The original drawings are in black and white – not very exciting for kids these days. So I am busy colorizing scans of them in PhotoShop. I’m more than  halfway through and should be ready to go to press sometime this spring. Since I wrote the book, other publications entitled “The Magic Beach” have appeared. For that reason – and for clarity – I have renamed the book FOSSIL BEACH.

Another project is a book for older children or young adults based on my publication “Great Women of Imperial Rome”. As described in an earlier blog, that title is languishing in the world of textbooks without anyone to assign it to a class (I am not a professor). The book is expensive and the pictures (the best part, in my opinion) are reproduced in black and white and in a fairly small format. I am now working on a new book to feature my drawings, entitled “STORIES OF FAMOUS ROMAN WOMEN”. It will feature one story from each of the lives of twelve imperial woman (all but two are empresses), accompanied by colorized versions of my pencil portraits. Coloring will take time and will come after the completion of the “beach” book; publication will probably be near the end of this year. I have completed the first drafts of the twelve stories.

Meanwhile, BULLA FELIX is beginning to sell since its publication, especially as an ebook. No doubt, this is partially due to the positive review it received on Amazon from a kind gentleman in Australia. And no, I do not know him.

By fleshing out the information given by Cassius Dio and adding some imaginary exploits – including a role in some of the outstanding historical events of his times – I have tried to bring Bulla and his world to life. Some features of the story:

1)      The opposition of Bulla and his band of 600 men to the policies of the emperor Septimius Severus.

2)      Septimius Severus’s attempt to conquer Scotland and eradicate its barbarian inhabitants.

3)      The murderous career of Severus’s son and heir, the emperor Caracalla, who massacred tens of thousands in a macabre quest to obtain magical powers.

4)      The beautiful and brilliant empress Julia Domna and her possible role in Caracalla’s assassination.

5)      The exotic cults of Roman times, involving human sacrifice and other bizarre rituals.

6)      The Roman fascination with eastern mysticism, highlighted by a sojourn in India.

Bulla Felix: The Roman Robin Hood is now available as an ebook on Smashwords and Amazon.com and is also available as a paperback on Amazon.

First of all, this novel had its roots in the wonderful 1976 BBC television presentation “I, Claudius”, which was based on the books by Robert Graves (“I, Claudius” and “Claudius the God“), which in turn were based on the writings of the ancient Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus. I had been interested in ancient history since childhood, but it was “I, Claudius” that turned me on to Rome in particular and to the fascinating personalities that made up the imperial family between about 20 BC and 60 AD (e.g. the first emperor Augustus, his scheming wife Livia, her sons Tiberius and Drusus and their children and grandchildren, including Claudius, Caligula, and right down to Nero).  I was especially intrigued by the saga of Tiberius and Vipsania.

Suetonius tells us that Augustus insisted that Tiberius divorce Vipsania – though he loved her and they had one son and another child on the way – so that he could marry Augustus’s daughter Julia, who had recently been widowed when Marcus Agrippa (Vipsania’s father) had died. Agrippa had been first in line to the throne and Tiberius was Augustus’s choice to replace him – at least until his grandsons were old enough to inherit. Suetonius describes Tiberius’s misery over losing his wife and a public expression of grief and longing at the sight of Vipsania that caused the emperor to forbid him to see her again.

The TV series had a heart-wrenching scene not based on the ancient accounts in which Tiberius secretly visited Vipsania after the divorce and pleaded with her to join him in a suicide pact, which she refused.  He went on in the series to become ever more morose and depraved and, by the time he became emperor, Tiberius was a monster, given to extreme cruelty and perversity – and that is more or less the way he has gone down in history. Suetonius and Tacitus tell of his sexual outrages and his apparently spiteful or arbitrary executions of friends, acquaintances, and family members.

But history also records the many gifts and accomplishments of Tiberius, who was a modest and extremely capable man, both as a general and as an administrator. And his devotion to Vipsania – which moved him to honor her as a member of his own family after her death, despite her remarriage to his arch-enemy – hints that he was something more than just another tyrant corrupted by absolute power.

