is solitary work which naturally attracts people who like to be alone. Being alone is not an effective approach to building a platform. A “platform” is marketing-ease for what Mark Morford has, a large group of people who are ready to buy his book the instant it hits the metaphorical shelves. If we make a list of the great writers – people like Cormac McCarthy, Amy Tan, Nick Hornby, Michelle Richmond, Mary Stewart, Neal Stephenson, Ransom Stephens (thought I’d squeeze that in to impress my daughter) – we’ll see few names who would have gained celebrity independent of their books.
In statistical terms, legacy publishers are biasing their sample against the very writers who make them the most money.
Where Janet Evonovich does not need a publisher and Mark Morford can do just fine without one, who does need a publisher? Ransom Stephens needs a publisher. His, I mean, my platform was quite tiny before The God Patent came out. With the help of my indie publisher, my list has increased by a factor of almost a hundred. A hundred times nothin’ is, umm, well larger than nothin’. If we believe the dozens of reviews on Amazon, it’s easy to see that the marketing acumen of a big publisher could have increased it by thousands. Of course, if a legacy publisher had bought The God Patent, the marketing budget would have been the same that Numina Press provided and the actual result would be the same except that I’d be getting 7-10% instead of 40-80%.
The problem for legacy publishers is this: The authors they need, don’t need them and they don’t want the authors who do need them. It’s unstable. It will change.
But how will it change?
Shortly after the 2009 San Francisco Literary Festival, Litquake, in a glowing New York Times review of the festival, a phrase appeared. A fragment that indicates the mindset of the legacy publishing industry. It said, “… San Francisco’s writers have come to recognize and trumpet the idea that this city prizes their craft, its solitary difficulty and what can emerge from it, even though there isn’t much of a publishing industry here.” Between Google, Scribd and Smashwords, more books will be published in the San Francisco Bay Area in the next 12 months than have been published in New York City in the last 12 years.
It’s true that most of the publishing profits for the next few quarters will be made by legacy publishers in New York City. These two facts are indicative of the accelerating part of the technological development S-curve.
Let me conclude with this, pay attention to that Sister who first makes a substantial Silicon Valley footprint by, for example, acquiring Scribd or Smashwords, you can forget the rest.
Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., writer, physicist, and public speaker, has had a front row seat for three industry upheavals: the collapse of the established computer industry in the mid ‘80s; the transition of the World Wide Web from a physicists’ tool to an economic cornerstone in the early ‘90s; the introduction of 3G and 4G technologies in the mid 00’s; and sees established publishers making the same mistakes that killed other legacy institutions. The San Francisco Chronicle called Ransom’s novel, The God Patent, “the first debut novel to emerge from the new paradigm of online publishing.” (www.TheGodPatent.com).

Another Reader responds

2011-03-03T08:30:00.001-08:00

I read the book and enjoyed it and passed it along to my book club, many of whom went right out and downloaded it to the Kindles. Darlene Meskell, Washington D.C.

The Very Tiny Man With The Big Chest of Medals - A Parable

2011-02-26T18:10:00.000-08:00

If you're surfing around anyway, why not click on A Gauche Press, click here> What's New tab on my regular website for a little parable: The Very Tiny Man With The Big Chest of Medals. It even doubles as a children's story. Rated G.

“Do Y Chromosomes Make the Man?”

2011-02-26T16:05:00.000-08:00

Barry’s got a guest blog gig on Mar. 2, 2011. Beginning at @ 10:00 a.m. he will be a guest at Four Strong Women. http://fourstrongwomen.blogspot.com/ The topic:

“Do Y Chromosomes Make the Man?” What the hell is that all about? There’s only one way to get an answer to that question. Check out the blog!

A Tangent.

2011-02-23T22:45:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to give anyone who happens along a tip. I've got a couple of new posts on my regular website, A Gauche Press - What's New. They're free. One's fun, or ought to be if you have any affinity for a sense of humor as warped as mine. The other is more serious and political. I've been moved these last few weeks by the events in North Africa and Wisconsin. I feel that in some ways, these events are a distant progeny of the conflicts that I attempted to address in The Flight of the Sorceress. I am so inspired by the indomitable will and power of plain, ordinary peaceful people when they have just had enough of the oppression that envelopes their daily existence. I think of them as the unsung heroes and heroines of a human spirit that I attempted to evoke on Flight of the Sorceress. My heart and hopes go out to everyone in the streets.

