De Bello Lemures Featured At TheIndieSpotlight.com

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The gracious folks over at The Indie Spotlight were kind enough to feature De Bello Lemures today.

I'd like to thank Ed Patterson and the other folks in charge over there.

Their site is a great resource for keeping track of the Indie book scene, particularly on the Kindle. [The iPad may get there one day, but right now the Kindle is still pretty much "where it's at" in terms of having a vibrant Indie book community.]

Check it out!

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They're Dead, Jim.

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I'm doing my best to wedge the story told in The Last Days of Jericho into both the available archaeological evidence and into the Biblical account.

This required me to be something of a schizophrenic, because I don't accept the accuracy of the Biblical account, and I think that Kenyon makes a compelling case that Jericho wasn't even occupied any more during the late Bronze Age - but I wanted to tell a story that required me to pretend that I didn't believe this. I had to pretend to accept Wood's dates, which are probably wrong, and the account in Judges and Joshua, which are almost certainly wrong. I ended up forging a messy compromise where I said, "OK, let's say that there was an independent city-state at Jericho, and there was an invasion as described in the Old Testament - but let's do the best we can to place those events in the context of as accurate a depiction of Late Bronze Age Canaan as the available research permits."

On the bright side, taking the real history of the Late Bronze Age seriously allowed me to enhance the Biblical account in ways that were, well, a whole lot of fun. For example, I am indebted to Richard Gabriel's excellent The Military History of Ancient Israel for his account of the chariot tactics employed by the Canaanites. Gabriel persuasively argues that a Canaanite force equipped with chariots, facing an enemy with no chariots on open and flat ground, would have almost certainly attempted to employ a mobile defense based on hit and run tactics; they would only have relied on siege defenses as a last resort. This means that the Biblical account, which leaps directly from Joshua's use of spies against Jericho to an account of the seven-day siege and its associated miracle, cannot be complete. In such circumstances, the Canaanites would have at least attempted to contest the Hebrews' crossing of the Jordan, and would have similarly attempted to engage them on the plain.

Including an engagement between the Jordan and Jericho was a great self-indulgence on my part - since I got to put on my SM Stirling costume - but I think most readers will get a big kick out of this "Military Horror" section. And as fans of Steven Spielberg will know in advance, a military situation where two armies meet and one of them is carrying the Ark of the Covenant can mean only one thing: face-melting. Win!

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Writing About Ancient Urban Environments

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One interesting thing about writing historical fiction is the challenges you face in describing urban areas.

In the course of working on The Last Days of Jericho, I have discovered that those challenges are magnified when trying to describe an urban area with a pre-monetary economic system.

When writing a scene set in, say, Rome during the Republican era, you can entertain the reader by focusing on the things about Republican Rome that are familiar. You can stress the similarity to modern experience. John Maddox Roberts has a neat little trick he employs a couple of times in his SPQR series: the narrator will walk down the street and stop at a sidewalk vendor to buy a sausage on a roll. The reader reads this and thinks, "A hot dog cart! He just stopped at a hot dog cart!" It's a neat little point of reference that stresses the ways in which some prosaic activities in that urban environment are very similar to the reader's own experience.

The problem I encountered while working on The Last Days of Jericho is that the economy of Bronze Age Canaan was pre-monetary. Money had not yet been invented as a medium of exchange. How do you describe an urban area where no one is using money? When your narrator walks through it, what does he see? It doesn't sound that tough until you sit down and actually try to do it.

The preliminary research I did revealed that the scholarly consensus is that the Canaanite cities had what are known as Redistributive Economies on a model similar to that of Ancient Egypt. All products effectively belonged to the king or the city and would be collected and stored centrally, and then distributed by the primitive state apparatus to the population. Readers familiar with the Old Testament story of Joseph and his sojourn in Egypt can see traces of this economic system in the tale of Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams. Joseph sees the years of famine coming, and the Pharaoh increases the amount held back in storage as a result; he is then able to distribute the stored-up produce when the famine arrives.

In terms of coming up with a way to work this economic system into a novel, the first obvious modern equivalent would be the Soviet system. The obvious imagery would be to depict the Canaanites as the Bronze Age equivalent of Russian shoppers standing in long queues to receive their ration of borscht. But the problem is that Canaanite society was class-based - their Redistributive Economy was not a communist economy, despite its centralization. There was a professional warrior class, a merchant class, a class of craftsmen, etc. - all of whom appear from the archaeological and limited literary evidence to have been on different economic levels. So I needed a way to combine the diversity of Canaanite society with its economic centralization. I think I found a good way to do that - and I hope that readers will like my solution.

