Austin, Ho! Publishing University

As a writer with several books traditionally published, and one aiming to place the next with a commercial or university press, what in thundernation am I doing signing up for the Independent Book Publishers Association's two day annual Publishing University? 

Pug-assisted. In a future blog post 
Uli and Washi will demonstrate
the number 1 book marketing
principle. 

Well, inspired by the likes of Kenneth Ackerman, Sophy Burnham, and Sandra Gulland, I have become what is called a "hybrid author," that is, an author who has some books with traditional publishers (in my case, University of Georgia Press, Milkweed Editions, Unbridled Books, Random-House Mondadori, etc) but others going out under one's own imprint (mine being Dancing Chiva). 

In particular, like many authors, these past few years I've been busy bringing out the electronic editions of some of my older works, published back in the days of yore when publishers didn't care about digital rights (what did they know, ha.  And yes, Miraculous Air in Kindle is selling like gorditas.) And more recently (for various reasons detailed in this talk for the American Literary Translator's Association), my own Dancing Chiva brought out both the Kindle and paperback editions of Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual.

Bright, charming and talented in multitudinous ways,
 my assistants do not do website updates.
Here they are asking, "You want us to do whut?

That said, I'd love to place my next books with a publisher who can do more for them than

I can with my own itsy-bitsy pug-assisted operation, and that may happen with the next novel and the work-in-progress on Far West Texas... we shall see. But the thing is, for the rest of my life, a long one I hope, many of my many books' editions may remain in my purview. So, I figure, I'd better grok this game.

I've learned a lot-- 2014 was my year of scrambling up the POD learning curve-- but undoubtedly I have more to learn, and since things are changing faster than a rocket to Mars, I guess it's just going to be (...sigh...) an ongoing process. But hey, I get to visit Planet Austin! Can't complain about that. 

Dear reader, if you are going to Publishing University, zap me an email or tweet @cmmayo1 or @dancingchiva. It would be grand to meet you in person there.

> Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

It's Not Like Making a Peanut-Butter and Jelly Sandwich

But It's Not Rocket Science, Either 

or, How I Made my PODs (And You Can, Too)

Self-Publishing for All the Right Reasons

Why Aren't There More Readers?

A Note on Curiosity, Creativity, and Courage

My Recollections of Maximilian

My Little Gumroad Shop Now Featuring "From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion"

It's been a most eye-crossing, shoulder-clenching, but fab-a-roni experience learning how to make ebooks. So far: a batch of Kindles, a few iBooks, two free PDFs, and now a fully-formatted PDF available on ...drum roll… Gumroad. Oh, I luuuuv Gumroad-- mainly because it is so supersonically easy peasy! Really! Well, check out my ebook, a novela-length nonfiction essay, From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion, here (Gumroad) and here (my webpage).

Cover for the Gumroad ebook edition features
the painting "Cazador de Nubes"
by Edgar Soberón
www.edgarsoberon.com

A nonfiction novela about a fairytale: a visit to the Italian castle of Maximilian von Habsburg, Emperor of Mexico. Originally published in The Massachusetts Review (winner, Washington Prize for Best Personal Essay). By the author of the novel based on the true story, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. 

Now you might be wondering, dear reader, why, as a writer, would I dedicate so much time and effort to making ebooks? Isn't that something one's publisher can do? Or, if not, then can't one outsource it to one of those newfangled freelancers or companies, such as CreateSpace or Smashwords? A two part answer: First, though I'll admit the learning curve has been steep (and rocky and muddy and slippery) at times, making an ebook is not rocket science, and I relish both learning and designing. Second, the economist in me sees the long tail, that is, a modest but steady number of sales spread out over many years. In other words, once an ebook is up, it is like a variable interest rate annuity-- which I prefer to keep, thank you very much. In my view, when it comes to ebooks, publishers are taking way too big a bite.

Back to the new Gumroad edition of From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion: It has a different design from the Kindle  (Kindle is plain, no color, generic fonts) and iBook (fully designed and full-color, made with the iBook Author app): it's a PDF download (I recommend opening it in iBooks, if you have an iPad), for a landscape orientation (I mean, turn the screen on its side). And yes, because it's a PDF, I had some fun playing with the fonts and colors. (I suppose Kindle will improve its design options, but I am not holding my breath.) As for that gorgeous cover, which is on all the ebook editions, as well as the CDBaby double audio CD,  check out more of Edgar Soberón's beautiful still lifes here.

P.S. In-progress, coming very soon: podcasts with Rose Mary Salum and the Apaches for Marfa Mondays. Stay tuned.


Your comments are always welcome.

The Changing of the Guards (A Comment on Self-Publishing)

• • I couldn't resist jumping in on this one. Here's my comment to Saurav Dutt's blog post, "The Changing of the Guards."

    @intralingo [Lisa Carter] tweeted this blog post, which is how I found it. I didn't have it served up to me in the NYT or whatever. The whole writing & reading scene is going horizontal & networked, that's the thing.

