LETHAL JOURNEY
Historical Fiction

Noir 1892 Thriller

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

Should I Publish or Self-Publish? The question may seem a bit odd. If we have eliminated the Berlin Wall of the Big Six publishers in New York City and their crapshooting gate-keepers, why ask this question? Of course we're going to self-publish to avoid all that. Right? Actually, the choices are more complex than that. The sad fact is that, for the first decade of the digital and self-publishing phenomena (two different animals, since the existence of a temporary bandage called print-on-demand or POD has clouded the issue), a general lack of understanding of publishing has led to some hybrid and bastard solutions that keep most authors being victims rather than self-guided pioneers. In this article I will lay out the various alternatives so authors can make an informed decision. But first we need to understand the industry itself, whether we purvey our work in print, or digitally, or in that short-lived bandage for the dying print industry, called POD.

Active versus Passive. Do you 'get published' or do you 'publish?' Herein lies the crux of the subject. Much of this article hangs on this theme. In the Old (print) Publishing monolith, the average author was a passive player with no power. The author devoted his or her life to writing, as real authors invariably do (it's a Paleolithic instinct hard-wired into the genes, as we'll discuss another day). Real authors write, usually from childhood on, without any initial thoughts of getting paid or even reaching the imaginary huge audiences posited by the New York game. Notice I said 'the average author.' The advantage has always been to (a) the already successful author, created by a combination of talent and hard work typical of all real authors, and the production choices and marketing machinery of the Big Six; and (b) instant authors, those with some claim to notoriety or non-publishing success, be it the fallen politician, the darling of some political movement, a champion basketball player in orange hair and a woman's wedding dress, and so on. An 'author' of the latter type, most often a product of ghost writing, has a tremendous advantage over the unknown author. The shame of it is that, traditionally, for every rare author who makes it onto the bestseller list, thousands see their life's work destroyed, and their lives lived in vein (in a real way) because the gate keepers controlled the industry and would not permit them to even enter the casino of their gambling. Remember, nobody can predict a best-seller with much certainty, except that at least half the Big Names (a and b above) have a leg up.

Should I Publish or Self-Publish? Let's ask the question again, with these things in mind. What all the famous self-published authors in history did was to turn the passive 'get published' into 'screw you, I'll publish my own'. However, looking past the hype about starving artists in cock-roach infested garrets, which is part of the titillating mythos of graduate students in tweedy sweaters at brie and white wine teas, most self-publishers have died in the same oblivion as their 'published' confreres or consoeurs. This illustrates the fact that writing the book is only a first step, and publishing it is the second step. The third step, and biggest, is to learn whether we tailored our package just right, so that readers will start to buzz, and a steady seller is born. Notice I said package, not book. And I said steady seller, not bestseller. We can easily dismiss the second dream. The chances of selling 100,000 copies or more are slimmer than getting hit by lightning deep in a coal mine. The earlier point bears discussion. But first, we must reiterate again: the path from passive to active is a tough one. Life is tough. Business is tough. Business is heartless, in fact. We are taught, in business school, such dismal statistics as '95% of all business ventures fail within five years' and 'most businesses fail in their first year or two.'

Not a Book but a Package. When you write a book, if you are a real author, you derive joy from the very act of doing so. It is not a profession in which to plan on becoming rich. It is, in many ways, an avocation for dabblers and dreamers. We are primed up, learning about artists who starved in garrets. We are primed up to learn about self-published authors like James Joyce and Beatrix Potter, who overcame the obstacles created by the gate keepers of their day and became successful. In actuality, for every Beatrix Potter, tens of thousands of artists and authors labored in vain. They were shut out by the gate keepers. And the ultimate gate keeper is not some 22 year old, newly college-graduated, first reader at Anaconda Publishing—but book readers out in the general public. Whether we are selling umbrellas, chocolate bars, or sniffle remedies, the market place is univerally heartless and brutal. Expect no love there. But wait—there's more!

