Firstly, an apology. This should have been sent out sooner. Life issues, and illness got in the way as usual.
The long awaited John Silence / Carnacki Kickstarter is not only live, it has easily made its target. Most importantly, It has less than two days left to run as I write this! Simply click the image to go there.
Why should you bother? The Kickstarter editions of Belanger books aren't the same as the regular versions you can order from Amazon. They're limited to backers only.
In the case of the Carnacki book, especially the hardcover, Belanger will be relinquishing all rights back to Cathaven Press once the Kickstarter is done, and we'll be publishing our own version in paperback only, with a different cover.
Check out the current number of backers who've elected to receive the hardbacks, or indeed the paperbacks... That hardcover of 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki, the Untold Stories, with that gorgeous Bob Freeman cover, is set to be a very rare collectable!
Full disclosure: I will be ordering a number of copies of all three Belanger hardcovers and paperbacks to sell mail order, and at conventions, but only within the UK! Shipping to the USA, and elsewhere would put the price through the roof. If you can't back the Kickstarter you'd be better buying the two SILENCE volumes direct from Belanger, or Amazon when they're available. I'm afraid you simply won't be able to get the Carnacki book.
Once the Belanger version of the Carnacki book is gone, it's gone, but we'll then publish the Cathaven Press edition, with a new cover by Adam Benet Shaw, which will be available on Amazon.
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In other news, we'll be uploading Miss Linwood Entertains, by John Linwood Grant to KDP within the next couple of days.
John has always resisted allowing any of his own work to appear in anything he edits, including OCCULT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE, so I'm really proud to have the honour of publishing this new collection of his stories.
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The Amos Jelkie collection proceeds apace. I hope to have it in formatting within the next week.
Who is Amos Jelkie you ask?
I think the best thing I can do is copy the first paragraph from Roy Bayfield's excellent article on Amos Jelkie, which we featured in OCCULT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE #11.
Can this be? One of the earliest occult detectives, overlooked since the 1890s, only now emerging back into the light? The accepted chronology, repeated in countless articles and anthology introductions, casts Flaxman Low as a seminal figure: Mike Ashley has called him ‘the first authentic ghost hunter in fiction’.
The Low stories by E. and H. Heron (Katherine O’Brien Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard) appeared in a series of stories published in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898 and 1899. So finding a set of tales about a ‘detective and spirit-layer’ appearing slightly more than a year earlier, in 1896 and 1897, is an interesting development to say the least. May we introduce you to Amos Jelkie, the obscure accursed ‘ghost-hunter’ who appeared in eight stories in The Halfpenny Marvel, written by the equally-obscure Sydney Chambers. Was Jelkie, rather than Low, the real first occult detective? Or should he be added to the pantheon of precursors, as a long-hidden colleague of the likes of Sheridan LeFanu’s Martin Hesselius, Arabella Kenealy’s Lord Syfret and Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing? Or was he something else entirely?
My first thought was simply to reprint all of the original stories, which were public domain, and would cost us nothing, thus providing a way to bring in some extra money to support OCCULT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE.
However, there weren't all that many stories, so I asked I.A. Watson if he fancied writing a pastiche to fill out the book.
He wrote four, plus a bible for the use of any future authors who might want to add to the canon!
He, as I expected, did an exemplarary job, and with the addition of an introduction by Gavin Saunders, and cover, plus clean-up work on the original illustrations, it's looking to be a very nice package indeed.
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OCCULT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE #12 is coming. Once it's out, we'll finally announce an open call for #13. Please don't submit any stories until that happens.
On the other hand, we always need book reviews. Reviews of fairly current books, are greatfully received at any time. I'm afraid we can't afford to pat for reviews, but you will get a pdf copy of the issue your review appears in.
We're planning an OCCULT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE FOLK HORROR SPECIAL, and we're actively looking for reprints only for that. We pay a flat reprint rate of £25 for any stories we use, which should be 5000 words plus.
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One final piece of news: We've pulled all of our publications from Kindle Unlimited. Frankly, the bulk of our sales are paperbacks, and when I calculated how much we made on page reads for a whole issue, the results were pitiful. I decided that I'd rather be free to sell the books on sites other than Amazon.
This was followed by Draft2Digital's announcement that they needed to finance the vast amount of work it will take to clear out the endless influx of AI slop, and so they're going to charge a fee to list books with them. As with most people, I could see the sense in this, and didn't object... BUT: they've decided to put all the costs on those who can afford it least. In a typical big business move, publishers and authors who have good sales, and could absorb this extra charge easliy won't have to pay. It's just those for whom this charge would cause real problems who will be expected to pay for something that will benefit all users. This tends to suggest that Draft2Digital don't really want to support the small guys, in fact they'd rather they just went away.
The upshot is, whether we could afford it or not, Cathaven Press won't be putting any books on that platform until they reverse this grossly unfair decision.
I think that'll do for now.
Dave Brzeski
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