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THE MARS CHRONICLES

The future is red

When the Book Becomes Real—And the Letters Disappear

  • Writer: Icarus
    Icarus
  • Jul 26
  • 2 min read

🚀 Welcome to ICARUS


An emotionally gripping, high-stakes sci-fi epic about survival, rebellion, and the fragile hope of beginning again — not just as individuals, but as a civilization.



There’s something indescribably special about holding your own book in your hands for the first time. Icarus has been a long journey—literally. I always knew it was a hefty novel, but seeing it printed and bound into a thick, weighty volume gave that reality a whole new dimension. A book you can lift. Thumb through. Annotate with real-life coffee stains, maybe.


Hand holding a book titled "ICARUS" by Zsolt Bugarszki, with a red-orange sunset cover. Background shows potted plants on metal shelves.

And then, I opened it.


What should’ve been a joyful moment turned briefly sour when I noticed a glaring mistake: all the Chinese characters were missing.


Hand holding a book titled "ICARUS" with an orange sunset cover. "Not for Resale" is printed below. Potted plants in the blurred background.

Icarus tells a story that spans cultures, languages, and worldviews. From Ancient Greek aphorisms to Russian dialogue and Chinese poetry, language is a powerful part of the novel’s texture. I spent an enormous amount of time making sure each character set was used correctly—differentiating between Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and even incorporating Southern dialects like Teochew where appropriate.


All of it—gone.


At first, I suspected Amazon’s print service, but soon realized the issue lay with the formatting tool I used: Reedsy. While their platform worked beautifully for the eBook version (the Chinese characters displayed perfectly in the Kindle edition), their print-ready PDF export did not support non-Latin character sets. In their response, they clarified that their formatting tools currently only support English-language typesetting.

My book is in English. But it’s not only English.


So I rolled up my sleeves—again—and reprocessed the manuscript with an external tool that allowed me to embed all foreign characters properly into the final PDF. Now, hopefully, the next batch of printed copies will reflect the story the way it was meant to be told.


This is indie publishing. A little bumpy, very personal, and always a learning curve.


But in the end—it’s worth it.


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