A Reader Comments on Flight of the Sorceress

2011-02-23T11:18:00.000-08:00

"I found the entire book thoroughly engaging. … Your book gave this world a substance and point of view that made me want to read more and understand the change better. And of course I felt the intellectual, religious constriction you depicted, believing it again to be happening today. I did not really appreciate how much was lost as fundamental, doctrinaire Christianity asserted itself at the beginning of the 5^th c. The central roles played in particular by Glenys, Aschi and Hypatia, revolved around each other to create a plot tension and foreboding that did really work." John Nash, Molokai, HI.

ONLY FIVE DAYS TO GO!

2011-02-23T11:05:00.000-08:00

JUST A REMINDER: ONLY FIVE DAYS TO GO TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE TWO-FER ON FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS. BUY ONE DIRECTLY FROM WILD CHILD AND I'LL SEND YOU A GIFT CERTIFICATE FOR ANOTHER FOR FREE!

The Future of Publishing, Part 2 of 3

2011-02-23T10:40:00.000-08:00

Modernization Puts an end to the Vanity Press and Rescues Booksellers

By Ransom Stephens, Ph.D.
In most quarters of publishing, the phrase “self published” equates to “trash.” Self-publishing used to require thousands of dollars and orders of magnitude more patience and sweat than working through the conventional publishing process. Of course self-published books, by and large, sucked. Why would anyone go through all that extra work unless they couldn’t find a publisher to buy in?
But now, clicking the “upload” icon to self-publish an ebook is free and easy. Within a few weeks anyone paying attention can see if the title has legs.
I fear that I self-published the electronic version of The God Patent. I admit it, I clicked the “upload” icon at Scribd.com. Call me a self-publisher, label it “vanity press” because I didn’t send 100 queries and indulge the 18 month conventional process. Call me crazy for investing the fraction of a calorie that it took to click the mouse. The manuscript had to be ready anyway and now that we’ve all grown up on Microsoft Word, formatting no longer calls on typesetters. Besides, the publisher Numina Press, LLC found it faster than if I’d gone the conventional route.
The label “vanity press” is a legacy concept. Is Scribd.com a vanity press? Smashwords? Amazon? Google? Throw the Six Sisters into a pool with these companies and ask yourself who is likely to survive the next decade. Interesting question isn’t it? Some of the new players won’t make it, neither will some of the old players.
The most common objection to self-publishing is that crucial components of the process are ignored. That without the copyediting and proofreading expertise of the legacy publishing industry we’ll face an artistic meltdown. There is a tradition of excellence in established publishing, but more and more authors are being called on to employ their own editors and fact checkers. At writing conferences it has become a cliche for editors from legacy publishing houses to complain that they have no time to actually “edit.”
Just as independent contractors in most fields must tend their own quality control, so must authors. They either hire brilliant copyeditors or do what Numina Press does: leverage the collective expertise of a community of writers. In San Francisco, writers congregate in workshops, grottos, and communities to share the burdens of “product development.” The God Patent was vetted by a dozen authors with bestseller credentials, an attorney, two particle physicists, a Baptist Preacher, a recovering Baptist Preacher, a retired English Teacher, and a New York City agent before I posted it on Scribd.com, long before it appeared in print. It’s not perfect, though the latest electronic version is close.
Ian McEwan’s book Solar has been through the legacy process: major author, major publisher, major process. Solar is about a Nobel Laureate physicist. The Dirac equation appears on page 42 incorrectly. It’s an egregious mistake for three reasons: first, the Dirac Equation is cited later in the book as an example of mathematical elegance; second, because if I mizpelled a French or Latin word in The God Patent the San Francisco literati would have been out on the porch with figurative torches and metaphorical pitchforks; and third, I paid $27 for it! Rest assured that both equations that appear in The God Patent are accurately portrayed (except on some ebook readers that bungle the symbol formats, but in that case you paid less than $10 for it so stop complaining).
The upshot is that, yes, many ebooks uploaded to places like Scribd and Smashwords don’t meet the minimum threshold of language mechanics and story clarity, much less the goal of editorial excellence, but if they take off, the revised versions will.
The whimsical and dramatic nature of art means that it is not easily categorized. The first question agents ask prospective authors is “Where should your title be shelved?” And the answer better not be “literary fiction, science, philosophy, and science fiction & fantasy.”
In the future, titles will be positioned by the people who know them best, their readers. At Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads, Shelfari, etc, readers position books for other readers. The God Patent is a novel about a guy who makes bad decisions and must overcome them. It’s also, according to Numina Press, “a story with Nick Hornby characters in a Neal Stephenson plot seasoned with authentic and accessible Steven Hawking science.” Numina Press positioned it as literary fiction. Readers applied tags at Amazon and now it sits in or near the top 50 in both “science > physics > quantum theory” and “religion & spirituality > fiction > science fiction & fantasy.” You might say, “Aha, failure of the system!” But read the book first and I bet you’ll agree with the tags. In stores, The God Patent is shelved either in literature or thrillers.
