Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Connections, Feedback, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, BBC, care-giving, caregiving, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, Her Final Year, Kickstarter, mathematics, More or Less, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, statistics, writing
This past weekend a broadcast of the BBC show/podcast “More or Less” caught my ear, as it was discussing the economics of conventional trade publishing. I would encourage listening to the entire thing (about 9 minutes), but the basics are:
- Of about 50,000 new titles published in a year, just 0.4% will sell more than 100,000 copies
- To ‘break even’, a title needs to sell about 5,000 copies
- Some 86% of all titles sell fewer than 5,000 copies
- Something like 15% sell fewer than a dozen copies
Whoa.
I knew the numbers weren’t good, and that I had been relatively successful with self-publishing my own books (after years of trying to land a conventional publishing deal), but I had no idea that they were that dismal.
For perspective, all three of my books broke that 5,000 threshold the first year that they were available. And two went on to break it again the second year. Total downloads (ballpark numbers) for each of my books so far:
- Communion of Dreams: in excess of 50,000 downloads from Amazon, with another ~25,000 downloads of the prior pdf before that
- Her Final Year: in excess of 11,000 downloads from Amazon
- St Cybi’s Well: in excess of 9,000 downloads from Amazon
I’ve been mildly disappointed in the performance of St Cybi’s Well, but that is largely in comparison to Communion of Dreams, which was published a decade earlier (and which has continued to see strong sales/downloads each year). This kind of puts that into perspective.
One thing I want to mention: free downloads. Yeah, that skews the numbers a bit, but not as much as you might think for the two novels. For those, free downloads account for about 15% of SCW and about 20% of CoD totals. HFY saw a much larger percentage of free downloads, but that was because we saw the book more as a public service to other care-givers than a moneypot.
Oh, and “best seller”? Other info I’ve seen indicates that about 50,000 copies is typically considered a best seller in the trade publication industry. Now, that’s for one-year sales, not cumulative sales over a decade. But still, it makes me feel pretty good about how CoD has done.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Connections, General Musings, Health, Kindle, Machado-Joseph, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
Just over a year ago I did a write up on completing the leather bindings for Communion of Dreams. This is going to be a similar documentation of completing the leather bindings for St Cybi’s Well.
Unlike the sewing structure for CoD, the sewing for SCW is exactly the same as for the hand-bound hardcover edition. Since I have already done a thorough documentation of that process, I see no reason to repeat it here. Instead, I’ll just refer you to that original post: Turning words into books.
And likewise, a couple of months ago I did a post about the actual design of the cover of the leather edition of St Cybi’s Well, so there’s no reason to go over all of that again. You can find that post here: Well, well, well …
The first thing in doing the full edition of 14 books, I needed to cut out sufficient “stones” of bookboard to form the relief on the front cover, and get those each laid out and mounted on the heavy bookboard. This was made possible by the use of my Glowforge laser to cut through the heavy bookboard. The “stones” were laid out such that one blank space was left for the mounting of a real slice of Preseli Bluestone from the quarry at Craig Rhosyfelin on the outside of the leather:
My Kickstarter backers selected what color leather they wanted for the cover of their books, and I ordered in the leather that I didn’t already have in stock. It’s all high-quality bookbinding goatskin:
I calculated how big of a piece of leather I needed for each book, and made a jig cutting those out:
Then those needed to have reference lines laid out, the corners cut and all the edges pared down:
The Communion of Dreams leather covers had the slight raised image of the Burr Oak tree, which was made using an archival board with a thickness of 0.02″. The archival bookboard I used for the “stones” of the St Cybi’s Well design were 0.10″ — five times as thick. Because of this, some additional work was needed to make sure that the leather conformed to the “stones”.
The first step was to saturate the outside of the leather with distilled water in the area of the front cover:
The the inside of the leather was pasted out with adhesive:
And the front cover was positioned. A barrier of plastic film was put on each side, then a sheet of foam core was positioned to cover the entire front cover. That was then placed between two press boards and the whole sandwich was put into my large nipping press. The press was cranked down, and the sandwich was left to dry overnight. The next day, this is what the end result looked like:
Then I mounted the rear board, as well as the spine liner, and turned the edges in (be sure to read my Wabi-sabi post about this):
After all the covers (the bookbinding term is “cases”) were finished, I mounted the text block as per usual. At this point, they were books, but they weren’t finished.
