All the sudden I felt the need to see if I could produce something more ‘durable’ than publishing online. A website may disappear, but books may change owners or even be available for quite some time. When it would come to publishing books, I had a few wishes. It should be printing on demand, so only copies sold would have to be printed. I also wanted ebook versions to be available. I looked around and found Amazon’s “Kindle Direct Publishing” which -other than the name suggests, is not just for Kindle ebooks. The size of Amazon has another positive point: the book is printed close to where the buyer lives, so less shipping.
The first book would be about Franz Farwerck. I have dedicated an entire website to the man and sometimes I get the question why there is no book. It would be quite a thin book, since I have not found all that much information. Besides, I do sometimes find new information and I am still after a few things, so would a book not be a little premature? Still I gave Amazon’s KDP a go. It costs nothing but time. It is pretty straight forward, only the cover designer is not too much of my liking.
I compiled a book from the website, reread and updated the texts, etc. Then I translated the booklet to Dutch, as I think there will be more demand for a Dutch book about the Dutchman who nobody knows abroad (which is exactly why I have the website in English). Then I had to make the Kindle versions, so actually there are four Farwerck books. So far so good.
For some odd reason I cannot have Amazon send me test prints or ‘author copies’ (a copy against the very low printing cost), while I can order the book once it is finished! A test print would have been nice, since the first Dutch printing that I bought myself, had a typo on the back. Then again, the nice thing about printing on demand is that I can just update the manuscript and the next person who orders the book will get the version without the typo.
After Farwerck I started to work on two books about mixed gender Freemasonry. An English book that covers the whole wide world (like the website) and one for just the Netherlands and Belgium. I am starting to get the hang of it, so these took much less time.
Then it was time to work on a Gangleri.nl compendium. I have been writing since 1999, so this time it was not going to be an 80 page booklet, but one with a more descent number of pages. I could even try what a hardcover would look like. This book mostly contains articles, ranging from 1999 up to recently and about a wide variety of subjects. Some texts are undoubtedly better than others, but it was fun to go through my old articles that I published through Sententia (my first website), Monas.nl (its follow-up) and now Gangleri.nl.
The last book-project -for now- is Freemasonry & Heathenry. Not much original writing there, but a compilation of what is available on the subject of heathen remnants in Masonic symbolism. Since there is not much about this subject in English, I wonder if the book will draw some people. The website does not really, but that I can say about all my publishing efforts. I always pick subjects with small audiences. So be it.
As for the websites that these books are based on, the others can be found at Farwerck.nl and 3-5-7.nl.
Click on the image to go to my authors page on Amazon.com. Make sure, that when you want to get a copy of any of the books, go to you ‘local’ Amazon. You may want to wait a bit getting the last two (Freemasonry & Heathenry and Gangleri.nl compendium. I just got my own copies and (of course) both prove to need to adjustments. In the compendium case minor adjustments (types, forgotten italics, etc.), in the first case I want to expand one part of the book a bit. I expect the new versions to be available by the end of the week.