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It’s a warm welcome back to the Sword Guy Podcast to Alexander Fürgut, who was one of my interviewers on Episode 132, Podcasting with the Sword Whisperer. He's the co-host of the Schwertgeflüster HEMA podcast and of Schwabenfedern Ulm, a large HEMA club in Germany. We're here today to talk about his new book, The Schielhau in Detail: a comprehensive guide about fundamentals, tactics and strategy of this longsword technique.
We talk about the challenges of writing a book, and how much tougher Alexander found the process than he expected, especially as he immediately went on to translate the original German version into English. Will he write another? We have a chat about possible subjects, and the best approach when choosing a topic to write about. Is it better to write something with the widest possible audience, or is it better to focus on something very niche, like, for example, the Schielhau?
Find Alexander’s book, The Schielhau in Detail here:
German edition: Amazon UK – Amazon US – Amazon DE – Amazon CA – Amazon AU/NZ
English edition: Amazon UK – Amazon US – Amazon DE – Amazon CA – Amazon AU/NZ
Transcript
Guy Windsor
I'm here today with Alexander Fürgut, who is a familiar voice on this show. No doubt I've pronounced his name completely wrong, but never mind, having been one of my interviewers on Episode 132 Podcasting with the Sword Whisperer. He's the co-host of the Schwertgeflüster (something else I've probably mispronounced) HEMA podcast and of Schwabenfedern Ulm, I'm not very good at my German, a large HEMA club in Germany. We're here today to talk about his new book, The Schielhau in Detail: a comprehensive guide about fundamentals, tactics and strategy of this longsword technique. So without further, ado, Alexander, welcome back.
Alexander Fürgut
Thanks for having me again. And by the way, good pronunciation. Every German would have understood that.
Guy Windsor
Oh, really. Oh, good. I never quite know with my German. So let's just orient everybody whereabouts in the world are you?
Alexander Fürgut
I'm living and teaching and fencing in the south of Germany, in Ulm. Not a lot of people outside of Germany know where it is. So it's about halfway between Stuttgart and Munich. You know, Oktoberfest, Munich, so somewhere in between.
Guy Windsor
And Ulm is a city?
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, Ulm is a city. It's at the border, and of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. And if you take two parts together, it's about 200k citizens living here.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. And so before we get on to the book, how did you actually get started in historical martial arts?
Alexander Fürgut
So a friend of mine was doing some reenactment, only just, you know, putting up the tents and so on. And he was doing HEMA many, many years even before that, like in the late 90s, and he wanted to do something. He wanted to start again and do some sword fighting. He asked his reenactment friends and me if we wanted to start some training. And it turned out pretty soon that reenactment people were not super interested in actually doing the sport besides like one guy, so it was me, him and one of the reenactment group.
Guy Windsor
There is surprisingly little crossover between the reenactment crowd and the historical martial arts crowd. Given that we're both swinging swords, it is surprising to me, how little it crosses over.
Alexander Fürgut
I guess partially with the harness guys, there's a bit more overlap, but yeah, oftentimes not too much.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so you've been running your club for about 14 years now, something like that?
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, I mean, he did it at the beginning, but pretty soon he had other priorities and moved away. And so 13 years, probably 13 and a half something like that.
Guy Windsor
Okay, and you've been doing mostly German longsword in that time?
Alexander Fürgut
The first 10 years, pretty much German longsword, I tried stuff out on the side, but this is one was my main focus, and my personal focus switched to rapier in the last couple of years.
Guy Windsor
Oh, so you're coming over to the dark side.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, exactly. I'm getting old, so now I'm doing the Rapier like everyone else.
Guy Windsor
Wow. See, I would say exactly the other way around. Rapier is much harder on the body than longsword.
Alexander Fürgut
I guess that depends on what kind of rapier you're doing.
Guy Windsor
What kind of rapier are you doing?
Alexander Fürgut
Italian, but not like Fabris Italian. I cannot do that. I think we talked about that last time. I don't have the have flexibility, and I tried your stretching and, yeah, not there yet.
Guy Windsor
All right, okay, the book, The Schielhau in Detail is your first book, correct?
Alexander Fürgut
Yep.
Guy Windsor
And the first book is always the hardest to write and it's also the hardest to choose.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, it's so hard, but yeah.
Guy Windsor
So why on earth, for would your very first book writing project, would you choose to focus on a specific technique and that particular technique?
Alexander Fürgut
So there's two aspects here. The one is, if I'm doing something, I try not to just do the stuff that everyone else was doing. And with the books, I thought about, okay, should I do, maybe a full book on Liechtenauer’s system as I understood it. And one of the things was I thought, well, you know, that sounds kind of hard and like a lot of work, and I don't know if that whole writing book thing is my thing, so I'm starting small, just choosing one technique so I can do a shorter book, maybe, like 50 pages eBook on Amazon. I'm not sure, I got a some of the writing advice from you. I'm not sure if this was among them.
Guy Windsor
Possibly, yeah. We had a chat in Potsdam.
Alexander Fürgut
Yep, it was in some of your blog posts about how to write your own books and choose topics and so on. As I thought this was initially one of these things like, okay, small topic, manageable size. Just take a little part of the system.
Guy Windsor
So what you could then end up with is maybe five short books on the Meisterhau which then it can be put together into one big, full-size book or whatever. So that's actually a good way to do it. But it turns out that there is a full, let me just check this fancy hardback here, 180 pages of stuff to say about the Schielhau.
Alexander Fürgut
So the second thing was, okay, so what can I do that is what a book is actually good at, better than a YouTube video or a podcast or something like that. And I thought, you know what? It would make sense to actually go into the details. Because even though, if you have the basic knowledge of how to do a technique, there's a lot more stuff you need to know or to be able to pull off to actually make it work, like if two of us are fencing and want to do the Schielhau. It's not enough to know how the Schielhau works in theory, because there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong and situations that can arise. So I thought, okay, instead of doing the whole system, take a small part of it, but then I go into detail, just I write down everything I think is important to know, or relevant, let's say about this technique, end up with a short book. And yeah, that's something I failed spectacularly at. This is not a short book.
Guy Windsor
Well, honestly, it's not huge. It's 180 pages. If it was a novel, it would be thought of as a relatively short novel. But yeah, it would only have to get a little bit bigger to be quite chunky. So you actually go into more than just the Schielhau. Because you're basically setting this up so that anyone who is doing longsword of any kind, and has some basic background in longsword can basically go in, use this book to kind of get an idea of what the Schielhau is and how to apply it in various contexts. Particularly it seems to be you would like to see more Schielhau done in tournament, is one message I got from the book, is that fair?
Alexander Fürgut
Tournaments, free plays. I mean, it's not a tournament focus book, it's a free play focus book. But of course, tournaments would be one area where it would be nice to see more. You know, I was thinking about what part of the system do I pick. And at least in the circles I fenced with, Schielhau was one of the least used techniques. So I thought, okay, this is something that I'm actually good at, better at than most people, and there's a lack in the community here, so maybe that's a good match. Go with the Schielhau. I like it. People don't do it that much. So hopefully I can turn around things and improve it a little bit.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so just for people who are listening and who maybe don't know what a Schielhau is, could you just describe it for the listener?
