Thomia is one year old!

Thomia was officially launched on 4 March 2025 at Barefoot Café, so last Thursday marked its first whole year in print. I still remember with what anxiety I awaited the start of the launch function, nervous about having to make a speech in front of the large number of distinguished folk I’d invited to attend. Luckily, I’d invited plenty of friends, too...

Lacking a credit-card reader, we sold only eleven copies that evening, but Thomia had been available for advance purchase for four months by then and I was gratified (as well as exhausted) by the number of books I had to sign before the evening ended. Sales including advance purchases by the end of Launch Day added up to 141. But this was only a fraction of the print run and I was still a very long way from recovering my costs. I mean just the cost of publication, by the way; I can never make back in sales what it cost me to research and write the book over twelve years. Money wasn’t the half of it...

Still, I’m happy to say we’ve made considerable progress since that day. We still have a few copies of Thomia left, but most are gone and there’s again room to turn round in the spare bedroom at home. The cost of publication has been covered and we have even turned a modest profit, though Thomia is never going to make me rich. As a writer and editor of the old school I had to overcome a strong natural aversion to self-publishing (we used to call it ‘vanity publishing’) before I went to print, but my decision to do so has been vindicated; this was such an unusual book that no professional publisher would take a gamble on it, yet it has found its readership all the same. The public reaction, too, has been enormously gratifying – press reviews, social-media reactions and personal feedback have all been very positive.

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One thing I was terribly afraid of was that, in spite of all my precautions, some gross typographical or other error would find its way into the finished book. My heart sank, therefore, when shortly after he had taken delivery of not one but two copies, an old classmate rang me up to inform me that his name, which was indexed to p.712, actually appears on p.714. I took a look – and discovered, to my horror, that not only was my friend right but every entry in the Index for Vol. II was, likewise, two pages off! An extra page had been inserted towards the end of the book-making process and not accounted for in the numbering. Luckily, the fix (once you know there’s a problem) is simple: just add 2 to the number given in the index and turn to that page instead.

My friend also spotted another typo, a misspelt Latin word... I’ll leave that one as an exercise for the Classics scholars among you. No-one’s reported an English typo so far, so I reckon our proofreader, Jill MacDonald, did a brilliant job. The boo-boo with the index is entirely my fault, not hers.

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And so Thomia comes to the end of its first modestly successful year. I must say it’s done better than I expected, for which I give sincere thanks to all my honourable customers. As for the heroes who’ve already finished it and want to know what I’m planning to write next, I’m happy to report that ‘next’ is already pretty much written and will, I hope, be published later this year. It’s a book of book reviews, and its title is Cocktails by the Volcano. The books it features are all about Lanka and her people, and nearly all of them are well-known, popular works. The oldest is Robert Knox’s An Historical Relation of Ceylon (pub. 1681), which has never been out of print in my lifetime; the newest is Vajra Chandrasekera’s mind-blowing, Nebula Award-winning novel The Saint of Bright Doors. Also reviewed are books by Sunela Jayewardene, Shehan Karunatilaka, Sir John Kotelawala, Michèle Leembruggen, Frederick Lewis, E.F.C. Ludowyk, Carl Muller, Gananath Obeyesekere, Shyam Selvadurai, John Still and many others. Each gets a no-hold-barred take on it, courtesy of your humble author. Coming soon; watch this space!