LETHAL JOURNEY
Historical Fiction

Noir 1892 Thriller

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

From Last Week: Assisted Publishing Is Still A Form of Vanity. True Self-Publishing is Publishing, Period. Publishing is a business like any other. You create a product and put it in a nice wrapper (the Package) so potential readers will like it and buy a copy. That's the whole magillah from A to Z. Baffled scribblers have never been more likely prey for bottom-feeding sharks than today. It's not enough to be a self-publisher today. Assisted Publishing (as I call getting fleeced by golden-tongued middlemen, who take your money and deliver mediocrity that won't sell) is the latest wrinkle in a publishing industry already filled with sharks for generations. In this series of articles, starting today, I will discuss the rudiments of Do It Yourself (DYI) so you can avoid outrageous middle persons or bottom feeders who are forever trawling around your wallet, and have nothing to offer that you cannot do yourself. Next week, we'll start looking at the components of successfully producing an effective Package to the trade.

Fugue: Losing Victim Words. For many years, if you didn't 'get published' (passive voice), you might either realize you were 'no good,' or try doing it yourself (which made you even more 'no good'). This was widely propagandized by the Big Six and their acolytes as despicable, stupid, ridiculous, and somehow heretical. Such propaganda is disproven by the very existence of this magazine, Publishing Industry News (PIN), and its series of articles on famous authors forced to publish their own work (Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, and many others). In fact, let's note how authors who publish their own work are still called 'self-published.' Notice the passive-voice-creep. You're 'self-published' versus 'published,' which anchors the 'real thing' on the Big Six (where one in a million passively 'got published' and the rest had their lives thrown away in a slash-and-burn industry that should have been illegal because it was a crime against humanity; by which I include their ubiquitous practice of stealing 'all rights, in all formats currently existing or yet to be invented, for all eternity.' Getting closer to reality, let's call it self-publish, self-publisher, self-publishing—anything but 'self-published' as if you are your own passive victim. It's victim terminology. Let's lose the passive voice and move on to DYI.

Do It Yourself (DIY) versus Do It To Yourself (DITY). In our journey to arrive at successful, proactive publishing, we have at least three critical junctures to roar through with our train of thought.

1. We learn that publishing your own work is amazingly inexpensive, and we do not need bottom feeding middle persons to fleece us on our journey.
2. We lay aside the passive voice and understand we truly can do it ourselves. We throw overboard victim terminology like 'vanity' and 'self-published' (passive voice) and become authors who publish our own work.
3. Now here comes the really critical point. Know when to seek help. But don't do it because you are afraid, or seek an easier path—and some smooth-talking sales person has talked you into a 'really great package' that is 'affordable' at $600 or $3,800 or whatever. Remember, nobody loves or understands your book like you do, and you owe it to yourself to take the time and effort to learn what is really quite a simple process. The caveat is that, as a business person, you have to know when to bring in skilled help—but as hired help, not as your 'publisher.' A good example is Walt Whitman, this week's featured self-publisher, who had worked in the printing trade and understood the nuts and bolts. Whitman even typeset his own book in wood-and-metal galleys, the same technology used in the 1450s by Johannes Gutenberg, who used an old wine press; hand-made type and galley compositing (letterpress printing) were normal methods before the 1884 invention of linotype.

The Horse versus the Automobile. I got my start in digital publishing fifteen years ago (1996) when there was not yet e-commerce, when the establishment firmly believed that Amazon would fail because it was not 'correct' or 'orthodox,' and digital novels were still considered 'not real books' even by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. I was a believer in digital publishing from the very start. As a corollary, looking at the expected economies—including no more paper, no more ink, no more typesetting, no more inventory, no more transportation, no more retail shelf costs—I readily concluded that print publishing has no future. We were dealing in metaphors at the time, and discussions abounded. Is digital going to be the new television, which did not replace movies? Is digital going to be the new movies, which did not replace stage plays (although movies reduced stage plays to a minority conoisseur art form, almost like opera). My metaphor was the horse versus the automobile, and I think today's trend vindicates my vision. In my 1886 parable, a neighbor sees Mr. Daimler polishing his new contraption outside his barn, and asks him what it is. "Why it's an automobile," says Mr. Daimler. "In the future, everyone will own one. It will replace the horse in people's work and leisure activities." The neighbor guffaws. "Horses have been around since the Stone Age. No steaming, belching contraption will ever replace the horse." He adds, eyeballing a parked buggy. "Well, you know, our gadget might be useful to back the buggy up to the horse's rear end." Within a generation, Henry Ford was mass-producing automobiles—and when was the last time you or I ever rode a horse to work? But wait, there's more.