Alexander Fürgut
So…
Guy Windsor
Not in all 180 pages, just like a bare bones overview.
Alexander Fürgut
Should we assume that they know how to do German longsword or nothing at all?
Guy Windsor
Assume nothing, like describe it as if you're just describe it to a reasonably intelligent person who's never picked up a sword.
Alexander Fürgut
All right, so longsword you could put it with two hands, and the other guy is doing one of several things, let’s start with the most obvious one, he's attacking you with a cut to your head. You don't want that, and you want to block that cut to the head and strike him at the same time. And the way you do that is, the metaphor I'm using, is you use using the thumb grip, so you have the thumb on the flat of your blade, you have the blade on the shoulder, point upwards, and just imagine that you have a remote control in your hand for the TV and the batteries are empty. What do you do? You move your hand forward. You press with the thumb on the button. And what this does is it moves the blade forward so that your long edge comes up, short edge comes down. And depending on how close you are to your opponent, you either thrust your opponent to just the neck or face, or you hit him on the on his right side of the head.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, so you're a right hander, and they're striking at your left side. And so your sword is basically turning clockwise as you see it, to bring that long edge up. And that puts the first half of your blade nearer the hand in the way of their strike, leaving the other end free to whack him in the head.
Alexander Fürgut
And the opponent's sword lands very nicely. And you're strong, so you're very well protected.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Does it though? I mean, I've seen people try to do that and fail miserably. So what are the keys to getting it right?
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, there’s more than one way, and more than one interpretation of Schielhau, of course. So it depends a bit on what they're doing. One of the main things is that people often turn their hands further than they need to, so that their cross guard is completely vertical. And if you do that, you pretty much, I'm not saying always, but a lot of the time, you just get hit in the hands, even if you manage to block the cut to your head. So that's one thing to watch out. So have an angle where the cross guard is actually in the way to your head. And also you need to get the right moment. The Schielhau excels at you can do it very early in the movement of your opponent, but if you're too late, you can at most block the opponent’s sword and, but not necessarily hit it. But if it can start really early, that's quite a nice thing to do. But I should have asked, what situations did you see where it failed?
Guy Windsor
I don't mean somebody doing it correctly and it not working. I mean, people trying to do it in drills or whatever, and they're doing things like what you described, their hands are too low, so they're not protecting the head or they're turning the sword to vertical. So instead of the cross guard being in like 11 to five, it's more like 12 to six. And so the knuckles are exposed so they get clipped on the side of the right hand, or they time it wrong, or they're too close, or they're too far away. It is a tricky thing to do well.
Alexander Fürgut
Yes and no. I mean, there are some details you need to make it work. I think you can pull it off consistently, if you know that.
Guy Windsor
Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, all the best rapier stuff is tricky to do well as well.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, it's not as straightforward, or something like just Zornhau long edge to the head and there you go.
Guy Windsor
That’s the thing. Because if I was writing a book on a single Meisterhau, I'd write it on the Zornhau Ort. Because it's the one with the most broad applications, right? And the one where you see it reproduced in lots of different systems over time. So, I'm fascinated by the choice of this particular technique. And this is absolutely not a criticism. Because what is particularly interesting to me, because I've been producing books for historical martial artists. My first one came out in 2004 so over that time, pretty much every book that came out aimed at actual training had to be the whole system, because the assumption is they don't know the system, and they want to learn it, and so you have to give them the whole thing, or at least most of it, in a kind of sensible beginners course, plus a few more months training kind of package. And it says something to me about how the community has developed to this point where it's worthwhile writing a book going into detail about a single technique. It marks an evolution in in the historical martial arts community, I think.
Alexander Fürgut
I think it's a good time now, because things have not changed as drastically the last couple of years than they have, like 10 years ago. If you waited from one year to the next, 100 different things, 100 different interpretations, your own system changes, and now we have people that have quite a bit of experience, while the underlying assumptions and the way you do things are not changing as much, so now would be a good time to do those kind of detailed things.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, exactly. Like my Fiore interpretation, kind of stabilised in terms of the choreography of the basic actions I see in the book in about 2010, 2012 maybe, something like that. And how I teach, it has continued to evolve. But the basic interpretation, I can't think of a really significant change that actually affects what you actually do with the sword in hand since about 2012. But I mean, some academic stuff has changed, like I had this two hour long conversation with Dario Alberto Magnani on this show where we went, we literally we discussed a single paragraph for over an hour, and at the end of that hour, I deleted one word from my translation, but it was a really important word, and I was like, ah, fuck. But that's that doesn't actually change what we what we're actually doing with the sword. It just changes how we're just how we describe what we're doing with the sword. So it's basically a change in the theoretical model, not the actual practice.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about, what do I find interesting, and what would I like to spend a lot of parts of the book and the whole okay, this is how you grip a sword. This is what the point is. This is the pommel and so on. Like, if you do a very broad book, like I said, you need those kind of things because you cannot assume any prior knowledge. But it didn’t super interesting, because a lot of people, including you, have done this very well. So if you want to know that kind of stuff, grab one of those. It's already out there. I mean, I'm not sure, well, it was quite a bit of a gamble, because I think I'm the first one doing this for HEMA. There I have books like this for other martial arts. Will people read it? Will they like it? Will they think it's silly? Would I think it's interesting? I had no idea when I started, but I thought at least it sounds interesting. It sounds like quite a bit of a challenge to make this work and to make people be open enough to actually get the book and read it.
Guy Windsor
Okay, well, you actually define who the book is for really clearly. I'm reading from the book. You have come to the right place if you are dissatisfied with your Schielhau. (Which is probably most Liechtenauer fencers, I would hope, given what I've seen of how they fence.) You want to learn your way of doing the Schielhau. So, if they're curious in Alexander Fürgut’s particular way of doing the Schielhau. Or they're looking for practical tips for longsword fencing. That is a really clear definition of your target audience. So anyone picking this up and looking at it going, well, I don't know what a Schielhau is. I don't know who this Alexander person is. So why would I care about how he does it? And I have no interest in practical longsword fencing. I'm into medieval history, they'll go, this is not for me, and that is genius marketing. Be really clear about who the book is for, and communicate that clearly, and then people who it is for will pick it up and they'll like it.
Alexander Fürgut
Yes, a lot of the structure comes from a book called How to Write Useful Books. I think you've read it too.
Guy Windsor
I have read it. Yes, very useful book. It actually inspired me to write my How to Write Training Manuals book. I read it when I was between drafts of my From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: the wrestling techniques of Fiore dei Liberi and those are kind of fairly heavy books to write. I tried to make them light to read, but that's a lot of work. And I was between drafts of it, and I needed a break from that book and to let it rest before I before I go and edit it. And I just started writing this how to write training manuals for historical martial artists book, and out it came. And then when I'd finished that book, I was ready to go back and finish the other one.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah. I mean, I'm not at a point where just work on a second book just for fun.