First, I wanted to get the endpapers mounted. Typically, this would just be done by tipping in the endpaper, then pasting it out and sticking it in a press for a quick nip. But I wanted these books to be a little more hand-fitted, so I pasted out the slightly over-size endpaper, then carefully by hand laid it out in position before pressing:
This makes the hinge joint a little more flexible, and the book friendly to open and read. A small thing, but with a book of this quality, an important one. Once the endpapers were mounted, I trimmed the excess off.
The next step was to mount the thin spiral cut from sparkly blue commercial glitterpaper using the laser. This was a visual reference to a similar image in the book. The trick was to mount the narrow, somewhat fragile, spiral of paper without distortion, damage, or excess adhesive. To do this, I first positioned the off-cut of the spiral using low-tack tape:
Then I pasted out a sheet of waste paper. Carefully laying down the thin spiral on top of the waste sheet, I lightly tapped the spiral so that a thin application of adhesive was transferred to the back. I carefully lifted the spiral off the adhesive, supporting it across the center with a micro-spatula. I was then able to position it into the void of the off-cut:
Using a narrow bone folder, I then pressed the thin spiral down along the entire surface, and then removed the off-cut:
This was then given a quick nip in the press to set the adhesive.
Once all the endpapers & spirals were mounted, it was time to mount the blue “water” inside the well design:
With the “water” mounted, I masked that area and did the title etching in the laser, using the same technique I developed for the titling on Communion of Dreams:
The titling done, I added a small tip-in sheet with the colophon and edition number:
I mounted each slice of Preseli Bluestone in the appropriate place on each book. Here they all are, arranged so as to re-create the “well” design with each stone in the proper location:
And they’re all done. 9 of the 14 bindings are going to their new homes, and one is staying with me. That leaves these four bindings still available for adoption:
If you’re interested in adopting one of these books, and perhaps a matching # copy of Communion of Dreams, feel free to contact me for the details: jim@communionblog
It’s likely that given my MJD, this will be the last edition of bindings I ever do. Not a bad place to end a career. But we’ll see.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Connections, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: Amazon, book art, book conservation, book design, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, Communion of Dreams, Kickstarter, Legacy Bookbindery, Science Fiction, St Cybi's Well, writing
Last May, I wrote about the process of designing and executing the artistic leather bindings of Communion of Dreams. Now that all of my Kickstarter backers have made their choices, I thought I’d give a preview of the process of designing and executing the artistic leather bindings of St Cybi’s Well.
I had a piece of Preseli Bluestone from the quarry at Craig Rhosyfelin (which is the source for the Stonehenge Bluestones in the inner ring). This site appears in a scene in chapter 8. Well, I had the stone cut into 14 slices (two times the magical number 7). Which I then used to construct a “well” as the cover design. The center of the well has thin blue leather to represent the water in the well. Like this:
Each of the 14 leather-bound copies will have one actual slice of the stone mounted on top of the leather, and thirteen ‘stones’ of bookboard under the leather for bas relief. In this way, all fourteen copies of the leather-bound edition will be connected into one “well”. Here are two examples:
As with the titling for Communion of Dreams, the letterforms are etched using my Glowforge laser, then infilled with real gold leaf.
The other major design decision was what to do for the endpapers. Communion of Dreams had marbled endpapers. For St Cybi’s Well I wanted something different. Thinking through the various visuals in the book, one recurrent image I used was of a Celtic spiral. A symbol of whirlpools and infinity, but also of the transition between realms of reality. Combine that with the ‘healing energy’ in the novel characterized as being a luminous blue. So this is what I came up with: a thin sparkly blue spiral, cut with the laser from commercial glitterpaper stock. It will be mounted onto black endpapers, one each on the paste-down sheets front and rear. Here’s an example:
I do have all the text blocks sewn up and ready to use. I’ve ordered the leather, and soon will be completing these bindings. There are five text blocks and five stones (numbers 1, 4, 5, 6, and 11) still available. If you’re interested in one, you can still choose your color of leather. Details here. Once I finish the nine books for my Kickstarter backers, I’ll just finish the remaining five in leather of my choosing (and raise the price).
I’ll post pics when I have the first batch finished.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Connections, Failure, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: Amazon, book art, book conservation, book design, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, Communion of Dreams, Kickstarter, Legacy Bookbindery, Science Fiction, St Cybi's Well, writing
It’s been five years since I last wrote about my efforts to come up with a satisfactory cover design for the premium leather edition of Communion of Dreams. Well, needless to say, a lot has happened since then. Not the least of which was getting, and learning to use, my Glowforge laser.