Passing the Hat, Printing your own Money. The point I want to emphasize here, in these time travel journeys to 1886 or 1996, is that DIY can become DITY without a pragmatic and realistic mindset. Remember, publishing is a business like any other, not a divine mystery presided over by gurus and shamans. Books are products, just like shoes, toilet paper, or wooden hunting ducks that someone manufactures and ships to a store for sale. Back in the 1990s, there was no e-commerce. The only common standard was early HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). Eager innovators began learning how to apply the product flow of the print industry. E-commerce appeared in the form of Paypal and one or two digital wallet concepts. Demand drives development. There obviously was a pent-up demand for this paradigm shift from the horse to the car, from the print book to the digital book. The economics of publishing favor digital on all fronts. Horses were beautiful, but they were wild animals at heart, and often went on rampages—not because they are stupid, but because their handling by humans often isn't natural to their evolutionary instincts. Horses and elephants did not evolve to pull carts or carry people. The out-of-control buggy was a staple of heroic fiction, especially Westerns. From earliest movies on, a handy plot element was to have the hero save the damsel by galloping his horse after her runaway cart, leaping through the air, and leaning to one side while holding the reins for a long favoring shot, and authoritatively going "Who-aaaah." Likewise, the print book can be an objet d'art, but it is inefficient and overly costly for mass manufacturing and distribution. It was time, in the 1990s, for the great paradigm shift, and here it is. But in 1996, you had to do it all yourself. I was the first person ever, on earth, to publish entire proprietary novels. We talked about figuring out ways to earn money from our work, but initially gave text away for free. It was the platinum age, when the scum of the earth had not begun hacking, phishing, or virusing. People were delighted with the new way of reading books, and actually sent us thank-you notes and raves from every continent except Antarctica. Some authors used the Internet to try a kind of organ-grinder concept, a virtual 'hat' into which readers could toss virtual 'coins' (usually, send a check sent by mail). We did everything shy of printing our own money. You did it all yourself. And that was great. And that was a real problem…

DIT and DITY: Know the Difference. The more stuff you do for yourself, the better off you'll be—if you learn the difference between Doing It Yourself, and Doing It To Yourself. As I mentioned, in the early days, we had to do everything ourselves. We thought of inventing e-commerce before it was invented. And that brings up this key point: how were we realistically going to become bankers, on top of the all-consuming task of being writers? Obviously, it ain't gonna happen. Or if it does, we won't do it well. Therein lies the major point of this article. Once you get over the victimization of 'getting published' (fleeced), and you decide to become your own business person-publisher, the next step is to know your limits. When I published my first commercial book, a slim volume called How To Balance Your Checkbook, back around 1982, a local distributor gave me this advice: "Don't try to do it all yourself. Let the experts in each profession do their best job for you. Concentrate on what you know best: writing." He was absolutely right. My book flopped. One acid-tongued bank manager who reviewed it told me: "It will never sell. The very people who need your book most don't read books and will never buy a copy." No advice is ever 100% correct, but he accurately predicted the less than stellar sales picture. But a manager at my work place offered these comforting words before that plane ever crashed. He said: "I have a millionaire friend. I asked him what the secret of success is. He told me 'You have to fail at least ten times, but if you say with it, you'll succeed eventually—on the eleventh time, on the hundredth time, whatever it takes." Obviously, none of us want to go through that many hard knocks. That's why we turn to those who are more experienced than we are—and avoid those who talk a good game, but actually just know a few buzz words, don't know much more than we do, and will never invest the love and care in our business (publishing is a business!) that we will. Whether you start a flower shop, a vacuum cleaner store, or publish your own books, you are in business for real. In what business do you imagine staying home, not bothering to learn the business, and paying large sums of money to smooth operators who will run your business for you? The answer is obvious—down the tube—with an R.I.P. that reads: nobody will ever understand or love your book like you do. It's like raising children. One person's darlings are another person's monsters to be avoided. One person's business is another person's nightmare, to be avoided like the plague, unless they can fleece you before delivering either nothing or something so mediocre you might as well never have done it. That's what we call 'doing it to yourself.'…