Just as titles ought to appear in as many stores as possible, they should also be available in every salable format. In other words, formatted for every bookreader; paper or silicon. Some legacy publishers actually claim that it costs more to develop, maintain, and warehouse electronic books than dead-tree books. More. It’s one of these statements that begs either deception or incompetence. Anyone with a few years high tech experience can formulate and code up a system to reformat the files appropriately. Of course it’s easier to go to Smashwords.com, click on “upload” and let their meatgrinder program do it for you. The meatgrinder takes an MS Word file and spits out files formatted for every known bookreader. And it’s free. Seems a lot easier and cheaper than loading paper and toner in a big printer and then gluing cardboard and cloth to the piles of printed paper, packing up the results in boxes, labeling them and sending them out. And warehousing? My external hard drive cost $100 and can hold a million ebooks including cover art. It gets weirder, most legacy publishers offer smaller author royalties on ebooks than printed books.
(A quick parenthetical comment on electronic books: don’t call them “digital books.” The antonym of digital is analog. “Digital” means that the information is encoded in a discrete set of symbols, like an alphabet. Books that use a finite set of characters are by definition digital whether displayed on paper, liquid crystals or e-ink (e-ink is the technology used on the Sony Bookreader, Kindle, Nook, etc.) )
In the mid-1990s corporations moved to Enterprise Resource Processes (ERP) that automate inventory control. When the last product is sold or the second to last, or wherever the retailer sets the trigger point, the ERP system orders more. No phone calls, no human-to-human contact: automated inventory enables automated ordering. ERP works all the way down the food chain, too. Wherever possible, manufacturers build products to order.
ERP makes it possible for modern companies to warehouse as few products as possible. Warehousing means that money is sitting around doing nothing, it requires that inventory be performed, and it’s a tax liability. Legacy publishers make huge print runs and, due to their sub 25% success rate, must warehouse most of their stock until it becomes clear that it won’t be ordered. Then a strange thing happens: it either goes back to stores as “remainders” and is sold at wholesale prices or the books are recycled – in neither case does the author receive royalties.
Numina Press operates on a Publish on Demand (PoD) model where inventory is carefully controlled. Print runs are designed to meet immediate need and when stock is depleted orders come in and books go out. It typically takes three to five more days for PoD books to get out the door than it takes to ship warehoused books. The time lag will improve as more publishers adopt the practice. Plus, there are no remainders and, with no warehouse cost, there is no reason for a book to ever go out of print.
The technological disruption that changes the equation is automated setup. The economy of scale has historically front-loaded the cost of printing. That is, once the presses are set up it doesn’t cost much more to make 15,000 copies than it costs for 10,000. The disruption is that the front-end setup cost is now only incurred for the first run, even if the first run is one book. Including setup, the cost per unit plateaus around 3000 copies – the point that defines legacy publishing’s minimum cost-effective print run. In the PoD model, after the first run subsequent runs don’t require further setup reducing the minimum optimal print run to about 100 copies.
There is a new approach to stocking and inventory that Numina Press embraces but legacy publishers remain wary of: the Espresso Book Machine is about the size of a copy machine and can print and bind a trade paperback in about five minutes. All it requires is electronic access to the formatted file including cover art. Once legacy publishers enable their titles, the local bookstore can provide almost any book you want in a few minutes.
The Espresso Machine can solve a problem that publishers would cheerfully be rid of, but the end to which booksellers fear: Returns.
Books are one of the final remaining retail industries that operates on a consignment model. Books are provided to stores by publishers for free. Shipping is free and, should the bookseller decide a given book is taking up shelf space that could be better occupied by another title, the publisher pays to have the book returned. Before The Great War, pretty much every other retail industry had rejected consignment. Instead, manufacturers sell products to retailers at wholesale and those sales are final.
It may horrify booksellers, but it shouldn’t: the consignment model is finished. Numina Press does not accept returns. It is the only way that Numina can calculate and distribute royalties in real time. Legacy publishers can’t even calculate their royalties in time to do their taxes. The burden on the accounting department isn’t cheap.
Writers and readers love bookstores. We want them to survive! When stores have Espresso Book Machines, they won’t need to overstock titles because they can produce them as needed. Plus, every bookstore can have a complete inventory, can have every book “in stock,” with hardcopies on hand of just those books that the proprietor selects based on the tastes of her clientele.
Bookstores just might make it after all. But will legacy publishers? Some of them. Stay tuned.