And now I’ve finally resolved the many different design and execution issues to my satisfaction, to the point where I’m completing the promised leather-backed copies for my Kickstarter supporters. Here it is:
This is going to be a bit about this binding, and how it differs from the hardcover cloth binding.
First thing, the sewing is different. Rather than just being sewn onto linen tapes, the books are sewn onto heavy linen cords:
Why the weird arrangement? So that those cords provide additional texture to the spine of the finished book, along the location of where the tree branches are (see the first pic above). Once the sewing was done, the text blocks were glued up and rounded slightly. All of that was very straight-forward.
However, as noted in that blog post in 2016, the problem I had was trying to achieve the raised texture of the tree for the rest of the cover. I played around with a bunch of different solutions, until I settled on using the laser to cut out a slightly abstracted version of the Burr Oak image:
That’s in the bed of the laser. The material is archival 50pt board. Trying to cut out such an image by hand would take me hours, probably. The laser does it in about four minutes. (Though I did spend some considerable amount of time coding the design so the laser would do it.)
Here’s the image free of the surrounding board:
That is then pasted onto a sheet of paper, and the book cover boards are mounted on the back in the appropriate location. Then it is time to mount the leather, and impress it such that the tree is in relief, with this result:
(Actually, that was a practice piece, not the final version pictured above. But I forgot to take an image of the final version at this stage.)
The edges of the leather are then turned-in, and the corners formed. This gives you a finished case (what bookbinders call the cover).
Next, need to do the titling. And this is where the laser once again comes in very handy, though it took me a while to get just the right technique worked out. After the design for the title is done, the leather is masked and then engraved with the laser to an appropriate depth:
Once that is done, the engraved areas are cleaned of residual charred leather, and gilding size applied:
Once that cures, then it’s time to apply the gold leaf:
Now, that’s real gold, in multiple layers, about $25 worth. This process is different than traditional gilding done by bookbinders, so I had to work up a whole different process to do it (based on my experience with traditional gilding). The result is very satisfactory, though, since I have a much greater range of options for the final design.
Once the titling work was done, it was time to prepare to mount the text block to the case. First, I tear the outer page of the outer signature, and trim the cords to the appropriate length:
This combination, with the two liner tabs, will make for a *very* secure mounting to insure the cover and text block stay together. Then, you fray out the linen cords, so that they will not present excess bulk inside the cover:
Then the whole thing is pasted out and mounted inside the case, similar to how the hardcover cloth bindings were done. Once everything is dry and secure, I added endpapers of hand-marbled paper I made:
Giving the finished product:
I tried a lot of different color combinations, and have decided that this is the one I think works the best (and echoes the original cover nicely). My Kickstarter backers have the option of choosing a different color, but henceforth this will be the only color option available for other collectors.
Next, after finishing these bindings: designing the premium leather binding for St Cybi’s Well.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Failure, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, book art, book conservation, book design, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, Kickstarter, Legacy Bookbindery, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
Last week I went through the mechanics of turning words into books. Today I’d like to talk a little bit about the economics of that, as well as being an author.
When I set up the Kickstarter for St Cybi’s Well lo these many years ago, a lot of my estimates in deciding on what goals to shoot for were based on … blind faith, to be perfectly honest.
I’d published Communion of Dreams, and had some sense of the possible income that could generate, as well as the amount of work that went into writing/editing/formatting it. But I really had no idea what the costs would be for printing and hand-binding copies of that book or the yet unwritten St Cybi’s Well. I had a pretty good handle on how much time it would take me to do the hand binding, based on my book conservation work. And likewise, what the cost of materials would be, other than the printing. Now that I’ve gone through all of that with both books, I have a much better idea of how costs break down, so I thought I would share all of that.
Based on 55 copies (edition of 53, plus two author/artist proof copies), the actual out-of-pocket expense runs about $50 per copy for the two different books. That covers the cost of the oversize archival paper (so the grain/drape of the pages is correct for hand binding), the printing, and going to collect the printed pages. It also covers the cost of archival bookboard and cover cloth. (The leather copies are two or three times as much, depending on the actual leather used.) Were I to bind a single copy, it would take me about 2 hours of labor. If I bind multiple copies at a time, that drops to about 1.5 hours of labor. (Leather is about 2x the labor.)
My Kickstarter goal was $17,000. Which succeeded. After deducting the fees paid to Kickstarter, and the costs of the different “rewards/premiums” for the backers, I wound up with about $12,000. Which, truthfully, isn’t a bad advance for a relatively unknown author.