What did I do? You'll have to read the book when it comes out to see the answer to that question.

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Cover Concepts for The Last Days of Jericho

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Just playing around with cover concepts right now. The writing is a little ahead of schedule, so I'm thinking about promotion today.

Let me know which one you prefer!

Between the two, I think that I personally like the second one better. But the first one's basic image is available on a Creative Commons basis, and the second one's basic image would have to be licensed. So I'm going back and forth.

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De Bello Lemures Reaches 500 Sales

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I had a funny feeling while I was checking out my Kindle sales total for March - I think my subconscious was doing some math on its own again.

So I decided to calculate the sales total across both the Kindle and paperback versions since De Bello Lemures was released on 10/24/2009.

I was pleased to see that as of this afternoon, we have reached the 500 total sales mark.

I'll need to pick that pace up a little to meet my first-year goal of 1500 copies for this title. Sales growth has been fairly steady, though, so I still think it's eminently doable.

Thank you to everyone who purchased a copy, either in paperback or for the Kindle. And thank you to everyone who has written an Amazon review, or been kind enough to mention it or me on their blog.

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Last Days of Jericho Back Cover Text

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I've been making decent progress on The Last Days of Jericho recently. I've managed to get into a routine where 1000 words a day is pretty much the norm.

To reward myself, I took a few minutes and indulged in a little "back cover blurb" writing. I hate writing loglines, but I love playing with back cover text. Here's the general concept so far:

"A monster is approaching the city of Yarich.

"It cannot be stopped. It cannot be turned aside.

"It's getting closer every day.

"And the monster is...God Himself."

I need more explanatory text below this, so that it won't appear to be a Left Behind book. But this is what I'm looking at right now.

Comments?

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Yes, You SHOULD Self-Publish - Follow-Up

Shockingly, yesterday's blog post actually generated both readers and responses.

I'd like to address some of those responses here.

Kirstin Morrell was angered by the fact that I quoted her and did not alert her.

I carefully qualified my argument with the phrases "To me" and "That's success as I would define it." Then you decided to throw a little party with my name without even having the courtesy to invite me.

So the question is, then, would you like to have a discussion of this topic, or was this a private party I interrupted, only to find a straw man dressed up to look like me?

First, let me say that since this is a blog no one reads, it would no more occur to me to email Ms. Morrell to let her know that I quoted her than it would occur to me to, say, email Sarah Palin if I blogged about Sarah Palin. I'll try to figure out how to alert her to this post, since it's not my intention to personally offend her.

I'd be happy to talk about the issue of self-publishing with Ms. Morrell or with anyone else, but I'd like to point out that I didn't set up a straw man of her argument for the simple reason that I was not arguing with her. I was disputing a point made by Mr. Sawyer. Ms. Morrell's definition was only tangentially involved. She may have quite a different opinion of self-publishing overall than he does. My post only says, "Mr. Sawyer should not employ this particular definition of 'success' for a self-publishing venture, and here's why." It does not say, "Kirstin Morrell's opinion of self-publishing is wrong."

There were also some Anonymous responses that I would like to address. Two posters referred back to an earlier post I made about lowering the price of the paperback edition of my book to try to increase sales, to try to show that I was, in fact, a failure. And the numbers just don't bare that out, boys, sorry. You're quite right - I am currently only selling about 20 copies a month of the paperback edition of this book. But if you'll check the sales rank of the Kindle edition, you'll see that it's performing much better. I am selling from 100-150 copies of the Kindle edition a month. This means that, between the two editions, I can reasonably expect to sell at least 1500 copies this year.

Anyone who tells you that a first-time novel selling 1500 copies in its first year is a failure does not know what they're talking about. It's that simple. Many, many traditionally-published first novels fail to sell 1500 copies. So if you want me to feel like a failure for selling that many copies, I'm just not going to do so. I can browse the genre lists at Amazon and see where my sales rank stands compared to people published by small presses in my genre - or by not-so-small presses in my genre - and I know who's outselling me and whom I'm outselling. So tell me, if I sell 1500 copies of my book this year using Amazon's tools, and would have sold 0 copies by pursuing traditional publishing, by what crack-brained ratiocination can the decision to self-publish possibly have been the wrong one?

If the Nook or the Sony Reader supported footnotes, I'd probably do even better. But they don't, so I can't sell at B&N or in the other ebook stores, or for the upcoming iBooks store; Amazon is it for me right now. But that won't happen to my next book, so I hope to do even better next time.

