I’ve heard from my publishers about how the sale of my latest books are going, and so far so good. Sales are brisk on Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Witchcraft and Wicca, though not as high as I might hope, since many people who would buy it bought the earlier edition (Witchcraft: A Concise Guide) a year or two ago. The Pagan Man: Priests, Warriors, Hunters, and Drummers seems to be hitting its stride as word of mouth advertising is spreading the buzz among Pagan men that there’s a book focused on them for a change.
Most exciting to me, however, is the evidence that Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Druidism is selling very rapidly, especially online. It’s been in the 50Ks in sales rank at BarnesandNoble.com, at Amazon.com, and at Amazon’s foreign outlets, which is fairly high for a non-Wiccan book on a Pagan topic. I attribute the rise in sales rank in part to the fact that Amazon had it listed as available for two weeks before it reverted to saying it wasn’t out yet (the “official” release date is August 31st). Considering that there has been only one review of it published online (at the RDNA Druid magazine site “A Druid Missal-any”) and none at the online bookstores, these are pretty amazing sales!
Of course, I won’t actually make any more money from these books for six or nine months, but don’t let that stop you from getting your own copies before the first run printings sell out. (For more info on these and other books of mine, please visit our Books Page, where you will find links for reviews and purchases, including the purchase of autographed copies.)
As soon as Phaedra and I finish writing Real Energy, we’re going to start on an update to Real Magic, as well as my Poisoned Waters and Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Neopaganism. That should keep me busy for a while!
Looking forward to the Real Magic update and … what will Poisoned Waters be about?
Poisoned Waters: How Ancient Gnostic Dualism Corrupts Decision Making Today is a politically and culturally focused book aimed at the general public. It will be the full-sized version of the hobby horse that I’ve been riding for thirty or forty years. It will include a history of black-and-white thinking patterns and show how they impact current American cultural and political contests. I’ll publish it as an ebook, even if not as a treebook.
Now that ought to be fascinating.
I do think it takes knowing the roots and tracing them in order to really shake things up, heal, and make increasingly better choices.
Wow! That’s great! I just finished read Essential today in the park, and started in on Real Magic. This new book sounds very exciting too; I’ve referred people to you as a good source of arguments against dualism but a single collected reference will really help.
I found Essential nice. The first part is a sociological overview of the past, debunking the myths (a good reference to have on hand!), and then you smoothly move into the current state of affairs. The inclusion of the neatly formatted ritual steps and the two essays at the back alone almost make it worth the price.
I am curious though, you recommend some books in the appendix that are known to have bad scholarship (or at least, you or one of the essayists mention that). Was this intentional?
I’d promote you vehemently to my pagan friends if I had any.
I figure that if I have warned people about a book’s flaws in the main text, listing it in the Bibliography and Recommended Reading List doesn’t imply 100% approval. There are some books, however flawed, that modern Druids should be familiar with.
Nice thought. You make a good scholar, a nice antidote to all the simply bad info floating around elsewhere, which I suppose you already knew.
I also want to thank you for defining theurgy and thaumaturgy for me. I been aware for some time that one of them–magic and not mysticism–is the main attraction for me, but I could never put a word to it.