Guy Windsor
Well, yeah, yeah. My first book took me at least four years to write. I started it, it must have been in 1999.
Alexander Fürgut
Which one was the first?
Guy Windsor
The Swordsman’s Companion. It was long before we had a really decent interpretation of Fiore. It was long before we actually had a copy of Fiore we could actually read properly, right? It was old school, dodgy fifth generation photocopies of dodgy microfilm scans. I mean, we could barely read it in places and not read it at all in other places.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, that's how it was back then.
Guy Windsor
That's how I was back then, exactly. But I figured, you know, because my students, a couple of students in particular, were asking me to write down the stuff I was teaching them, so that they had a way of remembering it. And so I thought, oh, that's not a bad idea. So I started writing it, and four years later, it was taken up by publisher. And out it came.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, if people are asking for it just usually a good sign.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, of course, I wasn't ready to write the book, and I didn't know nearly enough about Fiore or Vadi or longswords or any of that stuff yet, but it got everybody started while I figured out the actual interpretation. And it's a great way of ordering your thoughts. In the process of writing this book, what insights did you get that you didn't have before?
Alexander Fürgut
So the last two chapters are on tactics and strategy, and in the strategy chapters, I talk about these archetypes which are basic. So let's take the Zornhau archetype. And people that use this archetype often use actions that look like this, like they start with a cut from the right, cut around and so on.
Guy Windsor
Just for the benefit of the listener, I'm going to read out your archetypes. The suicidal fencer archetype. We've all met one of those, the Zornhau plays archetype, familiar also, but maybe you want to expand on that a bit. The Zwerchcopter, people who do the Zwerchhau because they think they are Yoda the second of the three prequels, where he fights Count Dooku; the thrust archetype; the hand sniper archetype, and, God, don't we all know people like that; and the wrestler archetype. Okay, many moons ago, in about 1998 this German rapier chap came to Edinburgh and ended up finding us The Dawn Duellists Society. And wanted to fence, so we fenced. We didn't have enough sort of experience to be really explicit about what kind of fencing we were trying to do. This is rapier, right? And as he charged in on me, I hit him five times in the face and chest with the point of my sword, five times. Then he wrestled me onto the ground and had my sword arm in an arm bar with his leg across my throat, while I transferred the weapon to the left hand and was beating him over his mask with a sword in my left hand, telling him I fucking won already, because he really just needed to wrestle, and I was not prepared for someone to put me in that kind of arm bar, having ignored five thrusts to the face and chest on the way in. That is the wrestler archetype. Am I not right?
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, not the part where you can ignore hits, but you try to do that kind of stuff. You try to.
Guy Windsor
So you're going to tell us about the Zornhau plays archetype, go ahead.
Alexander Fürgut
So the people who use this basically, they start with a cut from the right and then they want to cut around so. But that's the basic structure, cut from the strong side, and then change sides and maybe change height, like attack a higher opening, lower opening.
Guy Windsor
Very Vadi, in fact, his first play of the longsword is just like that.
Alexander Fürgut
Expands more than just a Liechtenauer addition. And this is just an example, that these archetypes I had not written them down or systematized or thought about it that way before, but I wanted to give people some advice here, and I needed to somehow reference this, instead of just referencing specific plays. So what are things you typically see nowadays when you just fence with people? And how can I name those things, because then you can give them some general help, and some general tips. Like, okay, this part of this approach is dangerous if you want to use the Schielhau so you should do something else. And that whole chapter, I have not put that into thought before I started the book. And this kind of came while working on it, worked it out, make a system out of it, so I can actually explain it to people. And look here, just using this kind of approach a lot of the time. So this is what you can do against it.
Guy Windsor
And that's a great thing about writing books, is it forces you to think in that systematic way. Because whatever insights you have, you have to put it down, one thing after the other on the page, which is desperately linear.
Alexander Fürgut
And in a clearly logical order. So it has to make sense in order. And what are the prerequisites? When can I explain this? What do I need to tell people before that even?
Guy Windsor
Yeah, in many cases for me, it's the hardest thing to do in writing a book. It's like the whole sword fighty thing is this massive, three or four dimensional thing with lots of interconnected pieces, like a protein or like an enormously complicated molecule where all the atoms are interacting. And to write a book, you have to take out a chunk of that and then put it in order on the page, so that when those things in that order go into the mind of the reader, they really fold themselves into the same kind of shape as you originally had before you straightened it out.
Alexander Fürgut
That's just, that's really, really hard.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah, that is the challenge.
Alexander Fürgut
By the way, I can tell you one of the probably most sad things as a first time writer: I thought this would be easier.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, yeah. No, it's not.
Alexander Fürgut
No. I mean, even if it would have been the original 50 page book, still, you have to do so much stuff. And I mean, a lot of people can write a bad book, but actually making it good, you have to go over it again and again and again. It's just so tough.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, it's harder to write a short book than a long one.
Alexander Fürgut
You have to be more concise.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, you have to be even more precise about the bits you select, even more precise about the order, and even more precise with the language. There's no space for fluff. There’s a famous example of somebody, some well-known writer, I'll have to look it up, who wrote, ‘I've written you a 1000-word explanation of this thing. I didn't have time to write a shorter one.’
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, I've heard that about speeches as well. Like, if I can have an hour, I can do it right now. If I have half an hour, I need two weeks’ preparation. If I have 10 minutes, I need a month or something like that. It is so true.
Guy Windsor
How long did it take you to write this?
Alexander Fürgut
I had a first draft lying around for a couple of years, which at the time I started thought, oh, this is probably about two-thirds, which of course, it wasn't. It was like 10% of it, something like that, yeah.
Guy Windsor
About 10% of my first draft of The Swordsman’s Companion ended up in the final book. But my second book, about 90% of the first draft ended up in the final book.
Alexander Fürgut
It wasn't even a full draft. I thought it at a time, but no. And all in all, for the German version, it was pretty much two years where I worked on it really consistently, like, got up a bit earlier, worked on the book, go to work, and so on, and it took me last year to translate it to English, which was not because the English translation itself took the whole year, but it's just, you finished one book, and then you have to do the whole thing again to translate it to English.
Guy Windsor
Miserable.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah. It feels like but I already finished. Why do we have to do this again?
Guy Windsor
Honestly, that's how I feel about making the audiobook out of my books. That's why some of my books are lacking audiobooks. It's like I've published that fucking thing already. I'm done. Why do I have to go back and look at it again? I mean, it's actually extremely impressive that you would be able to translate your own book into what is very clean and clear English.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, there’s help. There's a lot of tools you can use, but still, you have to do the work. You have to read the sentence over and over again, make beta tests, figure out, does the stuff work? Do people actually understand what I'm trying to convene here? I mean, I think my English is okay, but I'm clearly not a native speaker. And thinking in those terms and getting a nice sentence structure and everything, it's still difficult.