It took me seven years of writing work to finish St Cybi’s Well, rather than the one or two years I originally expected. That was both embarrassing and stressful, since I made promises to people I didn’t fulfill. But it’s over, and everyone seems happy with the end product, so let’s just talk about the amount of labor that went into it. I’d conservatively guesstimate that I have something on the order of 2,000 hours of labor in writing, rewriting, editing, and then composing (the last is mostly thanks to my Good Lady Wife) the book. That *might* be as much as twice as long as it took me to do the same with Communion of Dreams, though spread out over a longer period of time. So, do the math, and I earned about $6 per hour.
That’s just the Kickstarter, of course. Now that the book is done, I’ll continue to earn money on purchases of the downloads, printed paperbacks, and special order hand-bound copies. How much is hard to say. I have had about 40,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams, though a big chunk of those are free downloads. Still, with Amazon’s system, 2/3 of every sale goes to the author (as opposed to like 5-7% for conventional royalties with a publisher), and that adds up. To date, I’ve only had about a thousand downloads of St Cybi’s Well, and most of those have been free downloads. Which has been a little disappointing, but we’ll see how things go over time.
As for the printed paperback copies, there I earn a bit more from Amazon than I would for the downloads, but not a lot. And they don’t amount to very many sales. The signed copies I sell directly do a little better still, but again, that’s just a handful of books per year.
As for the hand–bound books, there I do make a lot more, about $150 per copy. But my conservation labor is billed at $200 per hour, so at 1.5 hours of labor, I’m making half of what I would professionally. The return on the leather bound copies is even worse.
So, why do it? Why even offer those books on the websites?
Because I enjoy it. I enjoy knowing that the books that I create will be enjoyed, perhaps cherished. Read, and passed down to children and grandchildren. Like most artists, I’m willing to trade some financial reward for that satisfaction, and I can afford to do so. Maybe it shouldn’t be the case, and it wouldn’t be the case ideally, but we do what we can under the circumstances.
Anyway, my books will be available for free download tomorrow (the First of the month, as always). Give ’em a try. If you like ’em, you’re always welcome to either purchase a download or one of the physical copies later, if you can afford to do so. But don’t feel guilty if you can’t; as noted I can afford to give them away, and take joy in knowing people read them.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Pandemic, Plague, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, book conservation, bookbinding, Communion of Dreams, Covid 19, Covid-19, Kickstarter, Koob, Legacy Bookbindery, life, pandemic, St. Cybi's Well, writing
As I noted a couple of months ago, I found a printer to produce the pages for a hand-bound copy of St Cybi’s Well. This is a photo-essay of the process of turning those pages into finished books. This is not intended to be actual instruction on how to bind books.
If you would like your own hand-bound copy of St Cybi’s Well or Communion of Dreams, click the links. Each edition is limited to just 53 numbered copies, plus two Artist’s/Author’s proof copies. At either link you can also order one of the remaining copies of the Amazing Koob, as well as signed paperback copies. And of course, you can always download the books from Amazon (remember, they’re free on the first of each month).
That completes the next-to-last phases of my Kickstarter. The final phase will be the design and completion of the leather bindings.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Artificial Intelligence, Brave New World, Connections, Emergency, Expert systems, Feedback, Google, Humor, Kindle, Marketing, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: A.I., Alexa, Amazon, Andi, Communion of Dreams, coronavirus, Covid 19, epidemic, Google, News, pandemic, predictions, reviews, Seth, Siri, St. Cybi's Well, technology, Travis M. Andrews, Washington Post, writing
In Communion of Dreams, I have “experts” who are A.I. assistants. As I describe them in that book when I introduce one as the character ‘Seth’:
His expert was one of the best, one of only a few hundred based on the new semifluid CPU technology that surpassed the best thin-film computers made by the Israelis. But it was a quirky technology, just a few years old, subject to problems that conventional computers didn’t have, and still not entirely understood. Even less settled was whether experts based on this technology could finally be considered to be true AI. The superconducting gel that was the basis of the semifluid CPU was more alive than not, and the computer was largely self-determining once the projected energy matrix surrounding the gel was initiated by another computer. Building on the initial subsistence program, the computer would learn how to refine and control the matrix to improve its own ‘thinking’. The thin-film computers had long since passed the Turing test, and these semifluid systems seemed to be almost human. But did that constitute sentience? Jon considered it to be a moot point, of interest only to philosophers and ethicists.