    I'm a writer now working on my 7th book, not counting anthologies, and, variously, I've been published by big commercial publishers, small independents, and university presses. For my latest book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual-- rather niche, as the title suggests-- I looked back on my experiences and the kinds of contracts & PR & marketing I could expect and I realized (in about 2 minutes) that trying to find a traditional US publisher would be in neither my nor the book's best interest. Frankly, it amazes me to say this. But I say this.

    Strategy: Kindle (done), POD CreateSpace under my own imprint (done), IngramSpark (in-progress) and once that's done, a postcard mailing to libraries, review copies to Mexican historians and others who would find the book of interest, Netgalley.com, and my newsletter will go out to subscribers. And I'll give a few talks here and there. So no, I'm probably not going to be able to buy a yacht, but I do think I can expect, over the long term, to do better than I would with the typical small or university press. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But I'm willing to take the risk and find out. And I will admit that, despite my previous experience as a literary magazine editor and as an author-- translation: I get it about hiring an editor and quality book design-- I have had to climb a bit of a learning curve… alas… but one big help has been joining the Independent Publishers Association. I do warmly recommend that.

    My take on publishing now is that, for various reasons and in many (though I hasten to add, not all) cases, publishers are simply not doing enough for their authors. They are struggling, they lack vision, and too many of them are trying to market books as if they were tubs of cottage cheese. But generalizations can only go so far; authors and their titles are an extremely heterogeneous bunch. For some authors and some titles a traditional publisher is, in fact, the best option and I think that will continue to be the case. (If I were not an independent writer but a faculty member aiming for tenure, I would not self-publish, for example.) But this is no longer the case for many authors and books, and increasingly so. The stigma of self-publishing is definitely less than it was only a few years ago.

    
    [This last bit is in response to examples of editorial arrogance Dutt cites:] 

    I do have sincere and enormous respect for many of my editors and the marketing staff I've worked with in the past. I say many, not all. As in any industry, or any society for that matter, there are some insecure, ignorant, and unhappy people. But bless 'em. One day they'll figure it all out. Meanwhile, one can fly wide of their orbit. Or maybe write them into one's next novel.

    COMMENTS always welcome.

    
    

    “Freedom in writing is akin to knocking down walls. Tyranny is a process of building them.” --Saurav Dutt

Updating a Kindle and a Print-on-Demand Paperback: The Never Ending Story

In Days of Yore, when printing book meant 2,000 + copies shipped to a warehouse, the mistake of, say, having called Jorge Luis Borges "José Luis Borge" would remain in one's book and upon one's conscience (like an itchy scar) until the reprint-- which, for most books, never happened. And even if it did, one's publisher might not trouble to make corrections. But now, with digital print-on-demand paperbacks, and of course ebooks, fixing mistakes is like being able to text message your kids-- you never have to really let go! Wonderful! Terrible!

Back in the fall of 2011 I put up a Kindle edition of my translation of Francisco I. Madero's 1911 Manual espírita as Spiritist Manual. I gave a talk about it for the San Miguel de Allende's Author Sala in November of that year, and then another talk for PEN San Miguel in 2012 (link goes to the podcast). Why no paperback edition? I wasn't ready to commit because the five pages of introduction I offered with that first Kindle edition were OK, but rather like having recounted a multilayered mega-saga such as Anna Karenina in the teacup of a paragraph. I refer not so much to the Spiritist Manual itself but to the origins and spread of Spiritism, Madero's own life, and Madero's role in that movement and in Mexican history. For those of you don't follow this blog or Mexican history, Madero was the leader of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913, when he was assassinated. And the powerfully radical significance of his secret book, Spiritist Manual, cannot be appreciated without this, well, rather novelesque context.

Finally, late last year, I got that introduction done to my satisfaction. I took a breather over the holidays and then, in January, published it as a proper paperback: Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual. 

So back to the Kindle for an update. Librarians will sniff rather loudly that, with a different title and 200+ pages of new material, I should have used a new ISBN-- that is, published it as a different book. But I wanted the people who had bought the earlier version to be able to go to "Manage My Kindle" on their dashboard and get a free update.

So then what is the copyright year on this thing? Can it be entered in thus-and-such a competition as a first publication (or not)? A dozen wiggly little questions all over the place! But digital publishing isn't considered the Wild West for nothing. Ain't no sheriffs I can see. So I just went ahead and updated the same old Kindle-- same ISBN. And since January, I have updated the Kindle, fixing typos, adding a map, another book to the bibliography, oh… 5 or 6 times.  Just yesterday I fixed a couple of typos. (I swear, typos are evidence of parallel universes.)

It's so easy! I just go into Sigil, type in or delete what I want, then upload the epub file to Kindle Direct. A few hours later, bingo, it's live on amazon.com.

P.S. Why am I so enthusiastic about Kindles? This chart from Bowker (hat tip to Jane Friedman) says it all.

P.S.S. Seven Reasons Why Ebooks will be Big in Mexico

COMMENTS

How I Published My Kindles (Easy Peasy, Sort Of)

Gosh, I've been having at least a couple of conversations per week (oftentimes more) with fellow writers looking to bring out their own Kindle(s), so I'll just quit yammering and copy/paste this blog post into my email replies. And here's hoping this may be of use or interest for you, also, dear reader-- I know that many of you are writers.