The Future of Publishing, Part 1

2011-02-17T17:19:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine and fellow author, Ransom Stephens, has written a very informative 3-part article on the Future of Publishing. He has given me permission to re-post it on this blog. While it has very little to do with my novel, THE FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS, I know the issue is of deep concern to us all, and it does affect both what we write and how we write it. I will post one segment per week, and am happy to welcome discussion on this blog. Thank you.

The Future of Publishing, Part 1 of 3

By Ransom Stephens, Ph.D.

Is the bound pile of pages we call a book merely a souvenir from a mental vacation you took in a world created by an author? Does the publishing industry still possess the skills that writers and readers need to foster the exchange of stories and free time? If established publishers aren’t the conduit, then who? What will novels look like in a decade?
Some writers don’t need the publishing industry as it exists today and has existed for the last century, some still do. But the writers who need the publishing industry are not the writers who the publishing industry needs.
The publisher’s role is to connect readers to the books that they want. Independent of this role publishers have no valid reason to exist. Many business practices of the publishing industry have not been updated in half a century. They fail on time of delivery, don’t have current Enterprise Resource Processes (ERP), lack modern targeted marketing competence and waste resources. On the other hand, legacy publishing is still unsurpassed at putting authors in the media spotlight and handling the morass of details involved in book development, promotion and marketing. The problem is that most of the time they don’t use their prowess to support the clients or customers that are most important to their long term health. That said, they’re still making lots of money.
It is unlikely that any of the six large publishers, the so called Six Sisters of Publishing, will lead the way to the next paradigm. We can state this with confidence without even referring to a specific publisher or practice because, historically, the established players in any industry do not fare well through technological disruptions.
Every business is faced with four fundamental tasks: product development, manufacturing and distribution, records and administration and marketing and promotion. In this three part series, we’ll examine how each is performed in legacy publishing, in cutting edge publishing, and in the crystal ball of the future. For the former case, by “legacy,” I mean “those processes that are practiced because it has always been thus.” For the cutting edge case we’ll use the example of Numina Press, LLC, which by pure coincidence is the publisher of my novel, The God Patent (obviously, you should click www.TheGodPatent.com and get yourself a copy before continuing).
For the future case, we’ll do what all crystal ball gazers do: make it up as we go along.
Books are developed to the advanced prototype stage by independent contractors, (a.k.a., authors). In all but the rarest cases, fiction manuscripts are well past the beta stage before the publisher ever sees them. When proposals for nonfiction titles are acquired the author is expected to do at least 95% of the development (i.e., research, writing, editing, fact checking, etc.).
The first role of the publisher is title acquisition and the first line of defense against the manuscript onslaught is the gatekeeper. The process itself is sometimes called the “cultural filter.” It’s an unfortunate term that rings of snobbery at best and censorship at worst, though the process does fit the definition of a filter.
With centuries of experience, legacy publishers are as good at selecting marketable titles as is possible for any small opinion sample. Individually, they are the best in the world. That what they attempt is impossible is reflected by the fact that far fewer than 25% of published titles are profitable. The fundamental problem is that art in general and literature in particular is quintessentially subjective. Above the basically objective thresholds of writing clarity and sentence and paragraph mechanics, the literary merit and marketability of a title by an unproven author is simply not discernible a priori. Literary merit can only be positively judged after a title has been in print for months, years or decades.
The acquisition process involves separate layers of filtering at the agent, the editor, and the selection committee. It is a probabilistic chain of subjective judgment. The probability of an agent judging a specific query intriguing multiplied by the probability that the first few pages of the manuscript hold that intrigue, then another probability for the complete work. More probabilities are multiplied as the process is repeated at the publishing house.
Given their sub 25% success rate, one wonders what the actual fraction of successful titles in the original pile could be. In other words, how efficient is the acquisition process at accepting titles that would be successful if they were published? Consider the extreme possibilities. A perfect cultural filter catches 100% of the profitable titles and the unprofitable titles that the filter admits are the minimum possible noise required to catch the signal in its entirety. At the opposite end of the spectrum, assuming the manuscripts surpass the threshold of mechanics and clarity, a truly random filter would yield the same ratio of profitable to unprofitable titles in the accepted stack as in the rejected stack.
Where in this spectrum does the legacy, plutocratic cultural filter sit?
What if a publisher could publish every manuscript that came over the transom? What if they could go back in time and choose only those titles for publication that the market will welcome? This is, in some sense, what Numina Press does.
Simulation is a trick used in high tech to make the product development process more efficient; without it, you couldn’t afford the instrument on which you’re reading right now. Using technology in these ways is old hat in Silicon Valley – which might be a hint of where the future of publishing lies.
Numina Press’s editor-in-chief, Yanina Gotsulsky, watched the performance of The God Patent as an e-novel at Scribd.com. When it spent 13 straight weeks in the Top 10 Most Read Fiction with over 10,000 people showing interest, Numina sent me an email asking for publishing rights.
Market testing a manuscript as an e-book provides a democratic cultural filter that gauges the market appeal of a title before it goes to print, before the publisher has spent a cent. In the case of Numina Press, there is a qualifier, the same as that of legacy publishing: Ms. Gotsulsky is a self-described literary snob who won’t publish something unless it meets her specifications.
The point is that, while professional acquisition editors are better at choosing worthy titles than anyone, they are not nearly as good as everyone.
Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., writer, physicist, and public speaker, has had a front row seat for three industry upheavals: the collapse of the established computer industry in the mid ‘80s; the transition of the World Wide Web from a physicists’ tool to an economic cornerstone in the early ‘90s; the introduction of 3G and 4G technologies in the mid 00’s; and sees established publishers making the same mistakes that killed other legacy institutions. The San Francisco Chronicle called Ransom’s novel, The God Patent, “the first debut novel to emerge from the new paradigm of online publishing.” (www.TheGodPatent.com).

