Casperian Books Blog

With the economy in the toilet and sales never quite recovering from the summer slump, we’re including every one of our titles in a Black Friday sale! Every book is $10 only while supplies last!

Sybil Baker read her short story “Dog House,” forthcoming in And Now for a Story… at the Meacham Writers’ Workshop last week. A free iTunes download/podcast is available if you go to this page and click on the “Subscribe to iTunes” link in the blue box near the bottom of the page.

We are pleased to announce the release of Rock Dance by Jack Ballard Jr.

In a small Colorado town, Dusty Palmberg spends his days rock climbing and volunteering with the local search-and-rescue organization.

When an airplane goes down in the backcountry, SAR volunteers do what they’ve done hundreds of times before: they head out into the wilderness to save the victims. But the pilot’s affiliation with the CIA means that what should have been a simple extraction turns into a disastrous multi-agency recovery operation in the middle of the season’s first real snowstorm, and the rescuers themselves require rescuing.

When the airplane is buried by an avalanche, something in the pilot’s luggage the CIA is desperate to get back is lost as well, and FBI agent Kelly Frey is ordered to retrieve the mysterious item. But to do that, he needs the help of somebody who really knows the backcountry, and before long, Dusty finds himself back in the wilderness.

You can read the first chapter here.

Curtis Smith has a bunch of readings scheduled in various Pennsylvania locations over the next couple of weeks:

• October 18th: speaking and reading at Push to Publish Conference, Rosemont College

• October 23rd: speaking and reading at Middletown Arts Collective, Middletown, PA 6:30-8:00 p.m.
• October 26th: reading and signing at MJ’s Coffeehouse at the Allen Theater in Annville, PA 5:00 p.m.
• November 8th: signing at Borders in Harrisburg, PA, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
• December 6th: signing at Borders in Lancaster, PA, 3:00-5:00 p.m.

Check it out if you’re in the vicinity!

Paul Elwork has a new story up at SmokeLong Quarterly called How Anything Got Done.

Jack Ballard, whose novel Rock Dance is coming out later this month, is a musician as well. Some of his music can be found here.

There is a very nice review of Sound + Noise in Gud Magazine.

It’s the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, and the Guardian has up a little quiz to test your knowledge concerning book censorship. The ALA has also updated its challenged books list with 2007 records here, which is always an interesting (if horrifying) read.

Of course we don’t believe in banning books. The one single book my mother ever tried to stop me from reading (because it wasn’t age-appropriate), I read anyway, and really didn’t enjoy (because it wasn’t age-appropriate). It didn’t permanently scar me. No book ever has. A lot of books have opened my mind though, and a lot of books have challenged me to think. Today, I am the sum of both my experiences and the books I have read over the last thirty-odd years (and there’s a lot of them).

I personally think that people who try to have books removed from libraries aren’t really afraid that someone will be exposed to what they consider “objectionable” content. They’re really afraid that after someone is exposed to that “objectionable” content, they might think and read more and draw their own conclusions as to what to believe and feel, rather than what they’re told to think and believe and feel about any given subject. That’s the real danger of books after all: they broaden the mind.

We are pleased to announce the release of the third book in the Administration Series, Games & Players by Manna Francis.

Games & Players begins with the novella Game, Set, which gives Toreth an up-close-and-personal introduction to the finer points of socioanalysis.

Socioanalysts can read minds and motives at a glance, predict the future, manipulate the smallest actions of their unwitting puppets, and crush careers with a single word…or so the popular rumors say. Their arrival is dreaded everywhere in the European Administration, even the Investigation and Interrogation Division. Para-investigator Val Toreth, accustomed to being feared himself, is about to discover the truth of the rumors at first hand, when he is assigned as personal liaison to Carnac, the socioanalyst seconded to I&I to root out anti-Administration sentiments among its staff. And to make matters worse, it seems that his admin Sara is smitten with Carnac and Warrick has a history with him. With his closest allies straddling the line of Carnac’s camp, Toreth must rethink the rules of engagement.

In addition to Game, Set, Games & Players contains nine short stories in which virtual-reality corporate genius Warrick and Toreth must face new players in the game, and discover whether their association can survive both the tensions between the unlikely pair and the pressures of life in the near future dystopia of New London.

You can read the first chapter here.

And if you’re just catching up to the Administration Series, we have just the deal for you! This month we’re offering a special sales package that contains all four books we have published featuring major gay characters, including the previous two Administration books, for only $40.00 while supplies last!

A good article: Tips for Promoting Your Own Book.

The first print run of Manna Francis’ Games & Players arrived today. Just sayin’.

Unrelated but still worth checking out: Michael Kimball wrote A. F. Rützy’s Life Story in postcard format here.

There’s a review of Sound + Noise and an accompanying interview with Curtis Smith in the current issue of ShowcasePA!. Click here to download a pdf of the relevant pages.

Paul Elwork has a guest blog about The Tea House up at Skepchick: Critical Thinking at its Finest, so check it out!

Well, the silence over the past few days had a lot to do with getting the spring list into shape, and it’s starting to look pretty good! We’re almost done with copyedits on three of our four spring releases (only task remaining is to check the comments that came/are coming back from the authors) and to move into production with those. The fourth of next spring’s releases went back to the author with a very detailed edit for some more fixing, and should then move into copyedits.

On the schedule for the next couple of weeks is reading four different manuscripts for possible publication in fall 09/spring 10!