Guy Windsor
Reading it, you can sort of tell that you're not a native speaker. There are sometimes, like, slight turns of phrase, which maybe, well, I mean, in the subtitle, for example, “A comprehensive guide about fundamental tactics, and strategy”. We may be, normally say, Guide to fundamental tactics and strategy. But it's perfectly clear, but it just has that slight flavour to it. But it's very impressive that you can actually, I mean, there's not a single other language I can do this to. I can write my books in English, and I can translate books from Italian into English, more or less. But, yeah, actually producing a book of mine in Italian? Forget it. No way. So, why did you bother with the English translation?
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, the audience is much larger, and again, I thought this would be less work than it really was.
Guy Windsor
It's a good tip, though. Actually, you should always underestimate how much work a book is going to be, because then you'll actually sit down and do it. If you actually knew how much work it was going to be before you started, you never would have started. It's the same with people who, like, climb mountains and walk across Antarctica and that kind of stuff. It's like, if they knew how hard it was going to be, they wouldn't do it. And so even when they've done something like that before, they sort of forget how hard it is, and then they go and do it again, and in the middle, it's like, damn it, this is harder than I remember.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah. I mean, my girlfriend gave me the tip. So she made a cookbook in German, and she always wanted to translate it to English, but she did not immediately continue after she finished the German version. And she was like, listen to me, if you want to do this, if you want to have this in English, continue. You got a momentum now, just continue, push through it. And that was a really good tip, because I'm not sure if I would have picked up this again, like after half a year or a year or something, just because of the mental resistance of I have read this so many times, I don't want to do it again.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I think that really varies from person to person. I would have to take a break and do something else for a bit, but then I would make a commitment to someone that I was actually going to do it. If I promise it to someone, ideally to someone I actually know. So look, you know, you've been asking for this particular book for ages, and I need to take a break before I get back to it, but I will get back to it on this date, and I will have it done for you by that day. And thing is, if I've made a promise to a person, it's quite easy to do it. If I haven't, then maybe next week, maybe next year, maybe I'll do something else instead.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, you're an experienced author, so you know that you work that kind of way. I did not want to take the book and just leave it like that.
Guy Windsor
But your first is the hardest. So what's the second going to be?
Alexander Fürgut
Well, that is the big question. So I said one thing during development, the beta testing and afterwards, if this does not find its audience, does not sell copies, I will not write another book, because I took a chance. If it doesn't turn out well, then I won't really consider it, because it's just too tough. If this sells, if there's an audience, if people like it, then, well, maybe I'll think about it. Let's phrase it like this.
Guy Windsor
And can I ask how it's doing?
Alexander Fürgut
I don't have anything to compare it to, really. So, that's another factor.
Guy Windsor
We can cut this bit out later. If you end up deciding you don't want to share actual numbers or something, that's perfectly fine, but we can have a chat about numbers and how they actually stack up, if you like.
Alexander Fürgut
That be very interesting to hear. Okay, so let me check. So I think until now I don't have to super up to date numbers, but I think I sold about 350 copies, something like that, in
Guy Windsor
What language?
Alexander Fürgut
German and English combined.
Guy Windsor
Mostly English?
Alexander Fürgut
Mostly German, because it's out longer, but English is catching up fast.
Guy Windsor
Okay. When did the German come out? German, like a year ago. So December of 2023 the German version was released before Christmas, and then January, or February, this year, the English version came out.
Guy Windsor
Right? Okay, so the English version is pretty new, and what have you been doing in the way of marketing?
Alexander Fürgut
The first thing basically posting it on a Facebook, Reddit and so on, wherever the community is, Discord, what we’re doing right now is part of the marketing efforts. Some advertising, like on Amazon, but I have not figured out the advertising part yet. The others were good for the initial push, like there were a lot of orders in a short amount of time. Just the sustained marketing I have not quite figured out yet.
Guy Windsor
It’s tricky. It's a whole art unto itself. And okay, if you've sold 350 copies in a year, you're doing maybe five times better than the average author.
Alexander Fürgut
Okay, that's pretty good, which is not bad.
Guy Windsor
An awful lot of books sell 10, 20, 30 copies, and then that's it, they're dead. So you clearly do have a market. It's clearly quite small, because you're looking at a niche within a niche. Historical martial arts is a niche. German Longsword is a niche within that niche, and the people who are really interested in the Schielhau is maybe a fraction of those. So actually, 350 copies is fairly impressive, because it's so specific. In all honesty, I wouldn't have bought it because I'm not that interested in the Schielhau. I'm glad I've got it, and I'm glad I've read it. And you sent me a copy so I could have a look at it before we talk. 15 years ago, any book on historical martial arts came out, I'd buy it automatically. I can't afford to do that anymore. And it's, it's outside of my usual focus, which is Italian stuff. And so it's all about the German stuff. And it's about a very specific part of the German stuff, which, I mean, I could do a Schielhau. My understanding of Schielhau is about what you have in the book. I mean, I can't think of any, any way I would be doing it differently based on being taught by various people who study the journal and stuff like Christian Tobler and Stefan Deacon, whoever else. And I don't have any real plans to make my Schielhau indomitable and my favourite strike, because, you know, I'm a Fiore guy. You know, I've been working on the punta falsa or the exchange of thrust or something.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, in all honesty, people who have been at it as long as you have, or even slightly as long they're really not my target audience, because oftentimes they are set in their ways. Or maybe that sounds a bit negative.
Guy Windsor
That sounds very negative, but you have the ‘not my first language card’ there. Yeah, it's fine.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean that they have formed their opinions, and they're quite happy with whatever they ended up with. And that's why I say, if you're unhappy with the Schielhau, this is the book for you. If you're perfectly happy with it and you don't want, you're not interested in any other versions, don't get the book. But HEMA is still growing at a quite considerable pace. So I'm thinking more of the people who are like, not maybe first year HEMAists, but in the range of year two, I don't know, three or four years or something like that. And theoretically those are quite a few people who can read and understand English.
Guy Windsor
That's several 1000 people at least, and particularly because the German stuff is what a lot of the people who are doing tournaments say that they're doing. I phrased that quite carefully, so I would say the majority of the people who compete regularly in tournaments think of themselves as doing Liechtenauer, and you have quite a chunky section in there about making it work against different kinds of fencing opponents. And it's not aimed at the tournament people, but it's aimed, I think, quite carefully, to be very useful to tournament people.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, they can definitely use it as well. I mean, I’m kind of biased, since I live in Germany, so most of the clubs that do longsword of course do German longsword. If you're doing Italian or something else here, you're quite an exotic part of it. Not sure if this is the same thing worldwide, or, I'm unaware of big regions where people do Vadi or something like that.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, Italy is full of people doing Italian stuff.
Alexander Fürgut
Okay, that makes sense.
Guy Windsor
Absolutely full of it, as you would expect. Yeah, but like, you know, I would say Liechtenauer clubs outnumber Fiore clubs probably three to one. I have no data for that. That's just my kind of gut impression from interviewing people and seeing people and travelling about teaching in various places. Of course, most of the places I go to teach are Fiore clubs. But very often, one or two people from the local other Liechtenauer clubs will come to the seminar. So I found out clubs which are doing Liechtenauer stuff, and there's just this one sole Italian themed club in the area.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, I have the German podcast Schwertgeflüster. So I knew that there was at least a pre-existing audience that might be interested in reading something I've written.
