Book Tour

I ordered a copy of my book last week and it arrived on Monday. I'm pretty impressed. I had my doubts that something produced on my computer and printed by some dot com internet company would be of very high quality, but it is. My vanity book is virtually indistinguishable from a "real" book. Best of all, it cost $9 + $4 shipping = $13. It's a little mind blowingly cool.

I was concerned that the pictures wouldn't look good. There are a lot of them, and obviously aren't as impressive in black and white print, as they are in full color on a computer screen. But they look fine in print.

I used Open Office word processor to edit the book and produce the PDF for printing. I had some difficulty with Open Office, mostly because of my unfamiliarity with some of the advanced formatting commands. It took me awhile before I found Lulu's templates which set a lot of the formatting for me.

I found the Lulu publishing website pretty straight forward and easy to use. I made some errors, mostly due to this being my first book. But I'm definitely going to use Lulu again and would recommend it highly to anyone who's thought of writing a book. I'm just amazed that I have such a professional looking product in my hands, and that it was so cheap and relatively easy to produce.

Book preview and ordering is here. If you are someone who contributed regularly to the blog, I'd like to give you a signed copy of the book as thanks for all the emotional support during my trip. Same goes for all the folks who gave me tangible aid through the trip. The gift is a little self serving. Sorry. And it hardly matches the generosity of say, someone who gave me his old rudder cages after mine were destroyed.

Also, because the abridged version of the blog turned out so well, I'm going to start work on a version which includes blog comments. And of course, my publicist is busy scheduling my book tour!