At home and have been trying to regain control of my inbox!
I’ve worked out how many copies of the Eusebius book have sold so far. 174 copies have been manufactured so far, paperback and hardback. But probably around 30-odd were review or complimentary copies; and I have about a dozen paperbacks in a box — the only stock that I have. These books were part of a box of 20 that I ordered for the Oxford Patristics Conference, but of which I sold almost none at the time.
It took a couple of hours going through the paperwork to work out where we are. I still haven’t got a final reckoning on cost (never had the time). But the income from each volume is only 66% of cover price. It’s clear that the income will not faintly cover the costs of the project. This does not matter, because it was an experiment, but it does indicate that doing more will not be a good idea financially at least.
All this effort was undertaken to calculate the royalties due on Zamagni’s Greek text. I’ve made approaches to pay that, and get that done.
An email suggests that creating a PDF version of the translation of pseudo-Hegesippus would be useful. It might. It might be a good text on which to experiment with typesetting, if I ever have the time.
The translation of Ephraim’s Hymn 22 against heresies will be delayed, at least to the end of September. No problem there.
I’ve ordered a copy of M. Albert &c, Christianisme orientaux, a volume of summaries of the various Oriental Christian literatures, running to 400 pages. It’s pricey, at $60, but Sebastian Brock recommends the section on Georgian literature by Bernard Outtier as being so good that it ought to exist in English. Luckily my French is not at all bad these days.
An article at the Lacus Curtius/Livius blog on “Original research” at Wikipedia has caught my eye. An article was created on the obscure grammarian Hestiaea. This led to discussion on Wikipediocracy, and the discovery of a second reference to the lady, in “pseudo-Didymus”‘ scholia on the Iliad; and attempts by me to discover what this source was, and how we might check.
Even if it has not covered its costs, it was a worthy and public-spirited project and it commends you that you undertook it.
I don’t regret it; but I had no idea how much *time* it would take up. That was the real cost — years of evenings and weekends.
Are you thinking of releasing an e-book? That would have a nice long tail, and wouldn’t require you to have boxes of books around.
Actually, I don’t know that Kindle has the character set for some of it, but you could make an epub version and sell that.