Guy Windsor
Do you find that your podcast sells a lot of your books?
Alexander Fürgut
I can't really tell, like, the episode where I talked about writing the book and what I did, what I didn't do, it was difficult. That had quite a lot of listeners, like, a bit more than average. But I cannot directly trace if, like, 10% bought a book or something like that.
Guy Windsor
I mean, like if you normally are making, say, 30 sales a month on Amazon. It's about right, more or less.
Alexander Fürgut
Average, but it's usually a bit more.
Guy Windsor
But the week after that podcast episode comes out, you see a spike, it’s reasonable to attribute it to the podcast episode, because there's nothing else that would reasonably have caused it.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, but I timed it to be close together to the release and all the different things so I cannot reasonably differentiate it.
Guy Windsor
It’ll be interesting to see when this goes out, whether that has an effect. So people, if you want to go and buy Alexander's book, please do it this week, because then I can actually tell whether the show has had an effect of selling his book because it's useful information. And I'm fairly sort of optimistic about it, because, like forever, my biggest selling book was The Medieval Longsword. And in the last three years or so, From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice is outselling The Medieval Longsword. And I think the reason for that is because of the nature of the conversations I tend to have on this show, which tend to get very specific, very nerdy. The book I am most likely to mention is From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The longsword techniques of Fiore dei Liberi. See, I mentioned the first one earlier, and it was not me like desperately trying to crowbar a book reference into the conversation. To have the conversation, that's the thing I had to say, right? But that's sort of just bringing it up quite a lot. I think that's what has driven the longsword volume of that series to actually, it makes me more money than The Medieval Longsword now, which is extraordinary to me.
Alexander Fürgut
And that's the book that you mentioned most often.
Guy Windsor
From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice is the one I've mentioned the most, because it's the academic one. Yeah, see, whereas The Medieval Longsword is much more useful to the average reader because it's basically, this is how you train to fence with longsword in Fiore’s style.
Alexander Fürgut
How big is the spread between your books? Like, your best selling book, does it sell 10 times more books than the least?
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I would say, right now The Medieval Longsword and From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice: The longsword version are about neck and neck. The Medieval Longsword actually maybe sells slightly more copies, but I make more money on From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice, so it appears as a bigger spike in the money chart, right? So they're about neck and neck. Then, I have quite a few books that barely sell any copies at all. Almost nobody bought the How to Write Training Manuals. Almost nobody, okay, not very many people have bought the How to Teach book either.
Alexander Fürgut
OK, bit surprised about that, because, yes, thought that this would be something like, I can see that people writing training manuals is a niche of a niche.
Guy Windsor
Honestly, I wrote that one to have a book, because I also sort of hang out at in sort of writing events, and so to have a book that's actually useful to writers, and I wrote it for, like, the niche of a niche of a niche, because they're very easy to target. But 98% of it is not specific to writing sword manuals. So I'm quietly hoping some well-known writer will accidentally stumble upon a copy and like it a lot, and, use it to write a book and then tell everyone about it, and it'll do a Harry Potter on me, that would be nice. I'm not expecting it, but, you know, it might happen.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, but then again, there are a lot of instructors, so I would have expected that at least some of them would be interested in to get their hands on all material that they could get their hands on.
Guy Windsor
I think quite a lot of instructors don't know what they don't know, if you know what I mean? I mean, I was the same when in 2010 I'd been teaching for a living for nine years. I went along to this British Academy of Fencing coaching course, and it was like being smacked in the face with a great big wet fish. I was like, fuck. I thought I actually knew what I was doing. Turns out I don't. So it was a very uncomfortable experience, put it that way. Exceptionally useful and a definite growth opportunity, but it was profoundly uncomfortable. But, it transformed the way I teach, and I teach a lot better now than I did then. But unless you happen to put yourself in the way of experiences like that, it's hard to know, because you don't have anything to compare it to. You have your students, your colleagues have their students, and maybe your colleague’s students are doing better than your students, but maybe he's just got better students.
Alexander Fürgut
You usually don't see how other people teach their regular classes, unless you visit them, even if you see some workshop at an event, that's a different audience, because it’s different people, maybe you want to be a bit more flashy with whatever you're doing, because it's an event, and not just the plain old stuff you do in your club.
Guy Windsor
A lot of instructors out there have, like, serious teaching experience, they're high school teachers or they are basketball coaches in their spare time, or whatever. They have actual relevant teaching experience, and they are applying that to what they're doing, and that has a lot of value. But I haven't done much to market the book, to be honest. And it's a niche of a niche, since it's aimed at instructors. And, you know, there's usually 30 practitioners for every instructor, on average, something like that. So it's like 3% of the total. And it is supposed to be useful to everyone else as well, because every time you cross doors with someone, you're teaching them something, whether you mean to or not.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah. Maybe we will have a nice effect on this book as well, and after the podcast…
Guy Windsor
Maybe. And again, I haven't put a lot of weight behind it, because, again, it was a book I felt I needed to write and get out there. But I don't feel it terribly necessary to push it, for some reason, it's like I'm quite happy with it just sitting there.
Alexander Fürgut
Do you ever see yourself stopping writing books about sword fighting one way or another?
Guy Windsor
That's good question. It is impossible to predict the future, and I would say that if I'm not teaching swords, I'll be teaching something else. And if I'm not writing books about swords, I'll be writing books about something else. At the moment, swords have no competition in my head as subjects to write about. But you know, I might end up, I don't know, getting completely into something else. And starting to teach that, and needed to write books about it. And, who knows? So, yeah, I'll definitely be teaching something, and I'll almost certainly be writing books about it. Because the thing is, to me, you write the book to organize your thoughts on the subject. And you need a target reader so you know who you're writing it for. That tells you how the tone and the pitch and the level of complexity and all that sort of thing. Otherwise you’re sort of swimming in the dark. I have to have at least one real or imaginary reader in my head, but, I'm writing it to figure out what I think about a subject, rather than I already know what I think so I'm going to write it down.
Alexander Fürgut
So writing clicked with you on a level where you say, this is, this is the thing I like to do. It's helping me. I'm good at that, I guess?
Guy Windsor
Well, I mean, I wrote my second book because I wanted an interpretation of Capoferro that I could actually use in class, yeah, right. And so I started working on Capoferro in class, and I started writing the book at the same time, so that I would have a clear focus and a way to capture the things that I was figuring out as I was teaching them. Because my primary way to figure things out is to teach it, and then my primary way to kind of make that into a coherent system is to write it. So teaching it tells me what it is writing, it tells me how it should be organised, and then I teach it better.
Alexander Fürgut
I see, yeah, that's interesting, because in all honesty, writing the book was tough, but finishing it was tougher on top of tough. So I'm not sure if I'm really ready to do this again soon or not. But yeah, it's probably true that the first book is the hardest, because I do have something I can build on, like the layout from the book, I don't have to make that again or something like that.
