Legends of Wingchun Now Available!

[reneritchie]

Barnes & Nobles & Amazon.co.uk have it up first! Amazon.com, Amazon.ca to follow soon!

Here are the links:

Barnes & Nobles (http://service.bfast.com/bfast/click?bfmid=2181&sourceid=41560024&bfpid=0973880406&bfmtype=book)

Amazon.co.uk (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=wingchunkuenc-21&camp=1634&creative=6738&path=external-search%3Fsearch-type=ss%26keyword=legends%20of%20wingchun%26index= books)

If you prefer to shop at your local bookstore, please provide them with the following information so they may obtain your copy for you:

Title: Legends of Wingchun: Embers of the Shaolin
ISBN: 0973880406
Author: Rene Ritchie
Publisher: Remnant-Hunter Media

(If you know anyone else who, or any other forums which, might be interested in this info, please do pass it along!)

[reneritchie]

TTTen characters!

[reneritchie]

Amazon.co.uk still hasn't gotten it's act together, but severall third-party Amazon marketplace vendors across the pond on picking up the slack!

Amazon.ca has it listed, but has incredibly poor load balancing as different servers display different availability results.

Amazon.com must be too humongous to move quickly :)

However, big thanks to those who've already ordered, and I look forward to hearing your comments, positive and not-so-much alike!

[anerlich]

I plan to order when Amazon.com gets it, I'm too slack ot sign up elsewhere.

Rene, I added my name to the "Order" list on the website. I assumed you were going to email all such people when the book was available. I didn't get an email, not a complaint, but if you didn't do that you might be missing some potential sales.

[reneritchie]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks, I haven't sent out a notice to that list yet because Amazon.com has been a little slow and I wanted to make sure everyone could actually order before I sent the note out. Now that it looks like they're taking their sweet time and might make pre-x-mas orders impossible, I'll probably do the send-out tomorrow.

I just felt if people were notified they could order, then got to a site saying they couldn't order, it might be a little annoying.

I'd forgotten how much faster things can get messed up now that we have computers :)

[reneritchie]

Andrew,

I processed the list but didn't see your address in it. It actually looks like a few (everyone from October 14th) are missing. I had a spam-attack on the form that day. One of the new trends is for spammers to try repeatedly send garbage from a virus-ladden machine to internet contact forms in an attempt to over-write the BCC field in the mail headers so they can use them as relays for their spam. I changed the form to hard-code the mail headers (everyone who has a contact form is advised to do likewise, as well as to strip out /n characters in the code), and thought I saved everything, but the 14th is just gone. My apologies, and if anyone else didn't get the response, my apologies as well.

[reneritchie]

TTThanks everyone!

[reneritchie]

Amazon is funny. First they get my name wrong, then they claim Legends of Wingchun isn't out yet, now I find out from the distributor that they've already shipped a bunch of copies from the first round of orders.

At least they have the cover up now!

Thanks again to all those who've ordered, hopefully everyone will get their copies soon, and Amazon will have the correct listing up sometime before armageddon!

:)

[anerlich]

They also changed your name to "Reni".

BTW, the "Wingchun" instead of "Wing Chun" fooled both my aging brain and Amazon's search engine. Any reason for that particular usage ... or will I have to read the book to find out? :cool:

Anyway, order placed, along with The Guard by Ed Beneville and Training for Warriors by Martin Rooney.

[reneritchie]

Yes, they had my name right originally, and then they changed it. Sigh.

With the names, it's basically the same reason Disney used Mulan instead of Mu Lan (actually, they went a step further and used Fa Mulan, a Cantonese surname and Mandarin given name, inseady of Hua Mulan or Fa Muklan to find the easiest name for non-Chinese.

I found the same, when it came to non-martial arts readers, it was hard to deal with all the Chinese compounds, and I really wanted to make it accessible to non-martial arts readers as I would like very much for the stories behind the art to spread and be appreciated by a wider audience much like Robin Hood, Zorro, and other cultural hero epics have.

Originally there were tons of straight up compound Chinese names. Now almost all of them have been simplified into Wingchun, Boklao, or even joined with translated nicknames like Butcher Ngao just to make it easier to keep track of the names.

I didn't consider the search engines, so maybe I'll take a hit on that. : (

Hopefully, however, if people enjoy the book they'll find it accessible enough to share and recommend to non-Wing Chun people, and I'll get a little word of mouth :)

[kj]

Intriguing:

Long Before Buffy or Lara Croft--Discover the Chinese Woman ... (http://news.ucwe.com/content/view/1195/2/)

Regards,
- kj

[reneritchie]

LOL! That's a good word for it!

Design and production I can handle. Marketing, however, remains extremely uncomfortable.