BULLETIN: I’ve been convinced that the cemetery photo is too cluttered, and there’s no place for the eye to land, and the title is harder to read. The vivid sunset was recommended as a better choice, and here it is:
Original post:
This is a book project that has been on my heart for a long time.
(tl;dr: This book presents the Akathist of Thanksgiving to read, study, and pray at home. Gifting, too. Beautiful photos on every page. Available October 1. Asking help with two questions below.)
We American Orthodox Christians look forward to the Akathist of Thanksgiving every year. It’s usually offered on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving Day. But it goes by so quickly as we sing it, and then gets put away till the next year. I wanted to provide a way for us to read it more slowly and meditate on it, any time of year. And I wanted to make it a beautiful book, a work of art in itself, worthy of this beautiful hymn.
The Akathist itself is somewhat mysterious. It was found among the belongings of a priest who died in the gulag, Fr. Gregory Petrov, and initially he was assumed to be the author. But after the fall of the Soviet Union more copies came to light, and the author was eventually identified as Metropolitan Tryphon Turkestanov (1861-1934), a heroic and prolific hierarch of the Soviet era.
For this book I created my own version of the Akathist of Thanksgiving. I don’t know Russian, so I gathered six English translations that I found online and went through phrase by phrase, making sure I understood the grammar and synonyms each translator chose. Then I asked a fellow-parishioner, who knows many languages, to read it in comparison with the Russian text. This English version is my own work, and I believe it is faithful to the original, despite my own inability to read Russian.
With this prospective book in mind, I began saving up a folder of photos my husband and I had taken. I gave the folder to my book designer (and fellow-parishioner) Amber Warhurst to choose from, as she laid out the pages. Every double-page spread is a work of art in its own right.
The book will be a hardcover in full color, with photos on every page of the Akathist text. After the Akathist I provide an essay about about what an akathist is, and a short biography of Metropolitan Tryphon. Following that there is information about each photo.
While looking up these photos’ information I was amazed to discover that the initial one Amber chose, the blazing mountain sunset, had been taken on the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving in 2021, when I had just arrived in the church parking lot for the Akathist service.
I have two questions I could use some help on.
- I took the cover photo in the Smolensk Cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the tomb of St.Xenia is located. Is it too depressing, for a cover photo? Do you think people will be repelled by seeing a cemetery on the cover?
The reason I took the photo was that I could see that the cemetery was being gradually taken back over by nature. Trees were growing up among the graves, and tombstones and fence-borders were toppling. This seemed to me so poignant and also so beautiful. Nature always takes over again; new life always bursts through. Yet it’s not as if humans and nature are in competition. Our relinquished bodies are part of nature, too, and they get taken up into the new life nature brings.
Anyway, let me know in the comments what you think about using that photo. Will it put people off?
- I am publishing this book using Kindle Direct Publishing, which is so easy and convenient.
Amazon sets a minimum price for every book, to recoup their own expenses for paper, ink, printing, shipping, etc, which is reasonable enough. For this book, though, since the pages are full color, photo-quality, they have set a minimum of $18.99. I can set whatever price I want above that.
So I can charge $18.99, if I don’t want any royalties at all. If I price it at $19.99, I’ll receive 60 cents for each copy that is sold.
It’s kind of deflating, given how long I’ve longed for this book. I can see for sure that I’ll never recover my costs, much less make a profit. It will just have to remain a labor of love.
So my second question is, what do you think a fair price would be?
It would make a great gift, too, and when you’re looking at Thanksgiving, Christmas is right over the hill. Cover price should be … ?