Guy Windsor
And honestly, I mean, there are sections of it that, you know, like the whole first chapter is not Schielhau specific. The strategy chapter can easily be adapted to any other technique. There's a lot here. You could take the same structure and you could do another book on the Zwerchhau, or the Zornhau. I mean, I would actually like to see a book on the Scheitelhau. Because I've not seen anybody show me an interpretation of the Scheitelhau that I look at it, and I go, yep, that has to be it.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, it does sound a good old how do. I beat the Scheitelhau, right?
Guy Windsor
Like, what the hell?
Alexander Fürgut
At some point the discussion just stopped. People gave up. They're like, I guess this is not working like this.
Guy Windsor
I mean, as I understand it, they're in a low guard, and basically, you throw a blow over the top, and you angulate it so you're basically angulating around their parry. That's my understanding of it. But I'm not a German scholar, so I couldn't say for sure, but I wouldn't mind seeing at least a 50 page book on the Scheitelhau.
Alexander Fürgut
I'll think about it, let's say,
Guy Windsor
But maybe do the Zwerchhau first, because it's a lot more common, it will sell a lot more copies. And then, actually, you have absolutely a series here, if you want one.
Alexander Fürgut
It's interesting. Let's counter this again. I thought, take a strike that is difficult. So people think, oh, I'm not good at this. I'm not happy with it. I'll write a book. And you're on the oh, do the Zwerchhau, because everyone does the Zwerchhau and that will sell more. So I think we are coming from two different angles to what a good topic is.
Guy Windsor
Well no, I first said do the Scheitelhau.
Alexander Fürgut
And even before that you said do the Zornhau.
Guy Windsor
Basically, for me, most of what I'm writing books for, because remember, teaching swords is my actual job. I don't have any other job. So mostly I need my books to help as many people as possible in this particular area. So okay, Advanced Longsword is explicitly volume three in a three volume series, and you're not supposed to read Advanced Longsword until you've read The Medieval Dagger and The Medieval Longsword, right? And that should be fairly obvious from how the book is presented. But apart from that, all my books are aimed to be useful to beginners and more advanced people. And you know, people have been doing this for like, 20 years or whatever, so there should be something in them for everyone, because I want it to be useful for the biggest number of people. So that when I go somewhere and teach a seminar on something, I can say, well, look, you know, here's a link. Go download the eBook, and read it, and that will give us all a common language and a common structure. And that only works if it's pitched at the instructor who's hiring me will find it useful. And the person who's been training for like, three weeks will find it useful. You'll find it differently useful, but it should be useful for a really broad range of people. Also, quite critically, my books generate about 40% of my income.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, so you're a sword fighting instructor and an author.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. But I mean, it's all part of the same thing, This is a fairly recent thing, like in 2012 my books generated almost none of my income. And now it's about 40% and online courses are another 40% and the rest comes from other things, like teaching seminars or whatever.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's you're quite lucky with that, if your books only sold 10 copies each. That would be difficult, I take it.
Guy Windsor
Yes, but that's another reason why, at least most of my books are pitched at the wider audience. So I mean, when I did my complete rapier workbook thing, the first book that came out was the beginners’ course. The second book was completing the base. The third book was basically the intermediates, and the fourth book was rapier and dagger. It's really just one book, but I published it in four sections, because that's how it appeared in my head. But by the time when I had all four sections together, all four sections were published, I pulled all of the individual ones and I just sell the complete, because in my head, it was always one book, it just had to be produced in in these four chunks. Because that's just the way the material presented itself to me.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, also you get something out the door, people can read it, you can get some feedback, and then use that for the next book.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, absolutely.
Alexander Fürgut
I think you could do maybe the Krumphau and the Zwerchhau together, and the Zornhau and Scheitelhau, because they do share some similarities when it comes to body mechanics and so on, even if so the technical application is a bit different. Or you go to full five edition thing for the master strikes.
Guy Windsor
Well, okay, I think maybe the thing to do would be to write the Zwerchhau and write the Scheitelhau, and maybe finish with the Zornhau. Now I'm missing the Krumphau. And then see what you have. It could be that, like the Krumphau and the Scheitelhau and together make up about a book size. And then the Zwerchhau is a book on its own, and the Zornhau is two more books. I mean, you never know until you actually write it. You don't know how much you've got.
Alexander Fürgut
yeah, I mean, it's a risk that each of them would escalate again.
Guy Windsor
But it wouldn't be a bad idea to do the Zornhau next, something with really broad application, because then people who like it will go and pick up the Schielhau.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, kind of ease them into it like you already know the Zornhau. People tend to generally do it kind of similar. So it's not that much to say about the Zornhau by itself.
Guy Windsor
But, well, there's a lot to say about the Zornhau, because there's a lot of nuance to it, and there are so many applications.
Alexander Fürgut
But no one's doing it with like the short edge.
Guy Windsor
They shouldn’t be. Well, one hopes they're not. Not a majority, yeah. But like lots of different ways to set it up, you know, it can be a parry. Can be a counter attack, it can be a way of breaking a guard. It can occur from the right side. It can also occur from the left side. You can even bring in things like Fiore where you can see crossings which probably occurred when a Zornhau-ish thing occurred.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah. I mean, I remember the times when we had all the discussions, like, if I hit you directly with this Zornhau is this a different technique than if I cut into your cut and then I thrust you. And personally, I think I also talk about this in the book, I kind of look at all of the master strikes as examples for a body mechanic, like they are different in how you execute a strike and well, if it's a thrust, if it's a cut, depends how close your opponent steps and how you step and so on.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, I would agree, it’s a Zornhau if you do it with that basic strike action, and you hit the middle of their blade and your point ends up in their head somehow.
Alexander Fürgut
And maybe you get even something crazy when you use a Zornhau against something else than an Uberhau. Maybe someone tries a Zwerchhau, how can you even consider it a Zornhau? It's not exactly described in the manuscripts.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and if you feel under pressure, you can make it into a parry. And if it's coming on the other side, you can do the same sort of thing on the other side. There's a lot of scope there for dragging in pieces from all sorts of other places.
Alexander Fürgut
And you need that flexibility when fencing. You cannot just be super rigid, like only this situation is described. And if that does not happen exactly like this, I am just letting myself get it.
Guy Windsor
Yes. I mean, this technique works great on Tuesdays.
Alexander Fürgut
That's a nice way to put it.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, and you see that all the time, and it was huge in the 80s. In martial arts stuff in the 80s, it's like,
Alexander Fürgut
My Kung Fu’s better than your Kung Fu?
Guy Windsor
Well, yeah. But also like, the reason my secret technique didn't work, it's not my fault, and it's not the technique is shit. And it's not like I don't know what I'm doing. It's they were breathing in instead of breathing out.
Alexander Fürgut
Ah, I see so my secret knowledge, touch KO was not effective.