MY LIFE AS A SPAMMER: What’s an author to do when accused of spamming?

2011-02-12T16:53:00.000-08:00

A while back, after my historical novel The Flight of the Sorceress was released, I commenced my amateurish attempts at marketing books. I didn’t think it would make good sense to spend large sums of money for public relations on my book, sums I was unlikely to recoup. But I suck at being shameless self-promoter. I think among my author colleagues this condition is not unique. But in the big leagues, or even the higher minor leagues, you’ve got to be able to both field and hit, not to mention run. I soon discovered that good writing is only one of many skills an author needs to get anywhere in the horrific world of book sales.

So what to do? I looked around. Found out what other authors were doing — and not doing. Began dipping my timid toes in icy water. Lo and behold! There are thousands of good, if not great, published authors out there all cast into the roiling seas of book promotion by their under-funded publishers and they are flailing about, fending off the circling sharks of costly promoters, gasping for breath while drowning in emails about “services”— promising 15 minutes of TV fame, magic mailing lists, snake-oily gimmicks. Shout all you like, your screams won’t be heard over the general din of the drowning masses. Yet shout you must. Shameless you must be, in the faint hope that your voice will be heard and deemed worthy of salvation.

And so I set out, trudging along the well-worn paths of those who had gone before, pretending to be heedless of the corpses that littered the wayside. I joined numerous Yahoo lists. I created a blog. I upgraded my website. I began social networking. I have gotten universally good reviews, which I touted. I’ve given away books. All in blind trust that there really is a “tipping point” out there, and that someday I will reach it…. And then I got accused of spamming!

SPAMMING! Jesus Christ! I don’t know where you come from but in my house, spam is a bad word. It’s worse than bad. It’s like calling someone a capitalist pig (or if you’re on the other side of the spectrum, a communist.) Goddamn it! Me, a spammer? No F*CKING WAY.