Doing It To Yourself (DITY). Now let's say you oscillate all the way to the other end of the spectrum. You decide to do everything yourself. Your original instinct may have been to say "I have no idea what I'm doing, so I'll trust somebody else to do everything for me." In effect, that's more of 'getting published,' wherein the author usually has no clue what the alleged shamans are doing. But now you realize it's possible to publish an e-book for free into all the major outlets (Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc) and to publish a print-on-demand (POD) book for under $100. Whether you 'get published' by the Big Six, or publish your own (DIY), you must care and dare, you must learn the industry for yourself, and you must treat it like a business rather than a frivolous puzzle. So first you have reached the point where you've had enough rejections from the Big Six and the bottom feeders in their industry. It's great if you 'get published,' but there are hundreds of thousands of writers competing for each 'get published' slot, and you will eventually stop banging your head on that wall which has no doors for most people. Next, you consider the vanity method (not learning the business, spending a lot of money for nothing, and ending up with boxes of unsellable books in your garage). Or you try its digital/POD equivalent, what I call Assisted Publishing, whereby some mediocre company with smooth sales people sells you a 'package' for hundreds or thousands of dollars. About a quarter million books will be published this year, most of them by authors themselves, and you can count on one hand (maybe) the number that will ever appear on any sort of best-seller list. These include some darn good books, written by authors with promise, but lost in the blender of Assisted Publishing. Your title, marketing image, marketing blurbs, and opening page(s) cannot be 'good' or 'okay' or 'nice' or even 'great.' They must be effective. You should not trust anyone blindly to manage this process for you, because if they knew the 'secret,' they'd have become millionaires on their own book already. Plus, nobody loves your book like you do. To be an entrepreneur and go all the way, you have to take charge of the process from A to Z. It's still no guarantee you'll be the next John Locke or Amanda Hocking, but it gets you a good part of the way there. For every Walt Whitman, Beatrix Potter, or Virginia Woolf, no doubt 10,000 self-publishing authors sold no more than a few copies. Many have lost money. With Assisted Publishing on the vanity or subsidy side, you can lose a lot of money. If you go the more entrepreneurial and therefore cheaper route (using a local printer, but more effectively, a company like Ingram's LightningSource or Amazon's Createspace) your loss is usually trivial, and can often be made up over time. In the parlance of the Big Six, entrepreneurs who did not achieve gate-keeper approval, and at least short-lived midlist sales, were ridiculed as being 'no good' and having 'failed.' In the real world, outside the Ironic Curtain of the Big Six and their total monopoly, none of these people failed; they were happy with what they did, and they achieved some modest, realistic success. Hopefully they sold all or most of their modest print run. Even today, many such books achieve some local success as family chronicles, or local tour guides, or histories of a town or village. Many endure in one or two treasured local library or museum copies. Most people will be content with modest sales, once they get past limitless and starry-eyed fantasies. If an author's sales are modest but they are steady, that sometimes takes the author about as far as the average midlist author selected for an investment gamble in the Big Six slash-and-burn industry.