It's changing all the time, and there is more than one way to skin this cat, but so far, here is what I can tell you:

ROUTE #1

My Kindles as of 2014:

+ Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution; 

+From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion; 

+ The Building of Quality; 

+ Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico; 

+ Podcasting for Writers

+ and the Spanish translation of my novel, El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano. 

UPDATE 
and
Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolución Mexicana, Francisco I. Madero y su libro secreto, Manual espírita

My novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is also available in Kindle, but that was my publisher's doing (Unbridled Books).

1. Get your book's text into in a clean WORD.doc. 

This was not easy for some of my older works, which were written in Wordperfect and, alas, converted to babble in .epub (see step #2.). And one was in a PDF that did not convert well either. Most of them had multiple corrections made after it had landed in my original publisher's hands-- and to the galleys, as well. Oh well, I got it done.

2. Convert the WORD doc to an .epub by using a free open source program such as Sigil.

Download Sigil here.

3. Using Sigil, arrange your table of contents and chapters.

There are a multitude of Sigil tutorials on the web, Google and ye shall find. (I hired an IT guy to help me on this-- and that did save some time and head-aches.) 

***UPDATE. A reader writes: "I keep the process easy by setting the paragraph indents to .2 in .docx, then saving the file as Web Page, Filtered. It becomes an HTML file. Upload that rather than ePub (use for Smashwords)." 

4. Open a Kindle direct account on amazon.com

Click here: https://kdp.amazon.com 

You will need to provide your email, password, contact info and your bank account number-- they do need to be able to pay you!

5. Purchase an ISBN from Bowker at www.myidentifiers.com 
(For a Kindle this is not absolutely necessary, however.)

6. Make a cover.

Amazon provides some free templates. You can do it yourself or hire someone. The Kindle Direct publishing website provides all the relevant guidelines here.

7. On Kindle direct on amazon.com, upload the description of your book, the files for your book's content (that would be the .epub you created with Sigil), and the cover. Select the rights territories, the price you want to charge, and then the button that says PUBLISH.

In about 12 hours, oftentimes less, you will be emailed the link to your book's page on amazon.com. Update your website, tweet, tell friends and family, etc etc etc.

ROUTE #2. 

1. Get your book in a clean WORD.doc.

2. Open a CreateSpace account (this is part of amazon.com)

3. Follow the very easy instructions to do a print/on-demand paperback edition of your book. (You can do this yourself, hire someone to do it, or pay CreateSpace to do it.)  Once that is all done, click the box that says "Make this a Kindle."

ROUTE #3

Multiple ebook editions all at once, for a fee, Smashwords does it all for you. I do not have experience with this. 

+ + + + + + +


Related blog posts:

>Seven Reasons Ebooks will be Big in Mexico
> My Excellent (If Occasionally Head-Banging) E-Book Adventure (Note: this is from 2011, ancient history, but includes many crunchy links)
>Guest-Blogger Deborah Batterman: "Publish Or Perish: 5 Links on the New Digital Imperative"

P.S. See all my ebooks in English here and in Spanish here.

MY BIG FAT OPINION ABOUT KINDLE EDITIONS:
Because they are quick to download, easy to read (especially for older people who need larger type and travelers of all ages with sore shoulders) and cheap, whatever one's own opinion about them may be, to expect that they will not continue to erode the traditional book market is to fight the winds and the tides. For those who would lament the loss of bookstores and paper books, take heart! There is the rare book market! (Cherish those autographed first editions with their dust jackets intact!) I say, paper books are like horses and candles. With the coming of cars and electricity the roles of horses and candles in most people's daily lives vastly diminished; nonetheless, horses and candles have not disappeared and probably never will.

Ceteris paribus, I'll take the paper book. But ceteris paribus is rarely what's actually going on. I have been buying and reading Kindles (and iBooks and free PDFs from www.archive.org) at a rather voracious pace.

More links of relevance:

> To read Kindles, I use my iPad's free Kindle app.
> Cyberflanerie: Rare Books Entrepreneurship Edition
> Michael Suarez, SJ on the Flow of Books and Money and Information
> A Super Brief Introduction to the Opportunity Cost of Rare Book Collecting

> Your COMMENTS are always welcome. 

Enter Allan Kardec, Chef du Spiritisme

Racing to meet the deadline.... I'm almost finished with my revised and expanded introduction to Spiritist Manual, my translation of Manual Espírita, the secret book of 1911 by Francisco I. Madero, leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico 1911-1913.  This excerpt mentions Swedenborg and the Fox sisters of Hydesville-- more about them anon.

Enter Allen Kardec, Chef du Spiritisme

Allan Kardec

Though an energetic evangelist, Francisco I. Madero schemed to hide his Spiritism from the public—his personal letters during his campaigns and his presidency make this clear—  and, over the several decades after his death, few Mexicans in public positions have had the incentive, the metaphysical context, or whatever wherewithal to begrudge more than a glancing mention of it. As early as 1915, any public discussion of Spiritism became taboo—historian Yolia Tortolero uses this word, and quite rightly, even while, as she also notes, Spiritism was being practiced “under cover by many public figures.” There is more to say about this thundering silence about Spiritism in Mexico, which, with a few notable exceptions, has persisted to this day, but to first properly comprehend the term we must hie back to Paris of 1891 and, reanimating our scene, let that page of La Revue Spirite fall. And another.

