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New kind of statistics: book sales

For many years I have not looked at statistics. Between early 2023 and early 2025 I published quite a range of books and now I have a new kind of statistics. Here are my books:

  • Franz Eduard Farwerck (1889-1969): His life and work – paperback 3 February 2023;
  • Franz Eduard Farwerck (1889-1969): His life and work – Kindle ebook 2 February 2023;
  • Franz Eduard Farwerck (1889-1969): Zijn leven en werk – paperback 3 February 2023;
  • Franz Eduard Farwerck (1889-1969): Zijn leven en werk – Kindle ebook 2 February 2023;
  • Gemengde Vrijmetselarij: in Nederland en Nederlandstalig België – paperback 10 February 2023;
  • Gemengde Vrijmetselarij: in Nederland en Nederlandstalig België – Kindle ebook 9 February 2023;
  • co-Masonry: Mixed gender Freemasonry around the world – paperback 10 February 2023;
  • co-Masonry: Mixed gender Freemasonry around the world – Kindle ebook 9 February 2023;
  • Freemasonry & Heathenry – paperback 17 February 2023;
  • Freemasonry & Heathenry – Kindle ebook 16 February 2023;
  • Gangleri.nl compendium – hardcover 17 February 2023;
  • Gangleri.nl compendium – Kindle ebookbook 16 February 2023;
  • The Kirwall Scroll Dissected – hardcover 19 June 2024;
  • The Kirkwall Scroll Dissected – Kindle ebook 18 June 2024;
  • Symbols of Freemasonry: A searchable book of Masonic symbols – hardcover 16 July 2024;
  • Symbols of Freemasonry: A searchable book of Masonic symbols – Kindle ebook 4 July 2024;
  • The Masonic Museum: Ancient Tracing Boards and other Images of Freemasonry – hardcover 12 February 2025;
  • The Masonic Museum: Ancient Tracing Boards and other Images of Freemasonry – paperback 23 January 2025.

These weird publication dates are explainable. For every edition I have to make another book at Amazon KDP. When I publish, there is a (semi-automatic) publication process of Amazon and apparently, this goes more rapidly for ebooks. So much so even, that when I wanted to publish Symbols of Freemasonry, the ebook was already published, while the hardcover was picked up by the Amazon copyright team. I ended expanding the book with sources and published it again almost two weeks later. As for The Masonic Museum, I already had a few paperback editions out before I thought the book was ready for another version, so the hardcover (which has much better printing quality and therefor twice the price) followed somewhat later.

Anyway, even though the printing costs are remarkably low, about the same amount goes to Amazon and then there is a little bit for me. I do not intend to make money with the books, so the prices are as low as possible, I make round prices for every single Amazon store (different countries), but I do not make more than a fraction of a Euro up to a few per book.

The books hardly sell, so when I received the royalties for June I wondered what happened and logged in to see which book did well in that month. I expected it to be the last, but it turned out that almost all books had copies sold in June. I have no idea why.

Two digital copies of the Symbols book (that book really works better in print, also the print is in colour). One copy of the Dutch Farwerck book. One copy of the Dutch co-Masonry book, Freemasonry and Heathenry even, one copy of The Masonic Museum and one of The Kirkwall Scroll Dissected.

May was a more common month. One physical copy of Symbols and one of the Museum.

Books

  • website

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.

Read More »Books

Like it’s 1999

  • website

That is weird. I am currently playing around with book-producing (more about that later). I was looking back and noticed that I started Sententia in 1999.

So how the hell did I conclude I had a website since 2001 before? So the new logo ought to be:

Some sort of logo

  • website

I have been playing around a bit with a ‘logo’. The weird line across the word “Gangleri” is a sound-wave. “Est. 2001” is a bit of a stretch. In that year I started my first website Sententia, which a year later became Monas.nl and only in 2007 Gangleri.nl. Of course most of the content moved along to the new domain names and 2001 sounds more ‘interesting’ than 2007, so I used 2001 as “established” year.

The ‘logo’ turned out fairly well, so I decided to use it in the headers too.

Busy still, but not always here

He there reader. Yes I do still look at my ‘main website’ every now and then, but I do not always have the time and inspiration to post something here. I do not see a whole lot of films that are ‘worth reviewing’. I do listen to new music, but I think it is a bit odd to review a release that I play on Spotify rather than own it. Besides, also here I seldom run into something really good and I do not want too many of these ‘not really my taste’ reviews. Books, I actually read quite a bit, but I am ploughing through some bigger works; one is even 1500 pages, so that takes a while (I think I am at 80% now though). I also read books that I wonder if they ‘fit’ this website, even though it is fairly general.

I also maintain other websites which aim at a more specific audience or that are about a more specific subject. Of course these websites take effort too.

And, since I do not live behind my PC and my job is behind a PC too so I sometimes want to not look at a screen, things just come when I have both time and inspiration.

Yours truly.