Method to the Madness. Now this may seem to go in circles, but there is a method to this madness. Once you depart from 'Assisted Publishing'—where you do the unconscionable and turn your business over to some stranger and pay an unhealthy price; said middle person or bottom feeder being almost guaranteed to help you fail—you then take charge of your operation. Now your choices are stark, but they are no different than if you trust middlemen, be they the Big Six or Doktor Divertimenta (diverts your money to her wallet). Ultimately, it all boils down to one thing: will the customer buy your product? Will lots of customers buy your product? The Big Six fail about 50% of the time; theirs is a numbers game, though they collectively have generations of experience. Doktor Divertimento will fail just about 100% of the time. Remember, buy or not buy is binary. There is no half-way measure, just as you can only be dead or alive, or pregnant or not pregnant. It's one of those stark yes-or-no, black-or-white situations in the cosmos. You need to not just have a 'nice' cover but an effective cover. Effective means it does its job in helping many customers buy your product. You do not need to create great art or great anything, though one hopes you believe your book is great. That's the raspberry center; the rest is all donut. As an entrepreneur, DIY, you have to make entrepreneurial decisions. Nobody can make them for you. You have to pick the right title, the right cover or marketing image, the right marketing blurbage. Yes, someone can convince you they know better, often at a price, but will that be effective? Many of the boilerplate covers I see coming from expensive Assisted Publishing middlemen are mediocre. Maybe there is an effective one sprinkled among the off-the-shelf cover products they offer. But will it sell copies? That's the million dollar question, and like all of life's most important questions, if you do find an effective advisor, you are lucky. It's worse in POD, because it costs more, and you can wind up with boxes of books in your garage if they talk you into into your wallet that far. Assisted Publishing leads to doing it to yourself. "But I'm not a cover artist," you rightfully protest…

Do It Yourself (DIY). Now this may seem to go in circles, but there is a method to this madness. Once you depart from 'Assisted Publishing'—where you do the unconscionable and turn your business over to some stranger for a healthy price, who is almost guaranteed to help you fail—you then take charge of your operation. Now your choices are stark, but they are no different than if you trust middlemen, be they the Big Six or Doktor Divertimenta (diverts your money to her wallet). Ultimately, it all boils down to one thing: will the customer buy your product? Will lots of customers buy your product? The Big Six fail at least 50% of the time. Doktor Divertimento will fail 99% of the time or worse. Remember, buy or not buy is binary. There is no half-way measure, just as you can only be dead or alive, or pregnant or not pregnant. It's one of those stark yes-or-no, black-or-white situations in the cosmos. You need to not just have a 'nice' cover but an effective cover. Effective means it does its job in helping many customers buy your product. You do not need to create great art or great anything, though one hopes you believe your book is great. That's the raspberry center; the rest is all donut. As an entrepreneur, DIY, you have to make entrepreneurial decisions. Nobody can make them for you. You have to pick the right title, the right cover or marketing image, the right marketing blurbage. Yes, someone can convince you they know better, often at a price, but will that be effective? Many of the boilerplate covers I see coming from expensive Assisted Publishing middlemen are mediocre. Maybe there is an effective one sprinkled among the off-the-shelf cover products they offer. But will it sell copies? That's the million dollar question, and like all of life's most important questions, if you do find an effective advisor, you are lucky. It's worse in POD, because it costs more, and you can wind up with boxes of books in your garage if they talk you into into your wallet that far. Assisted Publishing leads to doing it to yourself. "But I'm not a cover artist," you rightfully protest…

So How Do You Do It Yourself (DIY) Para 1? My grandmother was a brilliant mathematician who taught me some valuable things before she died all too young, of cancer, at 54. To solve a problem, she taught me, you break it into its parts. That's what we are doing here…

Summing the Parts; the Whole is Greater. I have already mentioned the principal parts. Each of these must be effectivein the specific sense that they hasten your book along to a sale. Here are the parts again. These constitute what I call an Effective Package.

