Who Says You Shouldn't Smile Today?

As a reserved Finlander at heart, self-promotion doesn’t come easy to me. It just seems that you should do what you do and leave it at that. For example, seeing athletes who showboat anytime they do something halfway productive annoys me to no end, and politicians who do nothing but posture through the media is even worse. Heck, I sometimes feel dirty simply linking to this blog from my Facebook page. (“There goes that Curly again with his links! We get it, you have a blog! Now leave me alone!”)

Not long ago, I ran across a quote by the author Dean Koontz, from an interview he gave, and it sums up my feelings quite well: “I love writing, but I dislike having written. So I keep promotion and publicity to a minimum.”

So, please understand how hard this is for me to do:

Yep, I’ve put together an ebook that's available on Amazon.com.

Now, if you do any sort of research on self-publishing, you’ll inevitably hear some variation of the following: “Once you’ve written your book, that’s when the real work begins!” What this means is that even if you’ve written the best book in the world - which I'm not claiming to have done, by the way - if you also don’t have an ambitious marketing plan then you're doomed to complete failure.

I’ve read where you should have three different plans of promotion for when you release your book, which could incorporate such things as Facebook, Twitter, contests, giveaways, paid reviews, etc. I’ve even read a suggestion that you start writing well-thought out online book reviews yourself, and then sign each with your name, followed by “author of,” along with the name of the book you’ve written.

As a reserved Finlander at heart, all I can say is that none of that will happen. In fact, this here is my entire marketing campaign, a single blog entry, linked to from my Facebook page. Shrewd? No, but anything more would be too much self-promotion, and if this results in me selling three books total - two to my mother - then so be it. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it was a fun project and I like the thought of one random person perhaps stumbling upon the book at some point in the future, purchasing it, and hopefully enjoying it. That’s the true extent of my ambitions. (Or to put it another way, this isn't my retirement plan. That will be taken care of by a future trip to Vegas.)

So, what about the book itself? Well, it’s a compilation of things I’ve written over the last ten years or so, all of it reedited and cleaned up. Some is from this very blog, some from well before then, and some brand new.

It consists of thirty short essays and a longer piece that details a trip to Isle Royale that I made with my longtime buddy Tom quite a few years ago. Of the essays, about a dozen have appeared before in this very blog, so be aware of this duplication, even though those pieces have been cleaned up and in some cases slightly lengthened. (I would like to heavily stress the term “cleaned up”. A lot of times my blog entries, while edited, still reflect the fact that they’re basically quick brain dumps from when the mood hit me. However, I’ve made certain that those included in the book have been re-edited thoroughly, so that the quality now stands clearly above the original versions. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise.)

The biggest thing to keep in mind here is that this is an ebook, available only at Amazon.com in the Kindle format. The book's product page is here, where you can view the first 10% of it as a preview. (Note: The Amazon previewer smushes everything together. In the real book, there are page breaks.)

I’m assuming there will be questions on this, so I’m going to include an FAQ beforehand, relying exclusively on my physic ability to predict what they would be:

FAQ

Q. So you’ve succumbed to commercialism, just like every other would-be author out there on the internet. Weren't you cool at one point?
A. No, I don't recall that ever being the case.

Q. I guess I don’t either, come to think of it.
A. That’s not a question, and we’re not getting into this again!

Q. What if I don’t have a Kindle, smart guy?
A. There are Kindle reader apps available for free here. I used one on my computer while creating the book, and it worked fine.

Q. What if I have an iPad?
A. There is a Kindle app you can download from the Apple Store that will allow you to read the book if purchased from Amazon.

Q. Didn’t you write a blog entry once saying that you liked printed books and ebooks were basically literary abominations?
A. Yes.

Q. And now you're putting out an ebook? How hypocritical is that?
A. Very hypocritical. However, creating an ebook is cheap, and I had no desire to sink any dollars into physical inventory that could sit on the shelves of a warehouse forever. So in the end, fiscal conservatism won out over my principles. Sue me.

Q. Do you want to thank anybody for helping in the creation of this book?
A. Yes, I do. Thanks to my friend Evelyn for creating the wonderful book cover. Check out her site here. Also, thanks to Tom for letting me use him as a character. You can follow his adventures here. Isle Royale was only a blip on his radar.

I guess that’s all I really have to say about this. If you do read the book, I sincerely hope you enjoy it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve had more than enough self-promotion for the day - and possibly the year. I think I’ll take about fifteen showers in a row, and then maybe I won’t feel so dirty about what I’ve done.