About 10 years ago, I did some research into the lives of Tiberius and Vipsania when I became intrigued by some coins issued in the name of their son Drusus a few years after his mother’s death.  These copper coins show a veiled woman with the word Pietas underneath. Traditionally, the portrait has been identified as Livia, though it does not resemble her known portraits. My research, summarized in an article published by The Celator in 2004 and presented on my web site, argued that, if the portrait represents an actual person, then she almost certainly must be Vipsania.

While reviewing the material about Tiberius and Vipsania for this article and for my book about the Roman empresses, I came across an amazing fact that never seems to have been commented on by earlier historians.

Tiberius was miserable in his marriage to Julia, even though it made him the second most powerful man in the Roman Empire.  Abruptly, in 6 BC, he resigned his post. Augustus refused to accept his resignation, but Tiberius threatened to commit suicide by starvation and Augustus was forced to let him retire to the island of Rhodes off the coast of the Roman province of Asia (modern Turkey). What I was amazed to realize was that Tiberius’s retirement coincided exactly with the posting of Vipsania’s new husband as governor of Asia. The custom at the time was for a governor’s wife to accompany him, so Vipsania was almost certainly in Asia when Tiberius went to Rhodes.

I wondered – did Tiberius plan to rendezvous with Vipsania? Perhaps even run away with her?  I collected all of the information I could about Tiberius and saw that most of the apparently random executions he ordered late in his life were connected in one way or another to his time in Rhodes. And so I concocted an intricate, romantic story that fits the facts and puts Tiberius’s actions and personality in a much more favorable light. I cannot prove that all of it is true, but it is a compelling tale based on historical facts. “Vipsania: A Roman Odyssey”  is available in paperback, as a Kindle book, and in various ebook formats.

My collecting areas, especially in my adult years, have usually been determined by historical and aesthetic considerations. For some time now, I have focused on ancient and medieval coins, but I’ve remained fairly eclectic within those very broad specialties. And my purchases have emphasized “big and pretty” rather than “rare and significant”. Therefore, I never thought I would make a contribution to the study of numismatics.

However, I became intrigued by the hammered pennies of the English kings Edward IV (1461-1483) and Richard III (1483-1485). These are tiny silver coins (usually less than half a gram) with large portraits of the crowned king on one side and a cross on the other. These pennies were usually clipped at some point, meaning that their outer margins were cut away (obscuring or removing the legends in the process), either to make them correspond to new, lower weight standards or so that the perpetrator could accumulate clippings from the coins and turn an illegal profit.

Edward and Richard’s coins were struck in Ireland as well as in England. The Irish issues tended to have distinctive, often charming portrait styles and were struck at a lower weight standard than the English. However, they closely resembled the English coins and could be passed off in England at a profit. The result was a drain of silver coinage from Ireland to England. Today, many English metal detectorists find these Irish coins, which are difficult to identify without legends and are often misidentified as English. These coins are often offered for sale without proper attribution on ebay, where they may frequently be purchased for a song.

There are many varieties of these Irish pennies – more, in fact, than English varieties for the same period. Moreover, new types are often encountered. Attribution in the absence of comprehensive guidebooks and complete legends is extremely difficult and often impossible.

In an effort to get my head around the series, I began to accumulate photos of the Irish coins, which helped me learn to recognize the Irish portrait types and to read mint signatures from partial legends that survived clipping. Within 4 years of my first acquisition, I had identified 14 entirely new types. In addition, I had added several extremely rare varieties to my collection for very modest amounts of money. For example, at a time when a total of three excessively rare Richard III Dublin pennies were known to reside in private collections, I purchased two nice specimens on ebay within a span of 4 months for a total of $160.00. They have since been sold for a total of $4000.

Quite unexpectedly, I realized that I was one of the leading experts on this series of coins. Even though I knew that it would reduce my cherry-picking opportunities, I decided that the time had come to share my discoveries with fellow collectors. So I published a guidebook: “Irish Hammered Pennies of Edward IV and Richard III”. Since it came out, I rarely get bargain prices for these Irish pennies on ebay, presumably because I have educated my competition. But it was a privilege to have the opportunity to acquire and study these amazing coins and to make a small contribution to a fascinating hobby and to our knowledge of medieval Irish history.

