First in a series: new eBook about runes
The Very Basics of Runes - The Elder Futhark just became the newest book I've published. It's a real simple eBook, which you can download on any e-reader (I tried it out on my iPad a bit ago, and it looks pretty good in iBooks), designed to give you a real basic view of what each of the runes in the Elder Futhark means.
seamus_mcnasty and I have been working to try and do more than just sell runes to people via The Magical Druid, and one of the things we were thinking was, "You know, it's great that people are buying runes, but we're giving them a tool here, not a decorative piece. How do we get them to feel comfortable using these things?" I mean, the last thing anyone who creates stuff wants (be they artist, magician, author, or even software developer) is for the thing they create to gather dust and never be used.
So, we put together this little book as a sort of experiment. It draws on the last ten-or-so years of lore and divinatory work that I've been doing. The book itself includes a number of things I've developed just for this project: a three-rune and nine-rune spread that I developed, the "Elder Futhark Rune Poem" I wrote a few months back, and some info on Odin's Eye).
What we'd like to do is have the book available as part of a bundle so that anyone who buys a set of runes from us can get up and running with their divination: it'll help people get comfortable with the runes and start using them as soon as they get them. Right now, you get a set of runes, a rune reference card, and a bag to carry everything in. We'll add the eBook to that at no charge, we think.
We'd like to offer an additional "bundle" that will include a physical copy of the book to tell our customers how to use the runes themselves, an Odin's Eye, and a nine-rune spread board (or cloth? We're not sure yet). It's an easy way to make our rune sets stand out above others (you know, other than their natural beauty and superior craftsmanship, he said humbly).
One of the keys, of course, is that because we're making/publishing all this stuff ourselves, we can do it far cheaper than anyone else out there. Our hand-made runes are some of the best you'll ever see (again, he says humbly), certainly at their price, but the ability to offer additional support for very little cost is pretty huge.
Next up: Ogham books, Anglo-Saxon rune books, Greek oracle books, and others. Honestly, it's kind of fun to build infrastructure around stuff. . . especially when it means that you can help people enjoy what you've created just a bit more.