This magazine Pancho Madero is reading belongs to his father—though his mother and other family members are devout Catholics and, as he surely knows, the Pope had declared the main ritual of Spiritualism and its derivative, Spiritism, the séance, diabolical. Decades earlier, Pope Pius IX had slapped the works of Allan Kardec, founder of La Revue Spirite, on the Index, the Vatican’s list of prohibited books.

Allan Kardec: this elbow-sharp and magnetic nom de plume, supposedly taken from one of his other lifetimes as a Druid priest, belonged to a French educator named Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, who died in 1869. From his stern-looking portrait, with his knob-chin and kingly pose, one might take him for a mightily conservative banker. Kardec was an unlikely guru. According to his English translator, Anna Blackwell, he was “grave, slow of speech, unassuming in manner, yet not without a certain quiet dignity.” Further, and somewhat frighteningly, “he was never known to laugh.” Yet anyone who doubts his influence, from France to Mexico, Brazil to the Philippines, can visit Paris’s Père La Chaise cemetery and find, among the stone angels and sarcophagi and mausoleums of the likes of Chopin, Collette, Victor Hugo, La Fontaine and Molière, Kardec’s megalithic tomb ever-heaped with flowers.

Rivail had been educated by the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who, radically for the time, emphasized freedom of thought and direct observation. According to John Warne Monroe in Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France, Rivail was a longtime student of mesmerism in 1853 when he learned of the strange phenomenon of the tables parlantes or table tipping, from a friend who said he had managed to induce a table to lift by itself off the ground and turn, and more: like the Fox sisters of Hydesville, he was communicating with spirits through the table by means of raps and knocks.

Though skeptical, Rivail determined to study this phenomenon. He soon moved on to observing mediumistic writing, in which two young mediums, the Mlles Baudin, would place their fingertips on a planchette, a triangular contraption with little wheels and a pencil attached, thus allowing spirits to answer his questions and offer messages in writing.

It was the spirit “Zéphyr” who assigned him the name Allan Kardec, and, along with other spirits, such a mass of teachings to solve “the controversial problem of humanity’s past and future,”  that Rivail turned it into a book—including additional information channeled by medium Célina Japhet. Published in 1857, Le Livre des Esprits, (The Book of the Spirits), concurrently with the levitating medium D.D. Homes’ visit to France, became a best-seller of its time, translated into multiple languages, and is still in print today. 

With down-to-earth language and easy-to-reference numbered questions and answers, The Book of the Spirits is a guide to nothing less than the universe and its laws, the nature of God, the spirit world and its relations with humanity. The concluding message, channeled from the spirit of Saint Augustine, calls for kindness and benevolence. It is this work that first spelled out the doctrine of Spiritism, which Kardec distinguishes from Spiritualism—the latter, according to him, simply the belief that there is more than physical matter— as a doctrine based on the specific nature of relations between the physical and spirit worlds. Spiritism’s most notable departure from Spiritualism is its assertion that spirits reincarnate as, in life after life, whether on Earth or some other planet, they evolve into ever greater states of consciousness.

This was the most modern of modern science, Kardec argued, for, as a scientist might peer through a microscope to see the detail in a leaf, so he could employ a medium to communicate with the spirit world. Through Ermance Dufaux, a teenaged medium famous for her channeled autobiography of Joan of Arc, a nameless spirit instructed Kardec to publish La Revue Spirite as soon as possible and using his own money and so, in 1858, he did. In 1861, Kardec published Le Livre des Médiums (The Book on Mediums), a how-to and advisory on the dangers of communicating with spirits based on his own and collagues’ experiences as well as more material channeled from spirits, among them Erastrus, Channing, “Spirit of Truth,” and Matthew. More followed: The Gospel Explained by Spirits (1864) ; Heaven and Hell (1865); and Genesis (1867), in addition to shorter works. 

This was the Swedenborg-sized pile that Pancho Madero, having finished with La Revue Spirite, ran to that magazine’s offices to purchase. In his words:

"I did not read [Kardec’s] books; I devoured them, for their doctrines were so rational, so beautiful, so new, they seduced me and ever since I consider myself a Spiritist." 

That is to say, Madero believed he had incarnated on this planet in order to help usher in a golden age, evangelist for the doctrine that was nothing less than, to quote Kardec in Genesis, “the pivot on which the human race will turn.”

Our Coahuilan prince has stepped onto his metaphysical Montgolfier, as it were. Soon he will be tossing sandbags overboard.

(Copyright © C.M. Mayo 2013, all rights reserved) 

>>Read more about the Spiritist Manual (website includes Q & A and resources for researchers)
>>Get the current edition on Kindle.