Well, Don Miller has gone on to become one of the most prominent members of the fossil collecting community – as the co-author of “Discovering Fossils,” which I illustrated, the author of a fascinating series of CDs about fossils, a dealer in fossils, and the founder and coordinator of the foremost online forum about fossils and fossil collecting, Fossiladdiction Forum.

Don also had the idea of publishing a series of guidebooks to different kinds of fossils, inspired by my illustrations for “Discovering Fossils.” He commissioned me to write and illustrate the first (and only) entry – “Trilobites: Common Trilobites of North America“, which was published in 1999.

Approximately 1500 copies of the trilobite book have been sold to date. It’s inexpensive and includes an introductory section and 41 illustrated descriptions of representative species. The drawings are in pen and ink and very detailed – I don’t know where I got the patience to draw all those tiny little dots for shading!

This book featured poetry and fanciful artwork, as well as straightforward sketches of my collecting sites and the fossils I found there. Descriptions of my collecting experiences were also included, but no specific locality info. I also planned to use some of the drawings of prehistoric animals from “Selected Lives: The Autobiography of a Soul.”

I was much less confident when I began to approach publishers and agents about this book than I had been with “Selected Lives,” but modesty did me no favors. Again there were no takers. However, an editor at Johns Hopkins University Press by the name of Anders Richter saw something he liked. He said that, if I removed the poetry and whimsical drawings and rewrote the book as a guide to collecting in the region, Hopkins might accept it.

After some agonizing, I decided to accept the opportunity and do the revisions, which involved preparing another 13 locality drawings and giving away the location of most of my sites. The result was “Fossil Collecting in the Mid-Atlantic States” (see my May 19, 2011 entry). I managed to sneak in 4 poems and a few whimsical illustrations, but it seemed that “Fossil Dreams” was not going to be.

Several years later, I wrote a children’s book entitled “The Magic Beach” about a boy and girl encountering prehistoric animals at the beach. This book was also universally rejected, but it did contribute some more fossil-related pictures to my stack of unpublished material.

By about 10 years ago, I had learned enough about building web sites to attempt a digital version of “Fossil Dreams,” featuring cool mouseovers and animations. I put this on CD and on my website and tried to sell it as an ebook. I got some very nice reactions from people, but ebooks were still in their infancy and my webmastering and marketing skills were not exactly state of the art even then, so this version lapsed into obscurity.

Finally in 2007, flush with my defiant publication of “Selected Lives,” I decided to self-publish “Fossil Dreams.”  I included most of my unpublished poems and pictures – and even used some sketches I did as a teenager and scans of actual fossils. Sales have been modest, but the book has had some great moments.

Most memorable was having the book reviewed by two successive 5^th grade classes taught by Jim Jenkins at Mountain View Elementary School in Purcellville, Virginia. Mr. Jenkins read some of the book to his students and had them write down their reactions and send them to me. The results were amazing – often hilarious, usually insightful, and always entertaining. I hadn’t thought of “Fossil Dreams” as a children’s book, but they definitely got it.

Julia’s portraits – especially those in marble – reveal a sensitive, bright, and very agreeable woman. But her sculptures would have been much more lifelike in their original states as they were painted – with realistic coloring for her hair, irises, eyebrows, etc. Now, these were the days before PhotoShop, so the only way I knew to restore these details was draw a portrait of one of her portraits and add the details. I was amazed at how this brought her to life. As impressive and serene as the white and cream marble busts and statues are, they lack the vitality and power of engagement that the painted originals must have had.

Encouraged by the result of Julia’s portrait – which I enhanced by adding background details that evoked the Syrian place of her birth – I decided to try my hand at portraying other empresses and imperial Roman women. In the end, I did a dozen drawings – Julia Domna, Livia, Antonia, Agrippina the Elder and Younger, Domitia, Plotina, Sabina, Faustina the Elder and Younger, Julia Mamaea, and Helena. These portraits are 12 by 14 inches – too large to fit many of them on my wall, so I was at a loss about what to do with them. I tried greeting cards, but there wasn’t much interest.

