T w e n t y S i d e d

As I have belabored, I have a book coming out. Authoring a novel is a terrifying endeavor. Months of work goes into a single pass / fail proposition. Even if you do make money, you don’t begin doing so until after all of the work is done.

We decided that we wanted to practice the process of releasing a book before we did so. I wanted an easy, low-risk thing to publish, so that we could see how it all worked before releasing the Real Thing. So, I turned my autoblography into a book. I’m very glad we did this. There is a ton of work between typing “The End” on your novel and the point where people can buy it. Editing is a lot of work (I’ve been blessed by having a couple of very patient and talented volunteer editors) but doing the layout and cover are also huge tasks. Heck, just getting the work listed for sale on the Amazon store took almost a day. It would have been daunting and stressful to try and figure all of this out using my novel, which is about twice as long and represents about ten times the investment in time.

The upshot is, my autoblography is now a book titled “How I Learned”.

I don’t expect this to sell particularly well. Biographies don’t generally sell well unless you’re already world famous. Moreover, anyone interested in reading this particular biography has already done so, and can do so again, for free. But that’s not the point. The goal was to bring a book to market, and we’ve accomplished that.

The book differs from the blog series in a few small ways. It contains a bit of cut material. (Nothing major, not more than one or two more entries.) It’s more rigorously proofread. The pictures are in black & white. It costs money.

If you’re one of the threes of people who have expressed an interest in having this book, here is where you can get it:

Preferred link for the e-book:
How I Learned on Smashwords. (e-book only. All readers – Kindle, Epub, HTML, RTF, PDF, Plain Text.)

Preferred link for the print version:
How I Learned on Create Space. (6″ x 9″ Trade Paperback.)

If those links aren’t convenient for you, there’s always my Amazon author page. (I link this last because Amazon takes a bigger cut. However, Amazon is global, and the other versions might not be available for some people.)

I don’t have an ETA on when the Witch Watch will be out. I was hoping to have it before Christmas. Then I was hoping to have it before the end of the year. We’ll see.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I apologize for the entire week of silence on the blog. Can’t remember the last time I had that much dead time. I have some sort of freaky / agonizing / very gross eye infection that makes it very difficult to operate a computer. Actually, the computer itself is’t the problem: it’s the monitor that’s impossible to use.

Also, if you’ve sent me email in the last week, please be patient. I’m a full seven days behind the curve. I’m not ignoring you. I’m just behind schedule and half-blind.

Modern medicine is on the job now, and I expect a full recovery after I’ve undergone my self-proscribed program of vigorous whining, moaning, and making people bring me stuff. Posting will probably continue to be light for a while, unless Josh steps in and does a post for that Shogum thing he’s always on about. What is that? I see a Samurai guy on the cover, so I figure it’s probably some fighting game or something.

Whatever. Everyone knows you beat those games by just holding block and counterattacking a lot. I don’t know what the big deal is.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.