Changed theme

  • website

Every few years I get an urge to change themes (sometimes I have to because it is no longer maintained). After some experimenting I usually come back to a similar lay-out with similar colors, etc. What bugged me most about the previous theme is that the post titles were always in all capitals. Now I have found a theme with a nice stack of options. Not perfect, but as of now I am quite happy with the result. You may notice some changes in the menu (ugly centered dropdowns…) and a few colors, such as the menu background color.

What a lousy job

“His or ours, Hank?”

Mine!

I used to use a plugin to pull post titles from other websites under the domain (all ‘sections’ are separate websites) to show in the “widgets” on the sides to get some ‘interaction’ between the different ‘sections’. That plugin had not been updated for over two years, so it is only a matter of time before something changes and it stops working.

So I looked around for an alternative and could not really find anything that made me happy. Then I noticed that WordPress itself has a new widget that has that very functionality. Great! Another plugin that I can ditch. This widget works great in the “sidebars”, but I used the abandoned plugin for the archive pages too.

So I turned off the old plugin to see what would die and believe it or not, it was that old / ‘simple’ plugin that added the hip and ‘new’ widgets that I just discovered. Argh!

So after an entire day of making something fancy with the new tools, I was back at having to look for a plugin that would do what I want. It does not really sound that strange to me. It should be able to make lists of posts of other sites and it should make a list of posts of the ‘section’ website itself for the archive pages. It seems that there is no such thing any more…

WordPress itself now has a “block” to show recent posts, even by category. That would mean that I ‘only’ had to find a plugin that is not abandoned to show the latest posts of other ‘sections’. I soon noticed that it can only list up to 100 posts. I have categories in the book reviews with 170 entries and I have film categories going up to 370!

Then I found a plugin that can make lists of posts and even group them by category. Great for the archive pages, but useless for the widgets since it can only access one site.

So this morning I started experimenting with yet another plugin. It is good in pulling posts from anywhere around, it can present hip carousels and has plenty options, but… It is not good at making archive pages with hundreds of posts…

So I ended up with replacing one old plugin with two new ones. Sigh.

But what do you think of the fancy news page?

18 Years

  • website

I’ve ran a website since 2001 (Sententia) which changed names twice (Monas.nl (2002), Gangleri.nl (2007)). Quite a period, 18 years. I guess that makes me an internet dinosaur.

Currently, there are exactly 100 articles. The last one is from 10 May 2019. My longer texts can lately be found on more specific websites that I made. I do not often have a subject to write an article about here.

626 Book reviews can be found in the book reviews section. I just keep on reading. Not everything I read finds its way to Gangleri.nl, but much of it does. This does not have the speed of the next section of course.

1163 Film reviews. Watching a film is just sit and watch for two hours which goes much faster than reading a book. Many films I see are not all that interesting, so reviews are usually short.

The music reviews are almost taken over by the film reviews in number. Currently there are 1205 music reviews.

From the few new additions on the website, you can see that my focus has shifted a bit in the recent years from heathenry to Freemasonry. I still study heathenry, but more in combination. Also Traditionalism is still in my reading list, but lower. I still see a lot in that way of thinking, but as it is too restrictive for my own path, it landed lower on my list. Also there do not seem to be a whole lot of new books or initiatives in that field. However, also here a combination with Freemasonry (and that is an interesting one) pops up in the works of Fabio Venzi or that of Angel Millar. Currently I am reading a book that I am not supposed to have, so it will not find its way to these pages. It is one of the few studies of the Northern European origins of Masonic symbolism. With less priority I am also reading a Manticore Press book and an Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (transactions of the first Masonic study lodge). When time comes, you will be able to read what I think about them.

Films prove to be a ‘problem’ recently. I do not hear of many films that I want to see. There is not all that much dark and weird. Besides, my DVD rental has made it more difficult to get me ‘enough’ films, so I have opted to fall back to Netflix for film nights for which I do not have anything. Netflix does not have really good films, so watching films has become mostly ‘brainless past time’. I do still enjoy watching films, but I rarely see anything really interesting.

I no longer keep statistics. This website has never been really popular. Who reads a website with book, film or music reviews these days anyway? For myself, there is one website with reviews that I follow (Noise Receptor) and one with film reviews (Filmofiel, which is in Dutch). For the rest, I probably have the same alternatives as everybody else. Ratings on websites (IMDb for example), information in webshops and newsletters. I use my own website mostly as archive. When I want to know if I saw a film or if I have an album, I check Gangleri.nl. If there is anything that helps anyone, good.

Sincely,
Roy

Gogo Google

While playing with Firefox I got annoyed that Ghostery finds trackers on this website. One of them is Google. I used Google Custom Search to allow visitors to find something in the entire network (there are different sites which only allow searching ‘themselves’). Looking for a replacement I found the DuckDuckGo option. No plugin needed, no results page to add and a somewhat customizable result page at DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo is not my favourite search engine, but it is one of the private search engines, so I have killed another tracker.