The Ultimate Marketing: Word of Mouth. I have met many successful authors. What every one of them has in common is a solid understanding of the market place, and a fierce drive to night and day self-promote. Nobody will do it for you. Almost. This is a bit tricky. First of all, take my words to the bank: the Holy Grail of publishing is that readers will discover your work, and start telling their friends. It's called Word of Mouth. That's what I mean by almost. Think of the math. Remember Six Degrees of Separation, the theory that every human being is separated from every other living human being on earth by at most six intervening persons? Think of the arithmetic alone: if each reader tells just two friends, you get a progression like this: (a) x=1; (b) x=3 (including the first person in the chain); (c) x=6; (d) x=12; (e) x=24...(n) x>1,000,000. That progression gets up there very quickly, in less than 20 steps. Once the numbers get that big, they double by the millions and tens of millions at each step. No matter how much money a publisher throws at a project, no matter now many talk shows they send the author onto, no matter if they have an advertising budget or not, a literary work must have that WOM factor, for Word of Mouth. Call it a Wow factor as well, since WOM is a Klein Bottle (endless loop) whereby the ending W in WOM turns upside down like the loop in a Klein Bottle to become the W in its eternal palindrome. Even the most successful writers, backed up by all the money and hype the print industry can muster, cannot succeed unless their work excites a WOW factor in readers. That phenomenon is free. The flip side, however, is that readers are so overloaded that you must grab them with the first sentence, both in the blurb that outlines you terribly exciting, can't live without it premise, and in your opening paragraphs.

What is Word of Mouth? Starts with Instant Spark. Word of mouth, as I long visualized it, should involve a scenario like this: in a diner one morning, two ordinary readers have coffee, and the one pushes a worn paperback across the table to the other. "I really enjoyed this book. I know you will, too." That's it—Word of Mouth, the Holy Grail. But there is more to WOM than just that. What is more essential, and preexists WOM—this you must grasp if you learn nothing else about publishing—is that there must be an instant spark in the reader at first sight. It has to happen in a nanosecond. There has to be an instant "Oh yeah, how did I ever live without this before?" It's the Big Bang of reader recognition. That is what you must have, in order to generate the heat and light to make your book go into critical mass. That is the primeval explosion that must happen with every reader in a reactive chain leading to millions of sales. But wait. The numbers are against each of us. This process needs a lot of breathing room between explosions, and a lot of random buildup time that no highly-paid Big Six marketing executive can accurately foretell. Dan Brown had about four average sellers (not very successful) before the world caught fire with The Da Vinci Code. The stellar career of Stephen King limped along in Bangor mobile home oblivion until some gate keeper in New York decided to gamble on Fire Starter. The latter was not a doctoral thesis or a Doctor Zhivago, but a simple premise instantly understandable to zillions of ordinary mortals: what if a bullied girl, a helpless and sympathetic victim, were to develop some superpower to defeat her cruel and despicable oppressors, who are the classic school yard Stalins and Hitlers of whom everyone grew up living in fear. Think about it. That's a scenario most people can identify with, because we have either lived its premise, or known someone who did. (Look at the link on Page One about the X-Men, and what the creator has to say about why the characters successfully draw people in.) Ultimately, the book you are publishing is not just story or a book, but a package. It must have at least these elements to be successful, as spelled out in every good book about writing fiction: we are immediately drawn in to a sympathetic but slightly larger than life hero(ine), who has a plausible and terrible problem, and we are instantly rooting for the hero(ine)'s success in surmounting the awful problem(s) which must be sufficiently big to be worthy of a book. Add to that a grabby and appropriate title, an effective and relevant cover image, and some succinct, grippy blurbage that propels us to page one…and you may just have a goodseller. I just made that up. The notion of a bestseller is one of the absurd hypes of the Big Six, since only a tiny handful out of at least a million aspiring, perspiring writers will ever reach the front list; but success can be measured in, say, an extra few hundred bucks a month for a young author to build a long-term investment account totaling a million bucks at retirement; or a nice Social Security supplement for the white-haired gang of delinquents. With the new digital industry, everything is on the table. The outlook for writers is vastly improved over the Manhattan gulag of old, which nurtured a handful of authors, while killing off, nipping in the bud, the competition that would surely have come from a million 'unpublished' and 'self-published' authors regardless of quality.