Finally, I decided to write biographies of all the ladies and produce a book, augmented with pictures of relevant ancient coins, maps, family trees, etc. The result is “Great Women of Imperial Rome: Mothers and Wives of the Caesars,” published by Routledge in 2006. One reviewer states that it was the first comprehensive survey of the empresses to be published in 150 years.

Another reviewer complained that there wasn’t much new material – just my recapitulations of earlier scholarship. This is partially true of the earlier chapters, which cover the well-documented Julio-Claudian empresses (most famously presented in the “I Claudius” books and television series). The stories of these women are very well-known and, while I tried to put their lives in new perspective, I did little new research. However, there was very little written about the later women, many of whom were every bit as fascinating as the Julio-Claudians.  I feel that the major contribution of this book is bringing the later empresses – Domitia, Plotina, Sabina, the Faustinas, and the Severan Julias – to life.  That, and the drawings (high res here).

It took four years to write it – much of the time spent researching the historical (or pre-historical) background and drawing the illustrations. I’d never done anything this ambitious before; most of my previous artwork consisted of doodles and cartoons. I was terrified, but I was confident that the idea was a winner and that the book would be a success. As far as I knew, no one had ever written a book like this before.

Finally, “Selected Lives: The Autobiography of a Soul” was complete. I wrote every literary agent and publishing house I could find and waited for the offers to come rolling in. The response was underwhelming. No interest at all, in fact.

When absolutely everybody had said no, I decided to try again. I rewrote “Selected Lives” as a series of stories told by an aging scholar to a young boy and named it “The Lives of Mister E.” First person became second person and I lost the poetry that had been a large part of the first version. Again, there was a deafening yawn from the publishing world. One small house actually accepted it, but published it in such an amateurish fashion that I refused to even let them offer it for sale.

I guess I’m stubborn, because I wouldn’t give up. At least twice, I revised the text – trying to make it livelier or something – and wrote to anybody who had missed the first opportunity to reject “Selected Lives.” Now my rejection slip collection became complete.

Seven years after completion, I rewrote it as a sort of personal celebration of life and called it “Life Itself”. In this “incarnation”, the stories were told as memories to illustrate the range and joy of conscious experience. The book had become a love song to life on earth. Again, no one cared.

Maybe that should have been the end of the story, but – as I said – I must be stubborn. I finally decided to ignore all of my painful “market research”, conducted over a period of exactly 20 years, and publish the book myself. I deleted 16 of the weaker and more didactic “lives” and I abbreviated the texts, hoping that less would be more, and I went to press on my own dime.

A happy ending?  Well, the book came out 5 years ago. So far I have sold (drum roll) nine copies – and given away over 200.

“Selected Lives” does have one distinction, however: it has one of the lowest sales rankings of any book on Amazon.com – number 9,140,747 as of today! Amazon doesn’t assign a sales rank until there has been a sale, so there are many books in their inventory that are unranked. “Selected Lives” achieved its incredibly low status when they thought they had sold a copy, then rechecked their inventory and realized it was a mistake. So the book obtained a ranking for zero sales.

Maybe some day after I’m gone, “Selected Lives” will be appreciated. There have been some positive reviews, though I must admit most of them came from friends and relatives – and one friend (who shall remain nameless) even asked me why I bothered to write it. In any case, I feel that I have done my duty to my muse.

I still prefer hard copy for reference books, picture books, and guide books. There’s nothing like holding a nicely produced book in your lap or seeing it displayed on a book shelf as a reminder of something you know and love. But I’ve had some tough experiences with the world of old-fashioned book publishing that make me welcome the ebook revolution. I think it is the way to go for novels, self-help, and a lot more.

I’m not going to name names, but I want to share some of my publishing experiences in the hope that they will make other authors and illustrators a bit more cautious or modest in their expectations. Of course, I’m grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to have my writing and artwork published, but it has been a rocky road.

- Publisher A was listed in the Literary Market Place. They accepted my illustrated story book. Yay! It was to be published in hardback and paperback. Finally the books arrived – the pictures weren’t centered and were reproduced on an ink-challenged xerox machine, the pages tended to fall out and were not always in the right order, and the binding featured blue duct tape and magic marker to make the gray cardboard edges match the cover.