In the world of 2052, when Communion is set, these “experts” are ubiquitous and extremely helpful. Seth is an “S-series”, the latest tech, and all S-series models have names which start with S. I figured that naming convention would be a nice way to track the development of such expert-systems technology, and in the course of the book you see earlier models which have appropriate names.
So when the time came to write St Cybi’s Well, I figured that I would introduce the first such model, named Andi. Here’s the first bit of dialog with Andi:
“Hi, I’m Andi, your assistant application. How can I help you?”
“Andi, check local restaurant reviews for Conwy and find the best ranked Fish & Chips place.”
“You’re not in Conwy. You’re in Holywell. Would you rather that I check restaurants where you are?”
“No, I’m not hungry yet. But I will be when I get to Conwy.”
“Very good. Shall I read off the names?”
“Not now. It can wait until I am closer.”
“Very good. Shall I track your movement and alert you?”
“No.”
“Very good. May I help you with something else?”
“Not right now.” Darnell shut off the app, then the phone, and dropped it back into his pocket. The walk back to his car was uneventful.
Now, I wrote this bit almost eight years ago, long before “Siri” or “Alexa” were announced. But it was predictable that such technology would soon be introduced, and I was amused as all get-out when Amazon decided to name their first assistant as “Alexa”.
Anyway, I also figured that since the technology would be new, and unsophisticated, that Andi would be slightly annoying to use. Because it would default to repetitions of scripts, be easy to confuse, et cetera, similar to encountering a ‘bot on a phone call. And you can judge for yourself, but I think I succeeded in the book — the readers of early chapters thought so, and commented on it.
So this article in the morning Washington Post made me chuckle:
Heh. Nailed another prediction.
* * *
It’s the first of the month. That means that both novels and our care-giving memoir are available for free download, as they are the first of each month. If you haven’t already, please help yourself and tell your friends.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Emergency, Faith healing, Feedback, Flu, Government, Health, Kindle, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: coronavirus, Covid 19, cytokine storm, emergency, epidemic, fire-flu, flu, influenza, Llandudno, News, pandemic, reviews, Spanish flu, St Melangell Centre, St. Cybi's Well, Wales, writing
I mentioned the other day that many of the early reviews of St Cybi’s Well talk about how eerily prescient the book seems now.
Well, judge for yourself. This is an excerpt from the book (Chapter 14: Llangelynnin) when news of the pandemic is just really getting started. The main characters are discussing it, and their plans to collect medical supplies since the St Melangell Centre is a designated rural care center. I first wrote this portion of the book about two years ago, did major revisions last fall.
“The government here is asking people to just stay home if they have any indications of illness. They’ve implemented a week-long ‘bank holiday’, so people don’t go in to work or school, and declared that only essential government employees and emergency workers are to report in. All the bus and train lines have been shut down. They’re even talking about closing all the restaurants and pubs. We’ll probably hear more about that later today. And there have been more anti-immigrant riots in London and some other places. And not just the so-called ‘Tommys’.”
“People are frightened.”
“Yeah, no surprise.” Darnell nodded at the stereo again. “There was also some science reporting about VCS itself. Looks like it is caused by a flu strain which is similar to the 1918 virus, the Spanish Flu, but one which is even more virulent.”
Megan paused, her hands lowered. The towel hung limply by her side. “Didn’t that kill millions, world-wide?”
“Yeah, something like fifty million.”
“And this looks to be worse?”
“Yeah,” Darnell repeated. “This seems to spread just as easily, but kills faster. Well, kills healthy adults faster – that cytokine storm thing, which is basically the immune system going crazy, creating high fever and complete exhaustion, leading to the inability to get enough oxygen and general system collapse. Victims often develop cyanosis – a blueish tint to the skin, particularly on the face and hands. Anyone who is very young, or old, or otherwise has a compromised immune system, can still get the flu, but don’t generally have the VCS reaction. But there’s a good chance that they’ll develop pneumonia which can kill them in a week or so without proper treatment.”
“But there are treatments for pneumonia.”
“There are. And even some things that can be done for someone with Cytokine Syndrome, if you get to them soon enough. Or anti-virals, like Theraflu.” He sighed. “But there’s not nearly enough of those stockpiled. And how well do you think the health system here or anywhere will be able to handle such a fast-moving epidemic, particularly if health workers are among the most vulnerable group because of massive exposure? Do you remember how devastating hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola have been in isolated areas, because health workers are often among the first victims of the disease? And those require direct contact with bodily fluids . . . this flu is airborne.”