1. A great story, with an opening that grabs readers. You should write short stories and see what works, and then apply what you learn to longer works.
2. Forethought and Planning—I suggest starting with short pieces that you can sell online for 99 cents. Learn how to take what you are good at, and bend it, shape, morph it into something that many readers will want to buy. Write what you know, but figure out the slant that people will be excited to buy.
3. A great title that is appropriate to the topic, and grabs the potential buyer. Since the book color and the title are the two first things the reader sees, make sure they are right for the job. The key word: effective.
4. A great and effective marketing image. This is a science in itself. Great art and art that sells books are often not the same thing. Nuance is everything. As with the marketing blurb, you're not out to tell the story. You do that in the interior text itself. The marketing image makes a promise and sets a mood. It should be 'truth in advertising' (e.g., don't promise Anna Karenina but deliver Keyholes to Lust, or some such thing) but feel free to bend it, shape it, manipulate it so the cover does its work in a single glance.
5. Marketing blurbs generally should be short. The shorter the better. Again, you're not out to tell the story (which the interior text does) but to tell something about the story. As with the marketing image, it's all about setting a tone, making a promise, and intriguing the reader.
6. If the reader is still with you, they'll open the book. Usually, they'll read the first page or two before making the buy/not buy decision. The old adages about starting with a gripping hook are true as ever. In fact, there is nothing really different about a digital story versus a print story. In a similar manner, there is no difference between a person riding a horse and buggy versus a person arriving in a six-cylinder sedan. It's the bottle that's different. The wine it contains is what it is, no matter what glass container used to hold it.
7. But what about marketing? My premise is that the unknown author should be able to succeed on the strengths of the several points just mentioned. Yes, if you are famous (a basket ball star, a movie star, even a famous criminal) the public will pay a lot more attention to you. The media thrive on notoriety to sell head views (TV, radio, print, digital, games, etc.). If you don't have that kind of notoriety, you can start by telling a great story and offering it in an effective package. If your ultimate goal is to 'get published,' once you demonstrate to the business investors of the Big Six and other media that people care about your product, they'll break their necks climbing all over each other for a piece of the action on a sure deal. But if you made it that far, it's almost astonishing to ask: "So why bother 'getting published?' The fact is, of the many bestselling authors I have met, every one of them will tell you that 'getting published' successfully requires an active author who understands the industry. You cannot escape it. You must learn the ropes and act like a business person.

So How Do You Do It Yourself (DIY) Para 2? As a business entrepreneur, marketing your Effective Package, you have to make an important decision along each step of the way (as opposed to blindly turning your money and your manuscript over to Doktor Divertimenta). Should I pay someone to format my text, or can I learn to do it in Word, using Styles, or some other word processing software? Should I composit my own cover, or pay an effective artist to create an effective cover that's not just 'okay' or 'good' or 'great' but one that does the job? Can I write a marketing blurb that's just perfect (effective), or should I hire someone? I would add that it goes without saying most sensible people will get an outside editor to read their text to clean up typos, malapropisms, gaffes, and other imperfections. Is your opening effective toward selling copies? Taking these things, step by step, you are not blindly trusting in some expensive Assisting Publisher. You are in charge, making each entrepreneurial business decision one step at a time. Don't overreach beyond your effective capabilities. Maybe you can't paint or draw, or do anything with PhotoShop, but you trust your own judgment about what works or doesn't work in a cover. Find an existing cover, print or digital, that comes closest to the one you think will work on your book, and show it to an artist you trust will create not just a 'good' cover, but an effective one. And so on. This is DIY publishing, whereas blindly trusting the purveyors of the B or C Package ($243 or $2,500) at Yoo-Hoo 'Press' is what we can safely call DITY. The author may or may not have written a good or great book. The DITY author chose not to take control from the start, and so let others create a Package from some cookie cutter mold they are selling, and thus had no control over whether the book was successful—most likely not, given the competition, and the abysmal track record of vanity or subsidy middle-persons. If you end up feeling you 'failed,' let it be because you made all the critical design, manufacturing, and retail decisions. You'll learn from the process, as opposed to remaining angry, bitter, and confused for the rest of your life. There is no freedom in this world like failing due to your own blindness, because you become wiser and smarter for the next try. If, conversely, you choose DITY, you'll never know why nobody bought your book; and, had you been on top of the game, you'd not only figure out why, but how to make the next (inexpensive) gamble more successful.