- Publisher B did a wonderful job of producing my book. However, when sales began to lag, I asked if I could help. I suggested a mail campaign, featuring letters to educators from me. I was told in no uncertain terms that my help was not needed and that the publisher would handle marketing, thank you very much. Virtually no marketing was done and sales continued to lag for a few years until Amazon came on the scene and reached the wider audience.

- Publisher C (bigtime) hired me to do a series of illustrations for one of their books. I charged a modest amount – $30 each – thinking that this would lead to more work. I never heard from them again, but they went on to use my drawings in at least a dozen subsequent titles, eventually forgetting to credit the artist.

- Publisher D did a very nice job of designing and printing my book, but charged so much for it that I couldn’t afford to buy a copy (they did send me a few at first). I asked why so pricey and was told because they only sell to libraries and students (poor students!). Trouble is I’m not a professor and have no students to fleece and the book was written for a general audience rather than for the classroom.

- Publisher E contracted with me to write and illustrate a book for a relatively small fee. The rest of my payment would come in royalties after publication. However, the “contract” was never actually written up and the managing editor was replaced after the book was finished but before it was published. The new editor decided not to publish after all. I complained very loudly and the book was eventually printed – but not marketed. It was sold for $1 a copy for a while, then hurried out of print. Repeated inquiries finally resulted in a very small royalty payment. I understand there are boxes of this book sitting around somewhere.

- Publisher G hired me to illustrate a book. They then consulted with me about a printer as I had some experience with the local options. I said “anyone but Printer X.” So, of course, they went with Printer X – and the illustrations are so faint they are barely visible.

- Publisher H hired me to do a large number of illustrations (well over 100) for a large book. It was published with a very long and forgettable title, offered to an extremely small local market, and then disappeared. The illustrations – which would have been useful in many contexts – were never used again.

- Publisher I was small but respected. They accepted my book, but were very slow in producing it. Finally I learned that one of the three principals was ill. When this person died, publication was postponed for “at least a year.” Another delay occurred when principal number two passed away. The remaining editor told me that the book was all but complete and would be published on such and such a day. I offered to travel to the book launch but was advised to wait until a couple of details had been worked out. The next thing I heard was that principal three had died – only two years after the first fatality. The company was eventually bought out by another company that eventually decided not to publish my book after all.

There are many more stories I could tell, but perhaps enough already. These experiences led me to pursue hard-copy self-publishing, as shown by the wall of boxed books in my storage shed, most of which will probably never sell. It’s an expensive way to go. On-demand printing means that I don’t have to print hundreds or thousands of copies, but, unless a title really takes off, there’s virtually no money to be made because the booksellers take a very high percentage and tend to order single copies so that postage eats up most of what’s left.

Amazon’s CreateSpace program is a breakthrough – hard copy on-demand printing with no shipping and no storage. However, you have to do your own professional layout (or pay for someone to do it) and the per-book royalties are meager unless you price the book through the roof. Still, a nice way to get into hard-copy print without spending a lot of money.

All-in-all, the digital age is a tremendous boon to us long-suffering “content providers.”

I wrote the book in an effort to share my enthusiasm for fossils and my knowledge about how and where to find them. I’m very grateful that Hopkins gave me the opportunity – and that so many people have taken the time to share their experiences with me.

Some things have changed since the book was published. For one thing, a lot more people seem to have taken up the hobby. Some of my localities have been closed or worked out and some highway route numbers have been changed (e.g. Locality 4 no longer exists, Localities 8 and 33 are now on limited access Interstate 68). However, most of my localities remain productive and the types of fossils illustrated in the book remain the most likely finds in this part of the country.

One irritation is that the reproductions of the illustrations in the book have declined greatly in quality through the years.  I complained about this, but the publisher informed me all books are now printed on demand and they have no control over the quality. The paper has also become much cheaper and the book thinner as a result. Meanwhile, the price has gone up. Oh well! I still think it’s a good buy because it will certainly lead people to fossils and help them identify what they find.

Since “Fossil Collecting in the Mid-Atlantic States” came out, I’ve written and/or illustrated four more books about fossils and prehistoric life. I hope my readers will check them out, too. I’ll describe them in coming posts. Good hunting!