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

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/

Judging A Book By Its Cover

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

copyright issues.

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. 

COPTS AND SALAFIS FIGHT IT OUT IN EGYPT

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?

THE FLIGHT OF THE SORCERESS