The Package. It is simple to describe, but nearly impossible to purposely create with certitude: the book as successful package. We can talk about how you should produce a story that really works (not for critics or graduate students, but for average readers). You must make sure it is properly line edited to eliminate gaffes and typos. You must make sure it has an effective cover (a vast topic in itself, which I'll broach another day). Avoid covers with rubbery looking Poser or DAZ figurines that scream 'amatuer!" (yes, I purposely misspelled amateur for emphasis). A flower seller (real life story, once seen along the Silver Strand in Coronado) can get away with painting Bokays $5 in brown and green paint on a broken piece of plywood. You the author and self-publisher cannot get away with such marketing. You must begin with professional standards before you even offer your wares. But then the real sell begins. The actual competition for scarce reader eyeballs kicks in. Our article today is less about that, than arriving at the sales counter with the correct attitude. You must not be passive and 'get published.' You must never think for a moment that, since self-publishing is a business, you can ever 'get self-published' or 'get read.' As a business person, you have to be firmly in control and understand the business. You must be an understander, a planner, a doer, a foreseeer, a visionary. Unfortunately, most of today's middlemen still offer passivity while taking your money.

Package Elements. I became active in digital publisher as early as 1996 (world's sixth digital publisher). I had a lot to learn, and I made every mistake in the book. I'm still not a millionaire, despite regular small paychecks dating back well over a decade. So I don't doubt that I still have a lot to learn. One of the thought-crimes of the print industry was to portray self-publishers as stupid people, with no professinal knowledge, who waste their money on doomed projects driven by mediocrity, heresy, even crimes against the ordained sacrosanctimony of the Big Six. But wait—many of us are in fact publishing professionals. As I mention the following, it is because I am representative of many man and women in this profession. Granted, there are lots of ignorant people pushing tedious and shallow text. It's always been like that. As a publisher, I bumped into too many of them before closing submissions at Clocktower Books indefinitely (though I may yet open again). Take me for example: I have three college degrees (BA in English, University of Connecticut at Storrs; BBA in Computer Information Systems, National University; and MS in Business Administration, Boston University). I speak several languages, have lived in several cultures and traveled extensively across half the world. I am well-read in both popular and classical literature. I have worked as a news reporter, science and history writer, and technical (aerospace, computer systems development) writer, editor, and trainer for decades. I have a degree in English and practical experience in journalism. I am a journeyman grammarian, with chops in English, German, and Classics. Why would anyone think of me (and people like me) as fools and ignorant dabblers? In many cases, people like me can put gate keepers under the table. The point is: those of us who do it well do so because we bring talent, training, and vision to the table. Many of us had the vision, years ago, to foresee the demise of the print soviet, when most people could not see past their noses. Okay, so you're a professional editor, writer, and publisher. Now what? You learn to do (or hire professionals) an attractive package. The primary components of this are covers, blurbs, title, and first page. You understand the mechanics of how people select their books: some variation of looking sequentially at title, cover image, blurbs, and first page. You know how to create all the subtle and subliminal cues (text flow, white space, etc) that at least don't turn a potential reader off, but probably whet their appetite for a well-crafted package that will excite their imagination and leave them feeling satisfied.

Excitement, Package, Then What? Now we come to the crux of today's discussion. We've already stressed that the initial spark of reader excitement, leading to Word of Mouth, is at the core of publishing success. In the old days of digital publishing online, before there was even commerce, it didn't matter if you had good pictures. Modems were slow, and pictures were too 'heavy' to download. Everyone lived with the expectation that, for now, it was a text-only medium. But 'now' has become 'then,' long ago, and a fully professional package is absolutely necessary at the best levels of the print industry. So how to do accomplish this? Do you 'publish' or 'get published?' How do you get past your lack of graphics ability, your lack of training in design or marketing, and so forth? My theme in all these articles is to stress self-publishing as the only real solution—whether you do the entire process yourself, as I have learned to do, or you hire professionals to do specific tasks. Anaconda Publishing Monolith usually hires blurb writers, book cover designers, artists, and other specifically trained professionals. Purple Potato Press has every potential to become as successful as Radium Hose in Manhattan, but you, the PPP Publisher, have to make yourself into an informed, fully functional publishing house. The key: stop being passive. Don't wait for people to do things for you, but proactively learn how it's done, and then go out and do it. If you can't do art, do what I do. I buy inexpensive stock photography from iStockphoto and fashion my own covers, often blending two or three photographs in some unique way to achieve a compelling effect. If you don't have talent to do that, no sweat; hire someone, perhaps a starving art student. Be proactive, find the way, and don't wait to 'get published.' In a more general sense, as a business person, you can't wait to 'get successful.' Publishing is a business, and you have to manage all the resources from the top down or the center outward. Passivity is one of the top killers of business startups. Study, learn, anticipate, do…wow, an acronym: SLAD. Has about all the appeal of a print book with tire tracks across it. But the idea is real.