>>Read a previous excerpt on this blog, "Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas"

***UPDATE Dec 2013 My book, Metaphysical Odyssey Into the Mexican Revolution, is now available***

COMMENTS

Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas

Racing to make a deadline with my publisher for the updated (revised and expanded) introduction to and translation of Manual Espírita, or Spiritist Manual of 1911 by Francisco I. Madero, leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico 1911-1913.

 (The first edition, with a brief introduction, is currently available on Kindle. The revised and expanded edition will be available as a Kindle and paperback.) 


***UPDATE Dec 2013 My book, Metaphysical Odyssey Into the Mexican Revolution, is now available***

Herewith an excerpt from the new section on the history of 19th century metaphysics:

Madame Blavatsky, Messenger from the Mahatmas

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

As Don Evaristo Madero cast his massive shadow over northern Mexico, so Helena Petrovna Blavatsky cast hers over metaphysically-minded Western civilization, that is to say, Europe, England, Australia, and the Americas, for she was the monumental figure of modern esotericism. (Not that that those two ever met. I am quite sure that if they had, any crockery in the vicinity would have exploded.)

She was fat and her eyes bulged. She swore like a stevedore, her tobacco was cheap, and the flower pots around her piled up with stubs. Madame Blavatsky had left her husband in Russia, first breaking a candlestick over his head, and then, before arriving to settle for a spell in New York, traveled to Central America, all over Europe, several times to Egypt (where, among other exploits, she disguised herself as a Muslim man and studied Coptic magic), and twice trekked into Tibet to attend a secret school led by enlighted sages called “mahatmas,” or “Great White Brothers.” She also claimed that, after her return to the West, she remained in telepathic communication with the mahatmas, who could also travel anywhere on earth and the universe by means of their astral bodies. 

A psychic medium and self-styled scholar, Madam Blavatsky exuded a charisma impossible to fathom. Her presence seemed to occasion fires, raps, knocks, tables rising from the floor, and messages in golden ink from the mahatmas dropping out of thin air. Her fellow Theosophist William Quan Judge recalled “marvels wholly unexplainable on the theory of jugglery,” including little orbs creeping over the furniture in her apartment in New York City and, as she sat in the parlor, a spoon flying into her hand all the way from the kitchen.

In a word, Madame Blavatsky made Cagliostro look like a pipqueak and Monsieur Kardec, for all his spirit world adventures via teenaged mediums, thoroughly bourgeois. 

For Madame Blavatsky, there were higher truths than Christianity and Spiritualism and its Johnny-come-lately offshoot, Spiritism; the Orient, wellspring of Buddhism and Hinduism, was the authentic source of spiritual knowledge. 

Now, to take an orbit-worthy leap over novel-length episodes—among them, Blavatsky’s meeting with Col. Henry Steel Olcott in the Vermont farmhouse of the Eddy brothers, mediums who brought forth such shades of the dead as a giant Winnebago chief, a squaw with her pet flying squirrel, and a naval officer in full dress with a sword— Blavatsky and Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Not a religion, it was an association to promote religious universality, and that included Buddhism and Hinduism— which, as one might imagine, would not endear them to Christian missionaries and many of the colonial authorities. 

Our young Mexican Spiritist never joined, but he, like many outstanding figures whom we remember today, from inventor Thomas Edison to Paul Gaugin, novelist D.H. Lawrence and poet W.B. Yeats, and the leader of India’s independence movement, Mohandas Gandhi, were influenced by Madame Blavatsky, and, as we shall see in Madero’s case especially—  and crucially— the Theosophists’ enthusiasm for the Hindu wisdom book, The Bhagavad Gita. 

So before spiraling on to Mexico, we must slow for a moment to pack into another nutshell another ouevre. 

Blavatsky’s first book, Isis Unveiled, published in 1877 and still in print, was inspired, she claimed, by the mahatmas and is nothing less than, as the subtitle says, the Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. A decade later, in 1888, after she and Olcott had stirred up a Buddhist revival in Ceylon and removed the headquarters of the Theosophical Society to Adyar, near Madras in India, Blavatsky published her massive two volume The Secret Doctrine, also still in print, which provides the spiritual history of the cosmos and human life based on the stanzas of the Dyzan.

The first:

THE ETERNAL PARENT (SPACE), WRAPPED IN HER EVER INVISIBE ROBES, HAD SLUMBERED ONCE AGAIN FOR SEVEN ETERNITIES.

Another, number 40, plucked at random: 

THEN THE THIRD AND FOURTH (RACES) BECAME TALL WITH PRIDE. WE ARE THE KINGS, IT WAS SAID; WE ARE THE GODS.