It's not a lot of money. It just pays my cable and internet bill. But the advance a first-time novelist would receive wouldn't do much more. It might even do less.

I'd also like to respond to one last comment of Ms. Morrell's. She was obviously a little annoyed when she wrote her post, and decided to get a little snide. I'm not taking it personally, though, because it gives me the opportunity to make another point that I think is important:

And of course your mother will buy your book. That doesn't make success.

No, my mother won't buy my book. Thomas Brookside is a pseudonym. My family has no idea that the book even exists. I realize that the stereotype about self-published authors is that all their sales come from their mom, but that's just not true in my case.

So I'd like to amend my earlier advice telling everyone to self-publish:

My full advice is to self-publish, using only CreateSpace and free ebook tools, and do so under a pen name. The contempt that the traditional publishing world has for independent authors flows from two sources: the notion that you're going to print a lot of books using PublishAmerica or some scam outfit and then nag your family members to buy them, and the notion that the reason you're publishing is so you can show up at cocktail parties and crow, "I'm Joe Blow, published writer." You can take the satisfaction of that contempt away by publishing under a pseudonym, and then leaving your family alone and never, ever, ever being that guy at a party.

Yes, You SHOULD Self-Publish

In a recent blog post, author Robert Sawyer advises everyone not to self-publish, because he says it's impossible to be successful at it.

He then cross-posts Kirstin Morrell's definition of success:

Now, let's define success. To me, it would be someone who makes a full-time living from writing SF novels, novellas, and/or short stories, without living below the poverty line. That's success as I would define it. And I don't know one SF author who self-publishes who would meet my criteria for success.

I really don't see how this can possibly be an appropriate definition, for two reasons.

First, according to this definition every author everywhere who has a day job is a failure. Poof! There went basically the entire literary fiction genre. Every last one of those people has a day job. Failures all?

Second, the standard of comparison being employed is absurd. To judge whether or not a self-publishing venture is a success, all you have to do is compare your outcome to your likely outcome if you had continued to pursue traditional publishing. Since the overwhelming majority - maybe 99.99% - of people who pursue traditional publishing will never get an agent, never get published, and never sell a single book, any of those people who pursue self-publishing and sell even one copy or net even one dollar made the right decision.

When someone asks, "Should I self-publish?" it's really silly to answer them, "No, because if you self-publish, you won't be as successful as Dean Koontz." The only method of analysis that makes any sense whatsoever is to say, "Ask yourself if you will sell more books, get more readers, and make more money by self-publishing or by traditional publishing."

I would tell everyone considering writing to self-publish. If you don't buy scratch tickets, self-publish. If you don't expect to win the Lotto, self-publish. If you pursue traditional publishing, the odds are overwhelming that you will never sell one single book. If you self-publish using CreateSpace and the Amazon Kindle Store, you at least have a chance to make some sales and get some readers. For every 1000 of you out there who decide you want to write query letters and keep your fingers crossed for a traditional publisher instead, 999 of you will utterly fail and never sell a single book to anyone.

Music in Bronze Age Canaan

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Just a quick update on my work in progress, since I haven't blogged about it in a while:

In the course of doing research on Middle and Late Bronze Age Canaan, I came across Joachim Braun's excellent Music in Ancient Israel / Palestine: Archaeological, Written, and Comparative Sources.

As it turns out, Canaan during the Bronze Age was quite musically advanced. This is creditable to its intermediary position between the main centers of civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Aegean. [You can write that same sentence about quite a few elements of Canaan's development at this time.] As a result, although I had originally decided to set this novel in Bronze Age Jerusalem, I have decided to shift it to Jericho. If you take Braun's work together with the Old Testament account of the fall of Jericho, the imagery basically writes itself.

Writing material with historical elements is to some extent a big cheat. The research will often just tell you what to write, and your creativity [such as it is] can take the day off. But what the hell, I'm not proud.

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Observations from Sci-Fi Films

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In WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, at the facility where they are building the spaceship to try to escape from Earth before the other planet hits, written on the wall is the motto "Waste anything, but not Time."

This makes a nice bookend to ON THE BEACH, where there is a banner hanging in the city square that reads, "There Is Still Time". Even when there no longer is.

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Zombies and Social Upheaval

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Before the holiday, over at A World on Fire Brian blogged about the subject of the relationship of the zombie genre to periods of social dislocation in the United States. He approvingly linked to an older article at IO9.com that charted a correlation between the production of movies with a theme related to the living dead and periods of war and social upheaval. Check out each link for more of each of their respective takes.