Rights: Old Versus New. Many people do not understand rights, but you absolutely must. When you sit in your kitchen at home, and scribble a poem on a napkin, you automatically acquire the 100% bundle of (copy)rights to that work. You have fixed it in tangible fashion. What you do (highly, highly recommended) with the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress is not to 'obtain' rights or copyrights, but to officially register rights you already own from the moment of creation. (About that website: make sure you consult legitimate websites ending in .gov, because similar .com or .org sites many actually be billboards for lawyers or shysters seeking your money for services you can render unto yourself.) These rights are yours to do with as you wish. But in the bad old days, when print was the only game in town, if you were one of the lucky less than 1% to be 'accepted' for their casino gambles in business, they always bullied you and stole all your rights. You must never let anyone do that to you. Those people no longer control the game. Those authors will understand, who have been on the cruel and unusual downside of losing all their rights, seeing their book go out of print (OP), and never getting their rights back to try a fresh start; in real effect, their book was stolen from them forever. Print publishers got away with this, and it was assumed to be okay or right, because all Big Six did it—not because it was right, but because they could get away with it.

In the old days, you could only be 'legitimate' if a Big Six gate keeper decided you should 'be published' or 'get published.' The idea of publishing your own book was disparaged as a crime of stupidity so despicable as to never mention without a sneer. It was an idea along the same illogical, self-serving premise as proposing the 'socialist' notion that we should have health care for our tax money. Every other country worth a toot on earth has universal health care. We can afford it, and it's great. But it takes away the role of those worthless health denial companies who steal all the money while delivering nothing of any value. Because they own and operated the media, they are able to continue fostering the lie that health care (think about how blatantly stupid and illogical this is) is socialism and therefore un-American; or that having health care is what kills people, rather than not having it or not having enough of it, as is the case for most U.S. citizens today. In the same blatant, dishonest, and illogical way, it was okay to steal authors' rights for a song, forever and without recourse, and to deny millions of authors the right to get near readers. You have it in your power to overturn stupid, dishonest, and blatantly criminal practices like this. In the arena of publishing, the digital model promises to set you free if you'll just inform yourself and take charge. Not 'get published,' but as an independent business person. The business is as easy as running a kid's lemonade stand, at its heart. You make lemonade (manufacturing), you build a little stand at the curb (retail) and you sell lemonade for money (commerce).

Understand how the old business worked, knowing most of this is now out the window and obsolete, in your favor. The basic mechanism was this. If a print publisher wanted to roll the dice, thinking they could earn a decent return on their investment by offering your work to the public, they put you under contract. They were giving you a shot at their midlist, meaning there was a 50% chance you would lose money, and a 50% chance you would break even or earn them a little profit. Neither case would warrant ever publishing any book by you again. Most midlist authors either had one, two, or three titles, and if that grand random spark of mouthword didn't happen, you were history. You were out of print (OP). Your career was over, no matter how many years you spent and how many sacrifices you made. In planning for a smallish paperback (mass market, rack size) print run, Anaconda Publishers would offer you a small advance, and acquire (steal) all your rights—not just for the paperback printing, but in movies, T-shirts, ads on orbiting space stations, foreign book deals, etc. In owning your book totally, they effectively owned you, because they owned your career. They did this because fossilized industries (monopoly capitalism vs free enterprise) are often more driven by lawyers than by visionary CEOs. The game was to own as many rights (backlist) as possible, because the market valuation of a traditional print house is almost entirely driven by the extent of their backlist holdings. A house, like many digital ones, that only holds transitory rights (e.g., one year exclusive; first serial only; etc) is essentially worthless on the auction block. That is, however, the modern trend, as publishers (if they still have any role) now tend to acquire only the specific rights needed, not exclusive, with human termination clauses (at will by both parties after some small notice). And digital publishers have long paid high royalties, whereas print Luddites are still trying to squeeze blood from author turnips and smash down their traditional North Korean-style love (not!) hammers. Amidst all this came traditions like 'royalties.' Now think about it. If you are a publisher (for real, not just a vanity victim), why would you allow a middleman to exist who pays you 'royalties?' If you have a handle on the game, you are self-employed as an author and publisher, even if you just publish your own work. You are in business, and people in business do not receive royalties. They invest in their business, and if they earn a return on their money and time and efforts, they walk away with a *profit.*