No one had heard of the Dyzan, nor has any scholar yet found it. Blavatsky claimed that it was part of the commentary esoteric literature of Tibetan Buddhism and that she had memorized the stanzas as given to by her teacher in North India and Tibet, where she first arrived in the 1850s. That she, a European woman traveling solo, made it into Tibet at all might sound preposterous if not for the fact that, among other sightings, one Captain Charles Murray of the Bengal Army encountered her on the Sikkim border. According to Michael Gomes, editor of the abridged version of The Secret Doctrine, esoteric scholars have noted similarities of these stanzas to the literature of the Kalachakra, or “Wheel of Time,” the ancient Tibetan Buddhist esoteric scripture blending Hindu and Buddhist ideas. And the Kalachakra, by the way, is a living idea. A quick google search brought up a lengthy discussion by His Holiness the Dalai Lama on his website, http://www.dalailama.com/teachings/kalachakra-initiations, and a video tour of the fabulously intricate 3D structure of the Kalachakra Mandala, a visual representation of the teachings, made in honor of the Dalai Lama’s 2007 visit to Cornell University, at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~kb/mandala/  . (With the low-voiced chanting and clanging, it is all very wonderfully mesmerizing.)

What to conclude about the Dyzan? I am not planning to get a PhD in Tibetan Buddhist studies (not in this lifetime anyway), but I can stretch so far as to agree with Gomes, who concludes that, “[f]act or fiction, the stanzas [of the Dyzan] provide one of the greatest mythos of our time, whose influence on modern esotericism is undeniable.”

Copyright C.M. Mayo all rights reserved.


***UPDATE: Read W. B. Yeats on Madame Blavatsky in The Trembling of the Veil-- very amusing. Includes a link to the free ebook.

>>Read more about Francisco I. Madero's Spiritist Manual (including resources for researchers)

>>Read another excerpt, Enter Allan Kardec, Chef du Spiritsme

P.S. As a result of this unexpectedly Mount Everest-esque project, and a laptop crash, I have fallen woefully behind on the Marfa Mondays podcasts. But stay tuned... three fascinating interviews are almost ready to go: Dallas Baxter, founding editor of Cenizo Journal; Enrique Madrid of Redfern; and historian John Tutino, author of the magnificent Making a New World, are all almost ready to go. (Eleven posted so far, 13 to go.) 

>Comments?


***UPDATE: Excellent and fascinating interview with Blavatsky expert Michael Gomes.

Seven Reasons Why EBooks Will Be Big in Mexico or: El Kindle es el futuro

Ebooks are already in Mexico, as are zebras and ice skating rinks, by the way, but I've had this "it's not going to happen" conversation with so many head-in-the-sand Mexican writers and editors (all my age and older), I thought I'd offer my thoughts in more precise order.

Yes, a paper book is splendid thing, and yes, I myself prefer them to ebooks, and I understand why other people would prefer them to ebooks; nonetheless, I say the ebook phenomenon is going to take over the Mexican literary scene faster than anyone here imagines, and for seven reasons:

1. You can see it for yourself, Mexicans adapt-- maybe with a lag vis-a-vis, say, Palo Alto, but fast. Middle and upper class kids in urban areas from Mexico City to Tijuana, Queretaro to Merida, Puebla, Guadalajara, you name it, are all just as addicted to their handheld devices, texting friends and updating their Facebook pages at all hours, as anywhere else. And the Mexican middle class is a far sight more susbtantial than most north of the border would guess. As for middled-aged middle class Mexicans, they've figured out Twitter and Facebook as well as everyone else. (Is there a Mexican pundit / senator / university student without a Twitter feed?) True, Mexicans don't all read books anymore than do their counterparts north of the border, however, there have always been readers, avid readers, in Mexico. It may be small, but Mexico's literary culture is vibrant and thriving.

2. Mexican economists, always with an eye on development, know that putting Wi-Fi in a small town is akin to putting in road-- on steroids. And people in the small towns want to sell good and services. Once the Internet is there, how hard is it to discover that, oh by the way, you can download an ebook?

3. Internet venture capitalists are looking at emerging markets, such as Mexico, as prime targets for investment, especially given the grim outlook in the US and (way gnarlier) Europe.

4. Though Mexico does boast some mighty fine bookstores, they are thin on the ground and rarely well-stocked. It's a heap less trouble to download an ebook.

5.  Ebooks are cheaper than paper books and Mexicans, like everyone else on the planet, prefer to spend less money. This goes for both readers and publishers / self-publishers.

6. There are many great reads in Spanish, from Don Quijote to Cien años de soledad, and more popping out of the oven every season. P.S. Download mine why doncha.

7. There are even more maybe not so great reads that haven't been able to land a commercial or university press publisher, and, Whoa Nelly, here they come.

I note that one of Mexico's most award-winning and prolific writers, Agustín Cadena, recently launched his new novel, Maljuna Knabino, not as a print edition but as a Kindle.

I also note that many gringos in Mexico are already quite happily downloading Kindles galore.

I further note that the best way to do that is to forget buying a Kindle and download the free Kindle app for the iPad. iPad rules.

Cyberflanerie: Newsletter, Mechanical Turk, Rose Mary Salum, Zack Rogow, William Kiesel on Occult of Personality, Agustin Cadena

I just sent out my newsletter which I used to say goes out 4 - 6 times a year but now say goes out 3 - 5 times a year. Probably more in the 3 x yr range. I figure everyone has too much email so I try to make it something worth surfing around in. If you haven't already signed up, check it out here-- all the new books (my dad's plus 4 -- count 'em-- new ebooks), new podcasts of interviews with Southwest Book Award-winner Sergio Troncoso and with Mary Baxter, painter in the Big Bend, a reading (tomorrow!!) in San Miguel de Allende, and recommended links for writers, news of Ann McLaughlin's novel workshop at the Writer's Center, and Marie de la Fere's eyewitness memoir, My Recollections of Maximilian, a rare circa 1910 English language manuscript from (and with permission from) the Bancroft Library, introduced and published by Yours Truly-- a free ebook. Just go to the newsletter and click to download it.