Now that all the Turkey Day festivities are out of the way, I'd like to add a few words to what Brian had to say about this.

I think that the correlation that IO9.com found definitely exists - but only for a subsection of the genre. Periods of social upheaval contribute to the popularity of what you could call the zombie action genre, but do not necessarily contribute to the popularity of the zombie horror genre.

I think that to the extent the zombie genre is a subset of the horror genre, it would be hard to find a legitimate correlation. The production of horror films, and fashions within the production of horror films, is so deeply bound up with issues of film financing, film production codes, and the preferences of individual performers and directors that it would be hard to say, "These films were made because of the Viet Nam war," or "That set of films was the result of McCarthyism."

But not all zombie films [or stories in other media, which tend to track along with the fashions in film] can really be said to be part of the horror genre. Many of them - perhaps the majority now - are actually science-fiction action films or stories. Certainly films like 28 Days Later or Zach Snyder's version of Dawn of the Dead pretty clearly belong to the tradition of the science fiction disaster film more than they "fit" into horror. They're much more like Them or Day of the Triffids than they are like The Exorcist. I would argue that the appeal of these zombie action stories basically mirrors the appeal of the science fiction disaster film.

In her essay "The Imagination of Disaster", Susan Sontag outlined her view of the basic appeal of the science fiction disaster tale, and although I don't generally care for Sontag there's a lot in this particular essay to agree with. [Sorry, no link; I don't believe it's available online.]

The lure of such generalized disaster as a fantasy is that it releases one from normal obligations. The trump card of the end-of-the-world movies - like The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962) - is that great scene with New York or London Or Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated. Or, as in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1957), the entire movie can be devoted to the fantasy of occupying the deserted metropolis and starting all over again, a world Robinson Crusoe...Another kind of satisfaction these films supply is extreme moral simplification - that is to say, a morally acceptable fantasy where one can give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings. In this respect, science fiction films partly overlap with horror films. This is the undeniable pleasure we derive from looking at freaks, beings excluded from the category of the human. The sense of superiority over the freak conjoined in varying proportions with the titillation of fear and aversion makes it possible for moral scruples to be lifted, for cruelty to be enjoyed.

In this respect, the zombie action story is like Sontag's model of a science fiction disaster film on steroids, with the amp turned up to eleven. How much of the appeal lies in the more or less openly conceded idea that fighting off a a zombie apocalypse would be fun? Many popular zombie-themed sites - like Zombie Squad or the Zombie Research Society - make no bones about the fact that they are primarily interested in what you could call the survival problem, which is basically the Robinson Crusoe fantasy in a modern context. Basically the subconscious psychological appeal Sontag claimed existed in some types of end-of-the-world sci-fi has been consciously brought out into the open in the zombie genre; we now openly admit that there is something cathartic and almost attractive about the idea that on the day after the zombie apocalypse, none of us will have to go to work, and everything in the malls and the gun stores will be free for the taking, and anyone who has become a zombie can be blown away at will. I don't think it's an accident that one of the largest zombie groups at Facebook is called "The Hardest Part of a Zombie Apocalypse Will Be Pretending I'm Not Excited".

To tie this in to what Brian and the IO9 folks were saying, if this is in fact the appeal of the zombie action story, then it makes sense that these types of stories would be more popular during periods when the population was frustrated or under great stress. When things are going well, fewer people are interested in the catharsis of a release from everyday obligations. When things are going poorly, the reverse will be true.

Of course, I need to cover this entire post with a great big Not That There's Anything Wrong With That. A lot of these "pop psychology" analyses can sound like they're critical of fans of the genre. Certainly Sontag intended to be critical, and patronizing. Not me, though. I've got my own bug-out plan and I own all these films and I sat down and chose to write my own zombie story - so all of these things apply to me, too. But it's OK. I've learned how to own it.

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De Bello Lemures Featured at A World On Fire

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A World On Fire is a zombie-themed horror blog that is updated with content very frequently and includes a lot of interactivity.

I'd recommend following this blog on Facebook, as well as browsing it directly. The Facebook fan community is very active and there's a lot of great commentary there.

They were kind enough to run a little feature on De Bello Lemures here.

I have to admit that I liked the enthusiasm of the guy who runs A World on Fire and his little marketing pitch for the book. I may have to steal all or part of it.