It got me to thinking. Is trying to create art or literature worth the trouble if, in the end, all you get is accused of being a spammer or a shameless self-promoter? Now, let’s be clear. I’m not in this writing thing for the money. I’ve been a lawyer for forty years. I’ve made more money in a billable hour than I can from a quarterly royalty check, or even a semi-annual one. I know damn well who makes the money in the entertainment industry, including the book business, and it isn’t the artist or writer (unless the writer is writing contracts or legal papers — but that’s another story.) True financial success stories among authors, artists, performers, athletes are about as rare as there are habitable planets in the universe compared to the rest of the cosmos. So it’s not that. And the arts are not fields where one doesn’t need a thick skin, always confronting a shitload of criticism and/or rejection. That goes with the turf, believe me, I know. But to be accused of being an, ugh, spammer. That’s going too f*cking far.

What happened was that I sent a blurb of Flight of the Sorceress to five separate Amazon discussion groups. (Amazon has over 600 discussion groups.) Several groups specifically asked for authors to tell the group something about their works. Two did not, but both of these asked questions that seemed relevant to the topics in my book — heroines in historical fiction and Hypatia. Now these discussion groups had a few hundred participants in total over a period running back to 2009. But I recall that at least two had fewer than fifty and some posts were fairly old. Does this sound like some clever spamming tactic I had come up with? One day, five groups, one single book announcement going to five selected groups interested in ancient history, could this be spam? Not in my book. Ha ha. A few days later, I got a notice from Amazon. If I didn’t cease and desist, I was going to get thrown out of these discussion groups. I’d never again get to abuse this innocent bunch of readers by mentioning my book even though it might be of specific interest to them.

Then a blogger/reviewer posted on her blog that Amazon had found me guilty of spamming. As it turned out, she had a rather large following. (When I found out, I wrote her, explained the circumstances and she graciously removed the accusation.)

Just what is spam, technically?

It boils down to this: spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. There are circumstances where spamming is illegal under federal law. There are private rights of action available against spammers. That is, people have rights to sue spammers.

Amazon’s guidelines for discussion groups describe spam as “Any form of ‘spam,’ including advertisements, contests, or other solicitations for other websites or companies; or any URL link that includes a "referrer" tag or affiliate code.” But there are other kinds of posts that are considered against Amazon’s guidelines than spam. The mere removal of an author’s post from an Amazon group discussion does not mean that Amazon, the arbiter of all things right and good in the book biz, has proclaimed it “spam.” Bloggers who consider a post’s removal from an Amazon discussion group to be proof of spamming are misleading their following. And they know it hurts the author’s reputation.

Other groups define spam differently. But spam has a technical, legal definition. While a discussion group can call whatever they want “spam.” That doesn’t make it so. For example they could call sending any unsolicited email to their group “terrorism” if they wanted to, regardless of content. Amazon’s lawyers are obviously aware of the risks they run by accusing an author of being a spammer, and they know it could have serious legal consequences to their deep pockets. So they didn't say that to me. Amazon appears to be well-aware that we authors are at risk of having our reputations tarnished as spammers as we stumble and bumble through the brambles of self-promotion hell. But many bloggers and webmasters are not so savvy (and not so fearful of being sued because their pockets are no deeper than most authors.)

“What can authors do to protect themselves from such an accusation in their promotional activities?”

Send your posts to places where you reasonable can think the site has solicited information about your writing or the subject matter you are writing about. Different discussion groups may include different members. Send them on different days. Sending posts to more than one discussion group does not make the post indiscriminate or in bulk, particularly when it was solicited or the custom and practice of the group appears to welcome such information.

Are you sending out your promo indiscriminately? Well, not if you are selecting groups with a specific stated interest in your subject matter. If you sent a promo of your XXX, m/m/f hot kinky romance-of-the-zombie witches book to a site that caters to Christian gardening clubs, I think there’d be an argument that it met the “indiscriminate” test, but then it all depends of the kind of Christians inhabiting those clubs.

And if, for example, a writer posts to five groups, and his/her posts are found relevant in three of them, but not in two others that contain a total of fewer than say, 20 members, do the two posts, one to each group qualify as “bulk?” I doubt it. You may be breaking some group rules but that doesn’t make you a spammer.

What happens when a blogger assumes that the removal of an author’s post from a discussion group means the author has been spamming, and then the blogger publishes as fact that the author is a spammer?

No question such a publication is defamatory, if untrue. It connotes civil misconduct and/or possibly criminal behavior by the author. Such a blog, designed to reach a specific group of the author’s potential customers smears the author’s reputation. The blogger is implying that the author and/or his or her work should be discredited. The accusation is intended to injure an author in his or her occupation.