The photo is from Pinto Canyon Rd, a lonely but gorgeous drive from Marfa (right behind Paul Graybeal's Moonlight Gemstones shop) down to the Rio Grande, where, should you feel so moved, you could chuck a baseball into Mexico.

Cyberflanerie du jour:

An article on the Mechanical Turk (an oldie but goodie from Salon.com)
The future is looking mighty strange...

Rose Mary Salum does the Next Big Thing Round Robin
A Mexican writer, translator and editor of Literal Magazine, one of the finest bilingual literary journals ever

New over on the blogroll (look right) Zack Rogow's excellent "Advice for Writers"

Occult of Personality interview with William Kiesel of Ouroboros Press
The book as talisman and much more. And another, with more on talismanic publishing and the Library Angel

I am intrigued by what Kiesel is doing with Ouroboros Press. I sense that publishing is diverging, sharply, into 2 streams: artisanal publishing (what he does, but I would include some ebooks in this category) and mass market ebooks. And I think we're going to see a galloping development in both over the next few years. On that note, Agustin Cadena, one of my favorite and most prolific Mexican writers-- and my translator-- has just published his new novel, Maljuna Knabino, as a Kindle. This, seriously, is a big deal on the Mexican publishing scene. And I find that interesting because I live in Mexico, I write about Mexico and I translate Mexican writers-- but it's also interesting because Mexico is a leading emerging market. As goes Mexico, so goes the emerging world-- Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and so on.... Right now its digital marketplace is underdeveloped. Most Mexicans still get their books at Sanborns (a nationwide chain that might be described as a cross between Denny's and Walgreen's). Translation: huge potential. And the ebook market is going to develop-- I mean to say Mexican readers will start using iPads and Kindle and Kindle apps--- why just look at all the urban and suburban Mexican (mostly) middle class kids from Tijuana to Merida. They're all texting each other and facebooking with the ease of breathing itself. And I do believe every Mexican congress critter maintains a Twitter account. Watch the audience when (even) the President speaks to any urban business audience under the age of 60-- they're all looking at their laps. So when people say (and alas many Mexicans insist) that Mexican readers won't adapt to ebooks, I say, hooey. More about all this in the next post.

Comments? Please feel free to email me.

If I Can Podcast, So Can You

I've had so much fun podcasting, and giving a one day workshop for the Writer's Center on podcasting for writers, that I just turned my notes into an ebook: Podcasting for Writers & Other Creative Entrepreneurs (Dancing Chiva). Ten "easy peasy" steps to getting your unique podcast on-line-- and reaching your listeners. It will be available on Kindle next week, stay tuned (and iBook edition to come). Meanwhile, the webpage has been updated with the on-line introduction.

Apple has recently introduced a new podcast app-- look for podcasts to surge in 2013.
More reading:
>Dylan Love on The Best Podcast Apps Apple is Hiding from You
>Geoffrey Goetz on The Best of the Rest of iOS Podcasting Apps

P.S. My podcasts are all here. Listen in anytime. My iTunes podcasts updated here.

New iBook: Los Visitantes ~ Una visita a Todos Santos

New in the iBookstore is Los Visitantes, the Spanish translation by the wonderful Bertha Ruiz de la Concha of chapter 2 "The Visitors," from my travel memoir, Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico.


>>Miraculous Air is available in a paperback edition from Milkweed Editions
>>and a Kindle edition.

An iBook edition of the whole enchilada is coming soon.

SCREENSHOT FROM IBOOK EDITION

Also in the iBook store:

From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion

The Building of Quality

Madam Mayo Now Available on Kindle Blogs; A Note on the Evolution of Blogs

If you're a Kindle fan, now you can read Madam Mayo via Whispernet. Yet another brick falls from the edifice of Publishing As We Know It. When I started out as a writer more years a go than I'll admit (OK, it was in the Clinton Administration), my goal, apart from writing books, was to publish in large circulation magazines and newspapers, which I did, in fact, at first. I placed a piece in the LA Times and another in the Wall Street Journal; and also stories, essays, and poems in passels of literary journals from the Kenyon Review to the Paris Review. But that was then and this is now and now I just wanna blog-- and publish digital Kindle and iBook editions of longer, more formal essays and books.

But back to the blog. I started "Madam Mayo" back in March of 2006, more as a playful adventure than serious endeavor. How I relished not having to bother with query letters and editors! And I thought the blog's format, provided by blogger.com, looked mighty nice. It was remarkably different from maintaining a webpage-- bloggers read each other, commented on each others' pages and oh, it was jazzy what the search engines picked up.

Soon I was fascinated, perhaps even addicted to blogging. My blog's archive shows 211 entries that year. In 2007, I hopped up to 295 entries and in 2008, whoosh, up to 311.