Guy Windsor
It works when you're breathing out. It doesn't work when you're breathing in. And you probably knew that, and you can find videos of these Senseis from way back when, who spout this absolute, utter bollocks to sort of explain how things do or don't work, and very often it's an explanation as to why their technique didn't just work.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, that's one thing I like about HEMA that you can with relatively low risk, just say, “Well, how about we try it out? Let's see.” At worst, you learn something.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. And thing is, a good fencer can make stuff that shouldn't work. So you do get false positives. And I remember one guy showing me an interpretation of a sword and buckler technique, and he was able to do something with his wrist without hurting it, because he had super bendy wrists that were also super strong for some genetic reason. He didn't particularly train them or anything. And I looked at that and I said, I literally cannot make my wrist do that. And he was like, well, that probably can't be the interpretation then can it? Okay, I'll think again, because he had this particular genetic predisposition to super bendy wrists, and so he was using it to get the sword to do a thing that there's no way I could physically do that.
Alexander Fürgut
I can do that myself, if I fence against some people who are very new to fencing. I'm not putting up my A game where I just hit them over and over again. That's no fun. So I start messing around, trying out silly stuff, and oftentimes it works, but this is just because I had a lot more experience. This is not a solid technique to do.
Guy Windsor
And sometimes you'll do things a little bit wrong to give them a chance to take advantage of it.
Alexander Fürgut
Exactly. See if they can react.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Okay. Now I do have a couple of questions that I ask all my guests, or most of them anyway, and the first one is, what is the best idea you haven't acted on?
Alexander Fürgut
So I tend to try to act on the ideas that I think are really solid and would benefit the community. One thing I think would still be useful is to have a dedicated club finder that has some additional code than just the map stuff, because oftentimes the information you get gets outdated really fast, like you put it on and then a month later, half the clubs are have the name changed or whatever, especially if you think about one globally, and have an automated system where you can add a couple of contact persons and it just emails them, like every half a year or something like that, and ask them, hey, anything change? This is your entry and so on. Something like this, where you have some automated system that keeps the stuff up to date, and as a little added feature, twist, whatever, it would be nice if you just said hey, and by the way, this is completely optional, but we would be interested how many members we have at the moment, because then you can start tracking how the HEMA evolves in different countries.
Guy Windsor
That would be very interesting. Because random friends of my mum will say, do a lot of people do that? And I'm like, yeah, quite a lot. And then they'll say, well, how many? And I like, I don't actually know. Maybe I'm guessing. Now we're somewhere around maybe 40,000 worldwide, something like that. It's a lot of people.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, I did that by hand for Germany twice, and it's just so much work. And in Germany, the last I did was in 2021 like, the estimation was about 4500 HEMAists in Germany.
Guy Windsor
Wow, that's a lot.
Alexander Fürgut
Quite a lot. And it's not like those are some made up numbers, from the just the responses, not the extrapolation. I had 3000 responses, I asked the clubs, not individuals. But then I could extrapolate, because I know how many clubs there are in Germany and so on. And that's quite a lot. And I think HEMA is a lot bigger than many of us believe it to be, and having those numbers would be quite nice, because also, for something like equipment manufacturing, if you can show them, this is a market, we can get nicer stuff.
Guy Windsor
It’s an interesting problem, and it's a new one. Because back in the old days, it would be like, you know, there is one club, but they are 400 miles away, and they're doing 18th century stuff, and I want to do medieval stuff. And now it's like, well, you go to any significant city anywhere in Europe or America, or there's quite a lot in South America too, and Australia, all over the place. It's like you have a choice of clubs. If you want to go and do the German stuff, you can go over there. There's a Fiore club over there, and there's a rapier club over there. And some clubs do all the things, and some clubs that just do one thing, and there's usually more clubs in that area.
Alexander Fürgut
If you live in the bigger city, you can often train five times a week, not necessarily at one club, but if you just go to all of the clubs. I was training twice a week and that was about it.
Guy Windsor
And, I mean, one of the real game changes for me was back in the early days, in June 2001 I got a permanent space. Suddenly my club could train. I mean, we were training four nights a week, plus like two weekends a month. And then students started coming and doing their own stuff at the weekends. And then when I had students who could lead classes and stuff, we had classes five nights a week and the weekends.
Alexander Fürgut
Also it becomes kind of a social space and anchor point where people know what is happening and just come there.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, it would be really interesting to see what's actually out there, and to see how many people are involved, that would be really interesting. So you're envisioning something as like a HEMA club finder website,
Alexander Fürgut
yeah, I mean, website for if you're looking for clubs, but there's a bit of a back end and some automation. I mean, it's not super complicated. Send out emails with some links to some forms where you get the data automatically. It's still quite a bit of work that someone has to do, and you have to maintain that stuff because frameworks change and so on, but this would be doable.
Guy Windsor
So do you have a tech background?
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, I'm a software engineer.
Guy Windsor
Ah, right. Yeah, you could build that. It would be useful for the community. It would be an awful lot of work. But, you know, Wiktenauer is an awful lot of work, and it's just this amazing thing that's so useful to everyone, I guess. I mean, so your club finder would be very useful for people who are looking for a club locally, but also very useful for people who are travelling.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, and you can go a step further, like, if you still have time and you still have energy to expand the project, like, there are several people running HEMA event finders. I'm one of them. I run hema.events for events in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And just integrate that as well. So you can find clubs, you can find events. You know how many people are there. Like, you could have a little bit of an ecosystem there where you get all the information. If you're travelling, for example, or just joining moving into a city.
Guy Windsor
That would be cool. And then, and then, you should have your own social media platform to go with it.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah. Take it a step further. Get everyone off Facebook.
Guy Windsor
Well, I already have my own social media platform.
Alexander Fürgut
What’s it called again? I have an account.
Guy Windsor
Swordpeople. You have an account, but I don't ever see you there.
Alexander Fürgut
No. How many people are on there?
Guy Windsor
It really depends. Active I'm thinking it's about 30, which is not a great deal. Actual accounts is closer to about 800.
Alexander Fürgut
Okay, still a bit to go, I guess.
Guy Windsor
Basically, I am not very good at social stuff. I was always terrible at social media, and I'm not great at running parties, and I'm not great at anything involving. I mean, I can put a seminar together and teach a bunch of people, because that's structured, or I can attend the seminar as a student, that's fine, because it's structured. I know exactly who is supposed to be doing what, and so it all works. But a social media platform where people are just talking to each other, it's difficult for me to see how all the parts are supposed to interact. So basically, a problem I would like to crack in 2025, is making the swordpeople platform better, so that more people spend more time on it, having a nice time talking about swords.
Alexander Fürgut
I would love to have a place that is less hostile to its users, and be able to get away from Facebook and so on.
Guy Windsor
And it's not hostile at all. There are no ads, there's no algorithms. There's no trolls. Bad behaviour is not tolerated. There's no anonymity. So you're expected to use a name you are known by. Doesn't have to be the name on your passport, some people use their SCA name, for example, and yeah, it's a really good idea that I have executed, but I haven't executed it well enough for it to actually do what I want it to do.