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De Bello Lemures Featured at ZombieCommand.com

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The astute zombie fans over at ZombieCommand.com were kind enough to post a brief feature about De Bello Lemures this week.

Check it out!

I have to extend sincere thanks to Barry and all the folks over at ZombieCommand.com. I definitely noticed a spike in Kindle sales right after their feature ran. And it was really exciting to see my work mentioned on a key site within the genre community.

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Paperback Version Temporarily Down

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I have had some feedback about the POD paperback version that matches my own initial estimate of my proof: the front cover is [was] awkwardly centered, and the one or two typos that I did not catch in the proof process really stand out.

So I decided to bite the bullet and revise the files that CreateSpace and Amazon use to produce the POD version.

I've uploaded corrections that are now being processed. The new version should be back up for sale soon.

I hated to take it down, but now at least the paperback version and the Kindle version will match.

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De Bello Lemures Now Just $0.99 for the Kindle

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When I made the edits described in my earlier post below, I took the opportunity to change the Kindle price at the same time.

New purchasers of Kindle copies will now get the "new iteration" of the book, and will get it for only $0.99.

Basically I've discovered that my Amazon sales rank in the Kindle store dramatically fluctuates as a result of minor changes in the number of copies sold per day. The sales rank crests and ebbs like the tide as individual copies are sold, and as time passes between sales. I'm lowering the price to try to push myself higher during the "crests". If you can get on and stay on some of the bestseller pages it helps product visibility a lot.

With the "Kindle for the PC" app coming out this month, at some point there will be a wave of new users looking for content, and I want to be highly visible when that happens.

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De Bello Lemures Free Sample Now Available

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Currently Kindle customers can preview De Bello Lemures for free using the Kindle Preview feature. But DTB paperback customers have been out of luck, until Amazon catches up on their "Look Inside!" backlog.

I am therefore going to make available a preview of the first 38 pages via Google Docs. In addition to the link in this post, I will be adding a permanent link on the left hand side of the home page.

Enjoy!

De Bello Lemures, or the Roman War Against the Zombies of Armorica

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Kindle and Version Control

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One of the revolutionary things about publishing for the Kindle is that it is truly zero cost. Authors and publishers upload the text of books to be published as .html files, and Amazon does the rest.

As a result, correcting or updating the text of a Kindle book is as easy as editing an .html file and negotiating an upload window in your browser. There are no new books to print or old copies containing errata to destroy.

This became relevant to me because, as I mentioned in a post below, a reviewer on Amazon asked a pointed question about the title of De Bello Lemures that was not addressed in the text. As he no doubt noted, the title itself is not grammatically correct Latin: Lemures, as a plural noun, should not be used to modify Bello. The fun "noun adjunct" stuff you can do in English is not appropriate in Latin usage.

The truth is that I chose the title I did because I believed that a measurably higher number of people would be able to decipher De Bello Lemures as "Regarding the War of the Ghosts" than would have found a more grammatically appropriate title accessible. Of course, I should have considered that the very readers most able to do that would also be the readers most likely to note an error in Latin grammar. At one point in an early draft, the Foreword included text justifying my title by claiming that it was an addition by a medieval copyist. After the Carolingian Renaissance dried up and blew away, Latin usage even by the most literate churchmen became progressively more abominable as conditions across Europe worsened, so this explanation of my preferred title was certainly plausible, and fit nicely into the entire "palimpsest" narrative. Unfortunately, I cut this explanatory material from the Foreword, along with other material, in order to scale the Foreword down and keep it proportinate to the main body of the text...and naturally the very first reviewer called me out on it.

But thanks to the Kindle, I can correct this omission. I have added the explanation back into the Foreword as a brief footnote. Since I was changing the text anyway, I took the opportunity to correct a couple of other minor items in the text as well. And POOF! I was able to upload these changes into the Amazon system, where they will go live for new downloads in a day or two. With no cost but my [minor] effort.

One can envision publishing for the Kindle eventually becoming highly iterative in nature, as authors interact with readers and make textual changes based on their input. And that's very exciting to think about.