Active versus Passive: Real Deal. The following paragraph mentions a business by name, and should be taken in the same spirit as any other personal opinion consumer review. I did business for ten years with Ingram's Lightning Source International (LSI) print on demand (POD) division, until I became so disenchanted with their abysmal, author-despising customer service standards that I walked away. Print is all but dead for me, anyway, so no loss. I mention Ingram by name because the operating premise of LSI is a shining example of great potential. Where I found LSI to fall down is that they seemed to me to cater to the Big Six (what surprise?), while simply collecting money from the very smallest (including self-) publishers without offering any follow-up on even simple matters, even to fix their own copious mistakes. In this sense, sadly, they are still vanity publishers. As instruments of the Big Six industry, they do not seem to see publishing as being more than six cartels in New York City. The small press tradition is older than that of the Big Six, and has always numbered in the tens of thousands. Whether you include self-publishers among small presses is moot. My Clocktower Books is the world's sixth oldest digital publisher, having published dozens of authors over the years, though I have my own books in the mix. Here's the point. If you are going to properly and fully be a self-publisher, you need to learn the publishing industry from the ground up, and be a business person rather than a passive victim. There are plenty of sharks in the waters. Publishing has always been a dangerous territory, full of predators who prey on gullible, wishful thinkers who seek the passive route of 'getting published.' It makes sense, at first blush. Most of us start out by knowing next to nothing about business. We wrote some poems, or a short story or two, or a long manuscript in scribbles upon a bedside pad, and feel ready to publish. That's like saying, "Hey, I read sixteen karate magazines, and I think I'll try out for the world championships" or "I bought piano for our living room; now I'm not sure if I should take some lessons, or go right ahead and apply for the state symphony orchestra." In the example, with which I opened this paragraph, for all its attitude shortfalls, LSI does get one thing right: Every publisher, whether Anaconda Publishing in Manhattan (500 titles a year), or Purple Potato Press in your garage with one title, is treated as a business.

Economies of Scale. Specifically, if you publish a POD book with LSI, they have a simple formula whereby they quote you a per-page price (typically 0.013 cents) plus a setup fee (last time I looked, $0.95 per project), plus a small (generally under $100) setup fee. Typically, you might set your 300 page book up for $85 (cover and text upload), and your cost might be 0.95 + (300 x 0.013)= $4.85 per copy. That is of course a lot more expensive per unit than the method that has created, defined, and sustained the advantage of the Big Six, namely, the large offset press run, say 10,000 or 25,000 copies where, depending on offset printing factors including cost of paper and ink, plus union labor, might bring costs down to a dollar or so per unit (book). In a POD situation, effectively every book must be setup for its print run. In an offset press run, you might do one setup (with however many reloads of ink or paper, and recalibrations of machines during operations). Taken as a whole, the large-number offset press run delivers economies of scale not possible for short runs (a few hundred or thousand copies) or POD. The ability (a) to invest thousands of dollars in a large press run, and (b) derive the significantly higher per-unit profit margin, and finally (c) dominate the distribution and retail end to sell all those copies quickly (or get returns nailed down for the loss side of the Revenue and Expenditures ledger, is the fundamental secret of how Anaconda has managed to beat any smaller comers. It is inherently the secret of how large, fossil industries like utilities (old Bell Telephone with its one black phone model) or sale-point warehouses (Price Club, Barnes & Noble, Wal*Mart, etc.) can always destroy competition and stay on top. Insider-authors like Stephen King and Dean Koontz have long offered direct personal support to smaller, independent bookstores around the country to diminish some of the monopolistic power of the two big retailers (B&N, the late Borders).