Alexander Fürgut
You need some critical mass where word of mouth begins to spread.
Guy Windsor
And I need a critical mass of the right sort of people who are good at social media stuff and start building followings on there, so that people have a reason to go to see what else has happened since the last time they went. And I post stuff there a few times a week, usually. And get some interactions or whatever. And there are people who post about as regularly, and you get some lovely conversations going. When it works, it works really, really well.
Alexander Fürgut
It’s just that the big mass of communication still is happening somewhere else.
Guy Windsor
Of course, as soon as you have more people, inevitably in that, in that larger sample size, you are going to get some people that need to get weeded out.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, and you need to moderate it, to take an eye, a look out.
Guy Windsor
There are excellent volunteers who moderate, and I moderate stuff, and so far, I've only ever kicked a couple of people off the platform, and that's only because they didn't put their name on. They used initials or something like and, and I would send them a message saying, I'm sorry, you have to use your actual name or a name you're known by, and they don't do it, so I delete their account.
Alexander Fürgut
Clear Rules.
Guy Windsor
Absolutely, clear rules. It's the only way to do it. But yes, I would be very glad to get more of the right people onto the platform, so that more people have a nice time there, so that it can actually do its thing. And there are a couple of clubs that use it instead of a Facebook page, which is really nice. And the downside of that is, because I own the platform, I can't lock myself out of any of the spaces, so it's private to the club, but I can also see stuff, and I just don't look, which isn't optimal. Ideally, the club should be able to have a completely private space, but I guess, on any social media platform, if you have a private Facebook page, people who work at Facebook who have a reason to need to see it, can see it.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, that's true. I mean, if it's your platform, people have to trust you, which hopefully is a little bit easier than trusting some mega cooperation.
Guy Windsor
One would hope. But it's clearly not the case, because Facebook has like 2 billion users, and I've got like 700.
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, people know you. They know who to complain to.
Guy Windsor
And it does seem to be working pretty well, but I'd like to get it really humming. And, yeah, we do have an events thing there as well. So if you have an event that you want to share, you can stick it on. You can create an event on the swordpeople platform, and it works. Basically it's modelled on Facebook. Pretty much everything you can do on Facebook, except be an arsehole.
Alexander Fürgut
I’ll definitely try it out the next time we have something for international Indies.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, do, again, because it's small and it's not moving terribly quick at the moment, it probably won't help much, right? But until people start using it, it's never going to help much, but when people start using it, the ball will start to roll, and then eventually, hopefully it'll be the place to post your event, because that's where all the sword people are. That's the goal. That would be great. Okay. Last question, someone gives you a million euros to spend improving historical martial arts worldwide. How would you spend it?
Alexander Fürgut
You know, my first reaction was, Oh, my God, a million. So now we're getting our own Karate Kid. Everyone will be know about HEMA.
Guy Windsor
You can have 100 million if you want. It's just an arbitrary very large number. It's imaginary money. So whatever you want.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah, so I'm not super familiar with how film funding works, but it would be nice to have something set up where, if you do actually include some sword fighting, and you do it in a certain way that you can say, Okay, this is closer to HEMA than to Buhurt or something else, that you might get a bit of additional funding, something like that.
Guy Windsor
Oh, a fund to persuade filmmakers to use authentic historical martial arts in their films.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah. I mean authentic with like in quotation marks. But something where you say, okay, we can have really shitty choreography, or we can get a little bit of extra money, even, or pay for some part of the costs, and get into contact with people who know about it, and that way you get it into more films, because it makes a life a bit easier. And hopefully the sword people have less to complain about with film choreography.
Guy Windsor
That is not a bad idea. Because, there's no question that the reason martial arts are so popular worldwide, they became popular in the 70s and 80s, is because of Bruce Lee movies and the movies that came after that. So, yeah, we need our own Bruce Lee.
Alexander Fürgut
Yeah. And the other thing is, if you have a system where you do know that there will be regularly new contracts, you can actually have people that specialise in that kind of thing. Like, I know a lot of the manuscripts, different weapons. I know how to do that safely, but still looking cool on camera. Because at the moment, we don't have that kind of, like action stunt guy who is really into that and is well connected and everything.
Guy Windsor
I do know some stunt people who are serious historical martial artists, but generally speaking, they don't get to choreograph much. And I know some fight directors who are trying to get decent sword fights on screen, but the actual director director very often doesn't want it, because they want whatever's in their head, and “swords are big and heavy, and you should hit people very hard.”
Alexander Fürgut
I mean, I can see you start with a little indie film where you say, okay, the film itself was alright, but, oh, the choreography was so great. Then suddenly it's a new thing in Hollywood, and everyone wants to get some of those new choreographed fights. And then it splits from there, something like that.
Guy Windsor
Basically getting historical martial arts into the mainstream the way Kung Fu and karate got put into the mainstream.
Alexander Fürgut
And the nice thing is, if at some point we say, Okay, now it's mainstream enough, we can't just stop the funding. Probably it will not stop the trend completely, but we do have some control over it, if you're in this imaginary land where you can just open and close the money.
Guy Windsor
Because, then, when that mission is accomplished, the money could go towards something else, yeah. Like, I don't know, getting other aspects of the historical milieu correct.
Alexander Fürgut
I'm not sure if we want to get mainstream, but if that's the goal, spread it to as many people as possible, mass media, and usually it's that means film that's the way to go.
Guy Windsor
It’s a fair question, whether we want to be mass media or not. It's tricky. There are pros and cons. I mean, I would sell a lot more books. That's for sure. That'd be awesome.
Alexander Fürgut
More people could live from the art or from their teaching.
Guy Windsor
But then, of course, as soon as there's money to be made, you get people who want to make the money and don't want to do the work.
Alexander Fürgut
Absolutely. And it wouldn't change the feeling of the HEMA community, probably, also if there's an influx of new people who are not dead interested in what it originally was about, even now it's fragmented.
Guy Windsor
Basically the same problem that karate had in the 90s or the 80s, yeah. Be a nice problem to have.
Alexander Fürgut
Probably, yeah, somebody will be getting there. It's growing. I think.
Guy Windsor
Well, I think if I had the money, I'd give it to you. I'll tell you what, maybe now that you've been on this show your book, The Schielhau in Detail. Spot that mention of the title again at the end of the episode, so that people remember it when they get on their phones and go, Oh, The Schielhau in Detail, that sounds interesting. And Schielhau, by the way, is spelled S, C, H, I, E, L, H, A, U. Top podcasting tip, spell it out so they can type it into their browsers. So maybe after this episode, you'll sell like 100 million.
Alexander Fürgut
Like, if I get JK Rowling rich, I'm definitely putting some money aside for this kind of endeavour.
Guy Windsor
I think that's a worthy goal. We should do what we can to get this book to be sold as widely as possible, so that you can make sure loads of money and put it all into the movies.
Alexander Fürgut
The Schielhau in Detail: available on Amazon.
Guy Windsor
Well done. Excellent, great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Alexander, it's great seeing you again.
Alexander Fürgut
Thanks for having me, Guy.
