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Hi,

Jordan Kahn contacted me recently for permission to use some images from one of my books, which is how I found out about his very cool new solo training tool.

It’s basically a caller, which tells you what to do next when practising solo longsword drills. You set it down, and it calls out instructions for you to follow, either as fixed drills or random sequences. It’s an interesting way to build flow and learn the Italian terminology.

He shared it on Sword People and asked for feedback, so go and have a look, try it out, and let him know what you think:

Solo Fiore on SP

If you’re not already a member of Sword People, you’re very welcome to join. It’s free, but all new applications are manually approved, so it may take a day or two to get through.

Speaking of solo training, I’ve been adding a lot of material to my own Solo Training course recently, including Capoferro’s mechanics, more I.33 sword and buckler material, Angelo’s smallsword, and point-control exercises. If you’re already enrolled, the new material is available in your course at no extra charge. And there’s more to come!

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MS 2031: more rapier goodness

My friend and colleague David Biggs has started digging into MS 2031 on his Substack here:

David's Substack MS 2031

His article is entirely free, so go see what he thinks, and by all means sign up to his newsletter if you’re in any way a rapier person.

In further news, my MS 2031 book will be available as a printed paperback very soon. This will save you from printing it out at home. The book will also include the scans, so it’s all in one place. It would be a nightmare to produce an ebook version because of all the tables, so we’ll leave it as just a PDF and paperback for now.

If you’ve already bought the PDF, you’ll be getting a discount code for £10 off the paperback when it goes live. It’s my shop policy that all print books include their ebook equivalents, so this just applies the policy retroactively.

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Speaking of paperbacks…

You can now get my Fiore facsimile with translation in paperback, for £15 less than the hardback. Seems fair, right?

Fiore on the Shop

Why you can’t buy my Fiore paperback on Amazon

I was going to put it up on Amazon too, to spread the Fiore love. But guess what those absolute pirates over there do.

First: they charge you for printing. It’s not the cheapest printing out there if it’s full colour, so they are obviously making money on it, but fair enough. I have no quarrel with that.

They also take 40%!! of the cover price of the book as their platform fee. Seriously. You pay ten bucks, the author gets six, max. And that’s before printing costs.

But here’s the absolute killer, and the reason you can’t get the paperback version of the facsimile on Bezos’s cesspool of exploitation:

They calculate their 40% share on the full cover price, and then deduct the entire printing cost from the author’s remaining 60%.

This has the following effect.

I pay $17.24 to print the book. I charge you $30. I get a grand total of $0.76.

That’s right, my friends. 76 whole cents on a $30 book.

I could up the price to $40 and make a whopping $6.76.

Or I can just have it on my own store, charge you £30 for it, and make a reasonable return on the work I put into it.

No wonder that piece of shit wants to fly to space: it’s to get away from all the authors he’s screwing over.

If they took their egregious 40% after print costs came off, it would be different. I’d make $7.66 on the book at $30. Not great, but I’d do it.

Instead, they take $12, charge me another $17.24 for printing, and I get 76 cents.

For writing the book, translating the text, and taking the financial risk of publishing it.

I know Amazon makes buying books very convenient. That’s part of how they got so powerful in the first place. But convenience comes at a cost, and it’s often the people who actually make the things you want to buy who end up paying it. My other books are on there because it’s a major way that people can find my work. Ordinary black and white printing is much cheaper, so I do actually make something on every book.

But please, do me a solid and buy books by authors you care about from either a proper bookshop or the author’s own website whenever possible.

cheers,

Guy