There was a wild look in her eyes, and for a moment Darnell thought he even saw fear. Then Megan closed her eyes, clasped the small crucifix necklace she wore, and muttered what he assumed to be a prayer. When she opened her eyes again, the wildness was gone, replaced with a cold determination. “We already have basic personal protection gear – surgical masks, gloves, even disposable gowns – and it sounds like we should wear them when we go to Llandudno. I’ll get them and meet you downstairs when you’re done with your shower.”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, Emergency, Flu, General Musings, Humor, Kindle, Marketing, Pandemic, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, Uncategorized, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: coronavirus, Covid 19, Donald Trump, dystopia, fire-flu, Lathe of Heaven, pandemic, St. Cybi's Well, theocracy, Ursula K. Le Guin, writing
So, since I haven’t been blogging here much in the last couple of years, I haven’t said anything about just how surreal it was working to finish my novel about a global pandemic … while an actual global pandemic was unfolding around us.
Yeah. Seriously. Real Lathe of Heaven stuff, making me wonder about just how much my envisioning a given reality was bleeding into this reality.
To a certain extent this had been an ongoing problem with writing St Cybi’s Well, as I had mentioned previously. I had to keep going back and making the ‘dystopia’ of SCW worse as our own world took a turn for the worse with the election of Trump, elements of Christian fascism seemed to be in ascendancy, et cetera.
But this year, after I had gotten a solid re-start on finishing St Cybi’s Well, watching the Covid-19 virus start to spread, was just … bizarre. And as you’ll see when you read the book, how the virus spread and the efforts that various governments tried to curtail it was pretty much exactly as what happened in real life. Fortunately, of course, C-19 hasn’t proven to be nearly as deadly as the Fire-Flu.
Well, at least not yet.
< shiver >
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Emergency, Faith healing, Feedback, Flu, Health, Kindle, Marketing, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Preparedness, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Uncategorized, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: coronavirus, Covid 19, News, reviews, St. Cybi's Well, writing
So, almost two months ago I ‘officially’ launched the publication of St Cybi’s Well.
No, I didn’t forget to mention it here. Since I have allowed this blog to go quiet, I didn’t see it as an important venue to announce it, and figured that it would make a little more sense to just let the book exist in the wild for a little while, then write about the reactions to it.
Currently, there are 14 reviews on Amazon, with an overall rating of 4.9 stars. Some are from friends. Some are from acquaintances. Some are from complete strangers. Among the reviews I have my favorites, and not necessarily ones which say good things. At this point, after struggling with the book for so long, I have very mixed feelings about it.
But my strongest emotion about the book, and something that keeps coming up in the reviews of it, is just how surreal it is to have finished the book during the middle of a real pandemic, and having our reality seeming to follow the path I had laid out in the book. Here are some excerpts as examples of what I mean.
The first review, by someone who backed my Kickstarter and had an advance copy of St Cybi’s:
With some recent political developments and COVID-19, I found this unsettlingly realistic.
That he wrote this well before our current pandemic was even a thing is a testament to his spooky prescience …
And:
The images are vivid and remain. No one took epidemic plagues too seriously anymore, Polio was long ago. But since Covid and Ebola, there is a realization that the 4 Horsemen of the Apocolypse are alive and kicking.
And:
What I found most compelling is the almost prescient storyline of the Fire Flu and its attendant effects on society. I can’t imagine a more difficult proposition than trying to finish your novel about an apocalyptic disease while having to do so with one currently taking over the news. There are some eerie moments in the book where it feels as though it’s a ‘ripped from the headlines’ story.
And:
Set in 2012, the overlap with current events in 2020 is uncanny.
And:
… the story is kind of terrifying considering its striking similarity to current events …
Of course, I’m not prescient. I had no real idea that the coronavirus pandemic was coming, though I had long known that we were about due for another pandemic and were likely unprepared for it. And what I put into the book about how the FireFlu virus spread, and how people reacted to it, was just based on history. What we’re seeing now … all the good and bad of it … was entirely predictable, because it is the sort of reaction that human societies have always had to pandemics.
Which, of course, doesn’t give me any comfort. As is said in one of the reviews:
… I ended up feeling that the story is part of what science fiction does best – telling you a tale that just *might* be real.
Stay safe. Stay healthy. Download my book, or order a paper copy. If money is a little tight, wait until the first of the month, and download it for free. And please, if you do read it, leave a review.
Thanks.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 