Final Thoughts for Today. Even if you decide, "Hey, it's cheaper if I trust my money to Yoo-Hoo 'Press,' because I've struggled with Word Styles and I don't have ten years to learn how to effectively use PhotoShop," great. If you make that decision as an informed entrepreneur, knowing the business and having studied Yoo-Hoo's output for other writers, you are making your (considered) best decision under the circumstances as you best understand them. I put 'press' in half-quotes for a reason. Too many starry-eyed writers are looking for an imitation 'get published' experience. They may feel that Anaconda Publishing of Manhattan rejected their work, but now there are all these Assisting Publishers (the new vanity or subsidy publishers) like Yoo-Hoo, who make themselves look just like the Big Six—they are going to take charge of my publishing needs so I won't need to make the effort to learn a simple industry; they will make me rich, and pay me royalties.

(1) That's a laugh. The Big Six have enough trouble staying afloat. They are selective for one reason only. It's not because they don't recognize genius or greatness such as you possess (obviously). It's because it's all about the bottom line. They are investors who need to earn a substantial return on their money, and this is a tough business to do it in. A lot of the people working in the print industry are lovers of books or literature, but their job description has nothing to do with that, not really. Their job is to acquire and publish books that are a reasonable bet to sell the most copies. There are not enough book buyers/readers in the world. And the Big Six have budget, time, and resource constraints.

(2) For you to succeed, you need to think of yourself as Purple Potato Press, a small press publisher. You are not a 'get published' passive author; you are a proactive business person, and business people earn profits, not whatever royalties someone wants to throw them like a bone. There are at least 40,000 independent small presses in the U.S., including certain famous houses for poetry like Black Sparrow, or topical houses like Ten Speed or Four Doors Eight Windows, which tend to be gobbled up by Anaconda if they show they are making money. Think of yourself as a small press (not a vanity publisher, not 'self-published' in the passive voice, or Assisted). Be even smarter—Know Your Limits (KYL). Know when to farm out specific tasks, like cover art, a.k.a., marketing images, to someone who has a good track record of creating not 'nice' images, but effective images. More articles on the specifics of this will follow in the next few weeks.

(3) Publishers earn profits, not royalties. The more middlemen and women you cut out, the more profit you keep. Think of yourself as a full-fledged publisher, because the game is the same for everyone. Some of those pretend 'publishers' like Golden Fleece or Yoo-Hoo Press (you know whom I mean!) pay you pretend-royalties after soaking you (assuming there is anything left to pay). The almost purest form of what I recommend is Ingram's LightningSource wholly owned POD subsidiary. They treat you like a small press, not a 'get published' author. They offer a reasonable deal (under $100 to upload cover and text for a typical novel) and pay you your due business profit, not a 'royalty.' Unfortunately, my personal experience over ten years has been that they are obviously a huge player in the old print industry (Ingram, the parent company, being the largest wholesale distributor of books to the trade). My personal experience has been that their customer service is spotty at best, usually quite awful and destructive, because I eventually came to the inevitable conclusion that they still consider small press publishers fools and vanity dolts to be fleeced and laughed at. I have since moved most of my business to Amazon Createspace, where at least I can control all output as coming from one source (me), and not subject to sloppy distribution that can evidently never be fixed or killed, even though LSI makes serious mistakes. But that's my personal experience, and yours may be different. LSI is technically among the best in the business. These are the sorts of entrepreneurial decisions you make. Createspace still pretends to pay a 'royalty,' which is idiotic, and you should approach such gaffes with the undertanding that the entrepreneur must understand the business better than the middlemen. That's another reason to know your business, not trust snake-oil salespeople, and make informed decisions on every point. You are the CEO, the captain of the ship, and you have to be on the bridge calling the shots 100% of the time. In the New (digital) Publishing, anyone can succeed with a reasonable combination of eyes-open savvy, hard work, some luck, and a canny sense for what readers want to buy. Do it yourself, don't do it to yourself.

Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved

The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.

It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.

John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and plausibly explain it.

Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.