Showing posts with label Lulu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lulu. Show all posts

Monday, 10 March 2008

"Codice Voynich", by Claudio Foti...

There's a new book just out, self-published through lulu.com, called "Codice Voynich" by Claudio Foti. It's 143 pages long, 6" x 9", and in Italian - though fewer pages, it has the same dimensions as the VMs and, who knows, perhaps even the same language. ;-)

But printing is basically easy now: and so the big issue for publishers and self-publishers is sales and marketing - getting people to buy your wares. Yet for print-on-demand business wrappers like Lulu, the economics are somewhat suspect: unless you've got absolutely killer content that large numbers of people need right now and can be compressed into a tiny number of pages (like, say, "Getting Laid with Facebook"), who is going to pay £13.15 for a softback? Yeah, Voynich completists like me, sure: but are there really more than 20-30 of those in the world?

For my own Voynich book, I worked out that for digital printing to make good economic sense, it could sensibly have no more than 240 pages, and I could charge no more than £9.95 per copy, no matter what I actually put inside it. And so I'll be very interested to see what makes Claudio's book worth more for 90+ less pages.

Incidentally, typical keywords Claudio has flagged are: magic alchemy Prague Rome medieval Middle Ages manuscript codex Atlantis Bacon Kelley mysterious rune Lovecraft Necronomicon Nostradamus Dee Voynich. No huge surprises there: which itself is a bit of a shame. If it had been "Voynich Facebook Smurf Cheeseboard Helicopter", well...

Wednesday, 30 January 2008

Italian novel featuring the VMs...

Today's addition to The Big Fat List is "L'UOMO NELLA LUCE" by Walter Martinelli (2007), published on-demand by Lulu. Though I'm not quite sure whether bundling the Voynich Manuscript in with the Templars, the Masons, the Pyramids, Hitler, JFK, Christopher Columbus and the Bermuda Triangle is a brilliantly sensible idea: it sounds more like a kind of obsessive trainspotter take on conspiracies (why include one when you can include them all?)... but maybe they are all out to get us, so who knows? 346 pages, 6" x 9", $22.96.

However, you can buy the ebook version of it for a measly $4.66. Which is nice.