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Upcoming Horror Project

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One of the things that drew me to the zombie genre was its central place in the universe of apocalyptic fiction. I've always been interested in stories about how systems and societies fall apart. This may be related to my interest in history, which is often presented to the reader as a series of stories about how individual societies rise and then fall; apocalyptic fiction telescopes that process and personalizes it, and often applies it to our own society in interesting and thought-provoking ways. I've always loved the first twenty minutes of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, because it gives us a series of moments where it's clear that society's defenders - the police, the journalists, the government scientist, the helicopter pilot - realize that the situation is deteriorating from a mere emergency to the End of the World, and then shows us how that End actually comes when those defenders stop defending and proceed on the basis of "every man for himself". Society collapses with the speed of a landslide once a few key thresholds are passed. I've also always loved the last fifteen minutes of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, because I'm fascinated by the human beings in the central facility at Ape Control, who have to realize that they've lost the battle and have a ringside seat as humanity goes down for the count. I always wondered, "What would it be like to be in that room? How would that feel?" That bunker experience, to me, has elements of pure horror that can't be explored by other traditional horror tropes.

That's why it's a little funny to me that I've written a zombie novel - that doesn't explore either of those concepts at all. The "traditional" zombie story provides the perfect opportunity to tell an apocalyptic tale, and it also provides the perfect opportunity to explore the horror possibilities of the "last stand". But the zombie story I chose to tell doesn't do either of those, because it's much more of a Night of the Living Dead story than a Dawn story. And that leaves me with some unfinished business.

I'm going to try to finish that business by telling a new horror story, one that again I'm going to try to tell in an unconventional way. I've started an untitled project that will tell the story of the last days of Philistine Jerusalem, leading up to the city's sack and the extermination of the inhabitants, as described in the biblical Book of Judges and Deuteronomy. I have made the creative decision as well to give the "invaders" the supernatural advantage that the Bible stories describe. Although, as was the case with De Bello Lemures, this makes it possible to think of the story as belonging to the genre of historical fiction, I'm going to approach the story as if it were horror: What would it feel like to face the advance of an implacable enemy, bent on your annihiliation and the destruction of everything and everyone you know and love, if that enemy had been chosen by God to be your destroyer? If that enemy was fighting you with the support of the divine? I think that will explore the concepts I talked about above quite well, if I can properly execute what I'm trying to do. We'll see, I guess.

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De Bello Lemures Receives 5-Star Amazon Customer Review

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When a new title is published and appears for sale on Amazon, naturally there are no customer reviews associated with that title. So there's a period of time that goes by when the title has no stars.

I obsessively visit the title's product page to keep track of its Amazon sales rank, and in the course of one of those visits I noticed that stars were suddenly associated with the title. That's a really nice "Woot!" moment - you're momentarily confused, and then you blaze around the page looking for the review section.

It's a favorable review, and I found it gratifying for that reason, but also because of the reasons this Kindle reader gives for his positive review. He "got" what I was trying to do with this title, and that made me feel like maybe I had accomplished what I set out to do. I'm going to post the review in almost its entirety [the reader asks a question in his review which I'll clip, and answer in a subsequent post]:

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A very clever novella with some real creepiness, October 31, 2009
By John P. (Kennett Square, PA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
I heard about this clever book from someone on a discussion board. The framing as a translation of a Roman manuscript is brilliantly done -- from the "cover" to the translator's introduction to the footnotes. The way it allows your imagination to work on what happened in AD 185 before you get to the actual manuscript reminded me of the slow build-up of an H. Rider Haggard novel. The story itself lives up to the frame. It has good suspense and pacing, with real chills. Overall, the author succeeds at the difficult task of writing a horror story that is both entertaining for modern readers and believable (or not wholly unbelievable) as an ancient work. On a few occasions, the spell was briefly broken when the dialogue became too modern. But those moments are rare.

Well done! I'm interested in seeing more work from this author.

That's really, really nice to read, as an author. The "frame" was a critical element of the story's conception, and I was not sure that readers would appreciate it. I was actually concerned that many readers would find fault with it and think that it detracted from the narrative. For this reader at least that was not the case.

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Modest Kindle Sales Success

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Kindle sales have been steady since this book's release. The book rose into the top 5000 items at the Kindle store at Amazon, and made it into the top 25 or top 100 in several of the book's Kindle subcategories or Amazon book subcategories. Seeing the book listed next to titles from "name" science fiction, fantasy, horror, and "zombie" authors was extremely gratifying.

One observation I have to make about the Kindle store is its price sensitivity. A lower price definitely equals higher sales through this channel. I've tried it at $9.95, $4.95 and $1.99, and the higher sales rate at $1.99 evens out the lower royalty per sale, and gets the book into more hands, and higher in the Amazon sales ranks. A high sales rank can turn into even more sales, since customers can browse to your title through the genre or category or subcategory, so this is a great trade-off, as far as I am concerned.

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