You're In Charge. Ultimately, a publisher (which includes self-publishers) must accept responsibility for failures in the market place. Fundamental to my premise today is that my decision to run with LSI was a business decision. This is not a blame game. If you stay with a stupid strategy, you deserve the stupid result you get. My answer was, finally, to abandon the best premise in the business, offered by LSI, and move my titles to CreateSpace. As I say, print is all but dead to me. I see no long-term point in investing further in it, since it's a dwindling market. LSI's offerings on the digital side never seemed more than muddled and mediocre to me. My main investment on the digital side during the 2000s was in Fictionwise.com, an innovative and pioneering company that has, in many ways, defined the digital industry. More on Fictionwise in another issue. One thing that LSI has provided is the only real model of a book manufacturer for the little guy. In the old world, if you were going to self-publish your work, you had two choices. You could act as a business person, and shop for the most cost-effective print shop. Or you could act as a passive victim, and seek out a vanity press that charged an arm and a leg to deliver boxes of poorly edited books that no retailer would ever, by universal agreement across the industry, allow into their store, so your books would sit in the garage until one day, they went to the city dump and you took a tax loss on the project. What I am saying to you is that this is essentially a choice the unknowing still make today in some sense. You operate from an entirely different space if you understand the industry and act as an informed business person. This means not thinking of going to Yoohoo Publishing (the latest wrinkle of vanity publishing) and 'getting published.' It means not sitting around waiting for your 'royalty' as if you were still a victim of the print industry. Start by thinking of LSI as your manufacturer, whether you use their services or not (beware of uncaring and unhelpful customer service reps who probably laugh behind your back as vanity press victims coming in with your money). Their publishing scheme is the best in the business. If they could only follow up with the right attitude toward small publishers, what a bright day that would be. But their bread and butter (Ingram, the parent company) is the Big Six. Their job is to transport books from the printer (hired by the Big Six) to bookstores. They are bought into the old print model, and they have failed spectacularly thus far on the digital side; for the same reason why the Big Six have failed as well; because they are not at home in a new industry that they do not rule with their fossil practices. All of that said, think about what LSI offers. You are the publisher. You do not 'get published' by them. You are the publisher (did I say that already?). They are the manufacturer. To my knowledge, they are the only company thus far that treats small press and single-book publishers on the same theoretical plane as Random Hose or any other Anaconda sibling. If you were a passive blob and shopped your book to Yoohoo Press, which treats you as if they were a Big Six house, and does mysterious things you do not need to know about, all in return for sixteen different plans and schemes and levels of payment ranging from $150 for the Basic Package to $2,500 for the Deluxe Ice Cream, You Scream, He She or It Screams, We All Scream So Our Tonsils Twiddle Between Our Teeth Package. Take iUniverse, long owned by the world's largest vanity press, with majority ownership held by one or more Big Six and B&N type people. Behind the lines, because I had contacts, I heard that the owners would charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to deliver vanity press services, while at the same time firmly making it their policy that they would (in the words of the executive I spoke with, now nearly ten years ago) "never touch a self-published book with a ten foot pole." What that meant was that these Big Six people, who had so derided and loathed self-publishing, were now the world's largest vanity press, and would take as much of your money as they could, but it was all a scam because they would never permit your book to appear on their store shelves. That is the same result as 1950s vanity publishing, where you got those boxes in your garage and so forth. With all of that, and more in mind, consider then how honest it is to operate as a real business. You pay money to a manufacturer (LSI), and they deliver books that you pay for at a basic price with their manufacturing profit built in. They make no claim to pay you 'royalties.' They are not your publisher, unlike iUniverse or Yoohoo or the other vanity presses out there trawling for your money. If, like myself, you abandon the LSI model, for peripheral reasons like customer service or whatever, do carry that entrepreneurial spirit and clear vision with you. Be active, not passive. Be a business person, not a victim. Publish, don't 'be published.' Earn profits, not 'royalties.'

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 explain it plausibly. A production company for the History Channel has flown him to Yale University, from his home in San Diego, for an interview next to the exemplar from Dura Europos in modern Syria. The episode, in which he is capstone speaker, is to be aired across the USA and Canada by the History Channel.

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.