Now, a blogger certainly has a right to review a writer’s work and to say what he/she believes are its merits or demerits. That is clearly a matter of opinion and opinions are protected speech. No problem there. But it is not protected speech to accuse a person of committing an act that may be a crime or a civil violation and most certainly is defamatory. It is one thing for a discussion group member to register a complaint against a potential offender of guidelines, but it is quite another thing to separately publish in a blog or website as a fact that the author is a spammer. The blogger knows full well it can damage the reputation of the author.

So what is an author to do?

First, take a deep breath and ponder P.T. Barnum’s admonition that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” Don’t freak out and write a nasty-gram. It’s always better to smooth feathers than to ruffle them. Second, write a friendly personal note to the blogger explaining what you were trying to do. Apologize for any unintended offense. Explain that you are the author and are proud of you work. Perhaps even offer the blogger a free copy. Explain that you made a good faith attempt to abide by the group’s rules and say that you thought that you did. But also explain that what you did was not spam under the law, or as it is commonly understood by the author’s and blogger’s potential readers. Explain that it is damaging to your reputation and that any reasonable person would view the accusation of spamming as derogatory. And then request that the blogger remove the statement from his/her blog or website because it is defamatory. Give them an opportunity to retract and keep a written record of the correspondence. Then, if they don’t remove the accusation and you feel your reputation is important to you and/or you feel you have been damaged as an author, you can consider taking more forceful action.

Fortunately for me, my letter worked.

TWO for ONE! February only.

2011-02-09T13:22:00.000-08:00

This February Only!
Buy a copy of FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS from Wild Child Publishing. Email me proof of purchase at barrywilldorf@gmail.com, and I will have Wild Child send you a gift certificate for another copy that you can give to anybody.

Flight of the Sorceress, Q&A Part 6: What happened afterward?

2011-02-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

Q. Several of your readers have expressed the desire for a sequel. Do you have one in mind?

A. Not presently. In my first draft, Glenys returns to Britannia many years after the events in Sorceress. She is still a fugitive. And she is instrumental in waging a rebellion against the Vortigern (the Roman’s appointed surrogate after they abandoned the island) and his Saxon mercenaries. I have no specific plans to write a sequel but I have left several characters available to fill the bill, should I decide to do so. In addition to Glenys, there are Aschi, Brighid, Adam, and Bishop Ignatus.

Q. What about Pelagius the heretic and Cealestius, his sidekick?

A. Them also. After Pelagius was kicked out of Tiberius where he attempted to help in the compilation of the Vulgate Bible, he was summoned to Rome to answer charges of heresy. The pope at the time was a convert from Judaism named Zosimus. Pelagius convinced him that good works alone, without baptism, can still get you into heaven. When Augustine heard that Pelagius was beating the rap, and threatening to undermine his doctrine of Original Sin, he arranged to bribe Zosimus with a herd of fancy white stallions. Pelagius was convicted and banished from Rome. People saw him leave the city but he was never seen or heard from after that. Cealestius, according to some accounts, went to Ireland. At some point he apparently reconciled with the Church.

The Flight of the Sorceress, Q&A, Part 5 - Hypatia's murderer and the Alexandria pogrom of 415 A.D.

2011-01-29T14:53:00.000-08:00

Q. Your account of the murder of Hypatia lays the blame squarely on the shoulders of Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria. Where does that come from?

A. It is not my account. It is an accurate historical account that is confirmed by various sources, not the least of which is Bishop John of Nikiu. Bishop John was a Roman Catholic historian (a Coptic Egyptian cleric) who lived in the late Seventh and early Eight Centuries and wrote a work called the Chronicles. In it, he recounts, with obvious glee, Hypatia’s murder and gloats that Cyril rid Alexandria of idolaters. By the way, his Chronicle addresses the Muslim conquest of Alexandria. If it were Muslims who destroyed the library, you can bet it would have been mentioned in the Chronicles, but it does not. Bishop John was the Glenn Beck of his day. He wouldn’t have spared the Muslim conquerors such bad publicity if they had destroyed anything as significant as a great library. Just reading John’s Chronicles, you get a sense that the Muslim conquest must have been a welcome relief from the dour religious repression of the Church. At that time, they were so much more tolerant of other religions and ideas, you can’t help rooting for them.

Q. Your book includes a subplot involving the Jews of Alexandria. Why did you feel that this topic should be included in the story?