In the meantime, I’m sad to report that Tenant B has moved out. Hopefully that won’t actually stop her from reading and commenting on submissions and manuscripts, but it’s still kind of sad not being able to yell across the courtyard, “Oh my God, you’ve got to read this.” We have a new tenant moving in on the 25th, so that should be interesting.

One dedicated reader wrote a very detailed review each of Mind Fuck and Quid Pro Quo, NewPages posted their review of Sound + Noise, and M. J. Rose wrote a ringing endorsement of The Tea House.

We are pleased to announce the release of Curtis Smith’s new novel Sound + Noise.

Sound + Noise tells the story of Jackie and Tom, two ordinary people living parallel lives. When their paths finally intersect, the background hum of their longings, hopes, and disappointments builds into something that neither of them could have anticipated. With deft, musical prose, Smith draws the reader into a heartbreakingly familiar story of family, community, and the accidental connections woven in between.

In Sound + Noise, Curtis Smith applies the classic philosophical question “If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one to hear, does it make a sound?” to the human condition. By turns thoughtful, funny, and bittersweet, Smith’s second novel is a remarkable exploration of the resilience and complexities of the human spirit, and the liberating power of love.

You can read the first chapter here.

There’s an interview with Curtis Smith, author of the soon-to-be-released Sound + Noise up at What to Wear During an Orange Alert.

Unrelatedly, today is my birthday, and since the celebrations for that sort of thing usually entail gifts, we’re running a special, one-day-only promotion: Buy any Casperian Books title through our website today, August 22nd, and we will throw an extra completely free book into the shipping envelope with it!

While from a sales perspective, this time of year is what in German one would call “Saure Gurken Zeit” (lit. pickle time–the black hole during the summer when absolutely nothing is happening), we’re starting to ramp up for fall.

So far, three fall release dates are confirmed and another is pending:
Curtis Smith’s Sound + Noise will be released September 2nd, 2008, followed in October by Manna Francis’ Games & Players, the third book in the Administration Series, and an anthology with stories by many of our authors titled And Now for a Story… in November.

Side note on And Now for A Story: the cover (which doesn’t render nearly as well electronically as it does on the printed page, (hopefully) says the conceptual equivalent of “Once upon a time” in as many different languages as we could fit on there. I can only actually vouch for this being spelled correctly in about 1/4 of them and was relying heavily on Wikipedia and various acquaintances for the rest. Let’s just say that doing a visual match in Arabic turned out to be so difficult, that during a dinner party, I pushed the MacBook into the hands of one of my unsuspecting guests and, said “Please type ‘Kan ma Kan…’ out for me!”

On to author news: William Walsh has a new short story titled Dr. Maroon up at Flatmancrooked, fellow Sacramentan publishers. The first chapter of Curtis Smith’s Sound + Noise has just been published in Straightjackets Magazine, and the first two reviews for the novel are in as well. This one at Small Press Reviews, and this one at The Adirondack Review.

Finally, since we do not have merchandising rights for the cover image of Sound + Noise, we’ve updated the Cafepress Store with Games & Players merchandise.

Without Wax has a very nice review in the Boston Phoenix here, and there’s a feature with an author interview of William Walsh in the Providence Phoenix here.

There’s a new review of Without Wax at Gently Read Literature, and Jeff Vande Zande has written a review of End Credits.

In other news, while I have been sitting on the SO’s couch here in South London, banging away at Casperian Books business and making a serious dent in the to-do list (two books uploaded to the printer’s in the last couple of days, a manuscript half edited, another half read), we decided that this whole transatlantic commuting business is getting kind of old after seven years, so we’re going to get hitched and the SO’s going to move to Sacramento at some point over the next few months–we’ll obviously have to arrange it around release dates :-)

One of the things my Dad told me to blog about when we were happily sitting next to each other on my mother’s couch last weekend, both working on Casperian business on separate laptops, was how net receipts are calculated.

That’s not quite as easy as it sounds, because there are a lot of variables to consider. Generally speaking, what gets deducted from the total retail price of a book is the following: the book’s printing cost, the printer’s shipping cost, our packaging cost, our net shipping cost, and the Paypal fees.

The book’s printing cost is easy. Usually it’s (page count x $0.015) +$0.90, but sometimes it’s less due to volume discounts for larger orders. All other costs are variable. The printer’s shipping cost, for example, depends on quantity and weight of books shipped, and UPS’ current shipping rates (which are fuel dependent). Generally, that works out at around $0.80-$1.25 per book at the moment. The packaging cost currently is $0.60, which covers boxes/packing tape/shipping labels, etc. This gets adjusted on an as-needed basis and is charged per retail order shipment (i.e. if a customer orders three books in the same shipment, there is only one $0.60 packaging charge divided between all three books). Our net shipping cost is also variable depending on weight, shipping method, and ship-to location. For instance, media mail shipments in the US for a book of less than 1 lb incur a shipping charge of $2.41; international shipments to anywhere except Canada a shipping charge of $2.85 after deduction of the amount charged to the end customer. Paypal fees for payments received from domestic customers are 2.9% of transaction value + $0.30 (3.9% +$0.30 for international), so for a $15 book with media mail shipping in the US, the Paypal fee is $0.74.

So, for instance, for a copy of The Tea House that sells through our website for $13.50 with media mail shipping, today’s net receipts would be $13.50 - ($3.48+$0.93+$0.60+$2.41+$0.74) = $5.34. For a copy of Mind Fuck that gets shipped to England, today’s net receipts would be $15 - ($4.86+$1.23+$0.60+($11.35-$8.50)+$1.22) = $4.24.