Everything seemed yeasty and weird; this was, after all, the moment when not only blogging exploded, but YouTube, podcasting, Facebook, and Twitter took off. It was also a moment when I was actively promoting three books, hear ye, hear ye:

Mexico: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press)
Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California (Milkweed Editions)
The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire (Unbridled Books)

Not to mention a literary magazine and my various writing workshops both at the Writer's Center outside DC and with Dancing Chiva in Mexico City.

But blogging at such a pace proved too much. In 2009, I began to cut back, with only 217 entries. By 2010 I had settled on a policy of Mondays only-ish and with guestbloggers, when available, on Wednesdays. By 2011 I was down to 140 posts for the year, and throughout this year I've averaged some 5 - 7 posts per month until-- what happened?-- I was back up to 13 for the month of September!

What happened was I'd seen a newspaper columnist somewhere assert that cyberflanerie is dead. Mangos! That's what my blog is, except when it's not-- lists of all the peculiar, fascinating, informative links I've surfed, for your surfing pleasure.

In sum, blogging is still so new a genre I'm still, after after more than six years, trying to get my mind around it.

I was trying to get my mind around it as far back as day one in 2006, and I blogged frequently on the topic for about two years. (In 2008, I made an archive of those posts as "Gone to the Litblogs"
< http://madammayo.blogspot.com/2007/06/gone-to-litblogs-archive.html  >)

Here's the blog post from June 13, 2007
Gone to the Litblogs: Narrowcasting and Notes Towards a Taxonomy

Dinner conversation this evening with my amiga K., a DC writer who works in a media organization, about blogging. K. says the successful ones are narrowcasting, i.e., aiming a highly specific blog at a highly specific audience. Indeed: in the litblog world, a good example would be Wendi Kaufman's The Happy Booker, which focuses on news in literary Washington DC and environs. Novelist Leslie Pietrzyk's Work in Progress focuses on, yes, work in progress. In the news world--- for example, for news on Iraq--- a blog I often check in on is Informed Comment, in which University of Michigan Professor of Middle Eastern History Juan Cole offers a daily summary of and commentary on the news in the Middle East. They may not be the end all of the All on this Subject, but between Juan Cole and Col Pat Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis, I get a better sense of what's going on in Iraq than from reading, say, the Washington Post. For example, last week, when Turkish troops invaded Iraq, to get a sense of what this meant, I skipped the papers and went immediately to these two blogs because (1) both Juan Cole and Col Pat Lang are highly knowledgable about this subject and (2) their blogs often go into far more depth than scant newsprint can. (Though now and again, Col. Pat Lang dips into movie reviewing and showcasing excerpts of his civil war novel...) But back to the litblog world: for literary travel writing, another excellent example of narrowcasting would be World Hum. What of Madam Mayo? I'd put this blog in the category of a Individual Artist Blog. It's about my work and what interests me, as an artist. Some other blogs in said category: David Byrne (musician), Margaret Cho (comedian),Moorish Girl (writer Laila Lalami), Coffee with Ken (Kenneth Ackerman, the writer/ historian/ lawyer). Last thought: It occurs to me that few people over the age of 30 have heard the term "narrowcasting." K. said the under 30s in her office didn't recognize the phrase "Drink the Kool-Aid." Interesting juxtaposition. Possibly meaningless. More anon.

UPDATE: In Clusterfuck Nation--- a hybrid (as per my defintions) of Narrowcasting (comments on current events as related to his book The Long Emergency) and Individual Artist Blog--- Jim Kunstler writes, that this is "a society of envious slobs deluded into thinking that they could become the next Trump if only the Baby Jeezus would whack them over the head with a sock-full of silver dollars." That's pretty much the tone throughout. Post up, bingo, 193 comments.

I never did take my own advice, if it was that. Madam Mayo is about anything and the kitchen sink but narrowcasting.

Funny, these days I don't follow that many litblogs (though I do maintain a hearty blogroll, as you'll see over to the right). Over morning coffee, after a browse through the New York Times and the FT,  if I feel the urge to peek  at the tottering zombie show that is the Euro, I'm most apt to check in with Swiss Miss, the Swiss designer in NYC, who offers such luscious photos and links celebrating good design, or the blog by Rose Rosetree, my favorite aura reader (her aura reading books are gold for any novelist, by the way), or marketing guru Seth Godin for his pithy and soulful advice du jour. But I was and am and will be a litblogger, blogging about books and all the wacky stuff that goes -- or might go into-- into mine. So stay tuned for more about Marfa, Texas, Cabeza de Vaca, biographies, the dead and undead, podcasts, guestblogs, and cyberflanerie galore. And book reviews, of course. One of these days I just might even come up with another book.

---> Sign up for your Kindle delivery here.

More from the Kindle store:

The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

Miraculous Air

The Building of Quality (short story with interview)

From Mexico to Miramar or, Across the Lake of Oblivion (long travel essay)

Spiritist Manual: The Secret Book by Francisco I. 
Madero, Translated and Introduced by C.M. Mayo




More anon.