A. At the time of the story, Jews made up approximately one-quarter of the population of Alexandria. They were an integral part of the political and cultural fabric of the city. And the Roman Catholic Church was quite concerned about their influence on society, particularly arts and letters. It was here in Alexandria that the Church’s vilification first took on proportions that led to one of the earliest pogroms against the Jews —certainly the largest after the diaspora. It happened close in time to the murder of Hypatia and the persecution of the Nestorian Christian sect. I fudged the chronology a bit because the pogrom in fact preceded the murder but I didn’t find that author’s license to be historically significant. The fact was that the Roman Catholic Church, by this time, was using the Roman army to consolidate its power, demanding that its version of Christianity was the only permissible theology. Anyone, whether Christian, pagan or Jew, who dissented was marked for destruction. I think the book faithfully recounts the equal opportunity repression of differing points of view and its ultimate consequences to civilization and human progress.

Of Witches, Wizards and Sorcerers, Flight of the Sorceress Q&A, Part 4

2011-01-14T15:34:00.000-08:00

Q. At the beginning of The Flight of the Sorceress you have several quotes from the Bible admonishing people to not tolerate sorcery, wizardry and witchcraft. What is that all about?

A. I find it interesting from the point of view of our current debate concerning Biblical literalism; the belief that the Bible is the literal word of God. If you believe in literalism, you’ve got to believe that we live in a world populated by sorcerers, wizards and witches. And you’ve got to believe that God wants you to burn them or stone them to death. That’s where literalism takes you. It’s not just some antiquated belief system. At the end of the road, it promises a holocaust. Do you know what the etymology of wizard is? It originally meant “wise one,” someone with an education.

Q. What inspired you to make your heroine a sorceress?

A. A sorceress or sorcerer was someone who was essentially a chemist —someone who could make potions. For millennia, women especially Celtic women were versed in concocting herbal remedies. One of their professions was to be a healer. (Among the other important, but not exclusively female professions, was as magistrates. They were also known to be fierce warriors.) They knew how to make poultices, to mix medicinal remedies. To the ignorant, this was some sort of magic. And the Church used the fear that is the handmaiden of ignorance to maintain power. I’ve read estimates that during the Middle Ages millions of women and men, but primarily women, were murdered as witches and sorceresses. We have no idea what the numbers were in the Dark Ages but they had to be staggering. Obviously vast numbers of women, particularly the unmarried ones, widows, those deemed expendable, were driven out of society and into the wilderness. We have only to look closely at the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales to see the distorted image of women living in the woods supposedly mixing devilish brews to kill children to see the power of the church-borne mythology that resulted in a gender-based genocide. It’s the same kind of propaganda that they used against the Jews, the blood libel. You want to rile up the ignorant, accuse your victim of murdering children, particularly for satanic reasons. I couldn’t think of a better heroine for a novel in this period than a woman accused of sorcery, and that turned into Glenys of the Silures.

Q. You seem to have a very cynical view of Christianity. Why is that?

A. I’m sure some people who read the Flight of the Sorceress will think that. That’s because it’s easy to confuse Christianity with the institution of the Church. In the Flight of the Sorceress there are plenty of Christians who are also victims of the Church. When Constantine ordered his legions to paint crosses on their shields and adopted the slogan “In hoc signo vinces —By this sign conquer” he changed Christianity. It was no longer the teaching of Christ that counted, but the strength of its armies. Priests became the equivalent of commissars, or mullahs.

MORE ACLAIM FOR FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS

2011-01-08T16:51:00.000-08:00

“A read that will keep you turning the pages!”
“The Flight of the Sorceress is meticulously researched and beautifully portrayed….Willdorf’s prose brings the moment alive. The themes explored in this book, of prejudice and power, are deftly interwoven with the beliefs of the time. The conflict manages to educate and compel at the same time and you can’t help but feel for these women, who are so grossly over-matched but who still do not give up.
“This book is a rare look at a time and place not often seen in historical fiction and is a read that will keep you turning the pages!” Historical Novel Review, by Vanitha Sankaran, author of Watermark. Read the entire review at http://historicalnovelreview.blogspot.com

“Locks you in for the ride”
“The Flight of the Sorceress locks you in for the ride and delivers a blend of historical fiction and fantasy. The Sorceress is an enlightened mind… her tenacity will impress you, but it is her will to flourish that will make you want more.” Ransom Stephens, author of The God Patent.