Revelation Revisited

Aleister Crowley, LAM, Dead Souls Exhibition, Greenwich Village, 1919. This portrait of LAM was published in The Equinox, (aka The Blue Equinox) Vol. 3, No. 1, (1919), and as the frontispiece to Crowley’s Commentary (Liber LXXI) to Helena P. Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence (1889). I write about LAM on my other site, Samizdat. 

I finally posted a new article on my other site, Samizdat. I use the pretext of a review on an article to revisit themes that are threaded throughout my book Revelation.

This is all high strangeness. I lavished photos and hyperlinks to arcane sources throughout, so if you are inclined to bend your consciousness without illegal substances, click through! 

I began writing Revelation as a preface to Metamorphosis, and it took me a couple of months to realize that it was just continuing to expand.

Writing Revelation was a process in learning, I continually researched as I wrote, and writing this review made me realize that I am not done with those subjects by a long shot. 

That preface turned into a book. I was so married to the idea that it was a preface that I published the whole mess as The Rosetta Stone of Memories. When Amazon priced the paperback at $88, I realized that I needed to split up the halves and make them into separate books. Sometimes I am not that smart. :) 

So Revelation and Metamorphosis were the result. Those books are selling steadily in small numbers every day. I am not getting rich, but the numbers keep rising. Amazon holds royalties for 90 days, so I will see no money from those books for another month. 

Google and Apple pay royalties every 30 days, so small amounts rolled in immediately. I took Momma out to dinner. I am not sure if I need to do something to start royalty payments from Barnes & Noble. I will give them a couple of weeks then look into it. 

For some reason, Amazon is the default bookseller for most of us. I do not understand it. Google makes it a policy to undersell Amazon--Revelation is selling there for $7.99, less than the $9.99 that Amazon charges, and Google still pays me my $5 per copy sold. 

Their sales profile is very different from A Tale of the Grenada Raiders. That book sold a ton of copies in the first 60 days after release and then it tapered off. I am astonished to see that folks are still buying that book a year after I released it!

Writing on my Samizdat site is very different from writing a book. In a book, I use inline academic references. On Samizdat, I hyperlink the hell out of everything, post photos with abandon, and include the inline references anyway. 

Writing the narrative is the easy part. Then the grunt work of doing bizarre Google searches comes into play, sourcing photos, and ensuring that they are not under copyright (almost always), and meticulously crediting them. I cheated a bit with this last piece. I admit it: I got lazy. 

As it is possible to include hyperlinks in eBooks, like Kindle or GooglePlay books, or iBooks, I may write first on Samizdat then port over articles into iBooks Author, which is my preferred writing environment. 

The formatting that I use handles URLs nicely in eBooks. It is theoretically possible to embed videos into eBooks, so I will have to experiment with that. I do not do much with video. I prefer text. It takes too long to watch a video, and the process is passive. A book, I can scan ahead, reread, and mark up the text taking notes. 

If I make enough in royalties to buy a new Mac, I will do some videos. I want to read my books and make my own AudioBooks. That way you can listen to them while you drive. My MacBook Air is not enough Mac for video. It is a great text machine. I push it to its limits. 

Another funny thing. My Samizdat page on Facebook has 913 Likes and 948 Follows! That is a hundred more than MKD. But we know that Facebook suppresses the distribution of MKD. We have, as you know, shifted most news commentary over to Spreely. Enough censorship.

Thank you for reading my work! I appreciate it when you buy my books! I love it when you leave reviews! Leave reviews anywhere, wherever you purchased the book. 

And to my cherished patrons on Patreon: Thank you from the bottom of my heart!