self-publishing

A Chasing After The Wind

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This book, timely right now, sells three or four copies a month.

That phrase, “a chasing after the wind”, appears at least a couple of times in the book of Ecclesiastes. It’s meant to imply something is folly. The folly of seeking after pleasure. The folly of seeking wealth. The folly of strong drink, of fly-by-night friends. The folly of…could be almost anything that becomes all consuming.

I suppose the thing that I pursued to the point of folly is book sales. Having written books, given up on trying to get them published and deciding to self-publish them, I then needed to figure out how to sell them. Conventional wisdom for a self-publisher goes:

  • Create social media accounts and blast out posts about your books. I did this only on Facebook, but I’m not sure the limited number I did ever qualified as blasting.
  • Start an author’s newsletter; collect e-mail addresses (using giveaways if you have to); publish a regular newsletter so readers will know about your books. I never did this. Actually, I did two giveaways, one big and one small. Total sales I could trace to them: two.
  • Place ads on mediums that readers will see, such as Amazon, Facebook, the Fussy Librarian. More on that later.
  • Attend author events and sell paperback copies of your books, remembering to collect e-mail addresses as you do. I did this as those events came at convenient places and times. But I’m sure I passed up more than a few.
  • Any other thing successful other self-publishers seem to be doing. Of course, to learn these things you need to subscribe to other authors’ newsletters, actually read them, and perhaps interact with them to pick their brains. I did a little of this, but can’t say that I really got into the newsletter loop.

About a month ago, I finally realized that trying to sell books is essentially chasing after the wind. It took up a lot of my energy. It caused me to divert time and brainpower from things I would enjoy doing more.

I’ve been running ads on Amazon—but nowhere else—for about four years. I’ve run a profit from these ads—not a big profit. I think I’m $100 or maybe $200 ahead. Every month or two the ads are set to expire, and I roll them over. A few times I’ve forgotten to do this and sales went to zero. I thought about these ads and wondered why I was using them to chase after the wind. I decided when the ads ended at the end of June, as all 17 ads did, I would not renew them. And did not.

So as of right now, I am no longer a book seller. My books are still for sale on Amazon and a few of them at other places. May I’ll sell the occasional one here and there. If any author events come up locally, I might take part until my inventory of paperback copies is reduced to a handful of books.

But as of now, I’m done chasing after the wind. I can always change my mind later, I suppose.

Now, time to go read that new C.S. Lewis biography I picked at the library this afternoon.

book reviews, History, letters, Politics

Book Review: All The Best

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A good read; 5-stars; wish I could keep it.

Back in the dark ages, must have been 1999 to 2000, I saw an episode of Larry King Live where George H W Bush promoted his book, All The Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings. This was more or less Bush’s post-presidential memoir. At least I think it’s in place of a true memoir. I didn’t research that question.

Regular readers of this blog will know I love reading collections of letters. And I always liked the first president Bush. I voted for him in the Kansas presidential primary in 1980. I was out of the country during his 1988 presidential run and can’t remember if I got an absentee ballot in. I know I voted for him in 1992. He made a good presentation of his book in that 1999 or 2000 interview, and I made a mental note to pick up a copy. Way led on to way, and it was several years later when I found it for sale used and picked it up.

Way continued to lead on to way, and it was only a little over a month ago when I finally pulled it off the shelf and read it. It is a collection of letters (Pres. Bush’s), not of correspondence (incoming and outgoing). And it’s not comprehensive. It’s a selection, made probably Bush himself and an editor. The collection begins just before his enlistment in the Navy during World War 2, continues through his business years in the oil field, his jump into politics—running for Congress and both winning some and losing some, then as Republican party chairman, US rep to the United Nations, CIA director, US ambassador to China, then to vice-presidential and presidential years. Plus, a chapter or letters after he lost the presidency in 1992 to the book’s publishing in 1999.

The letters have been selected, of course, to put Bush in a good light. But it appears to be an excellent selection. They show a lot of humor, such as an award given to cabinet members who dozed off in cabinet meetings. There were letters to his parents and children. I found this great excerpt in a 1974 letter to his sons.

Don’t confuse being ‘soft’ with seeing the other guy’s point of view. …[U]nderstand too that power accompanied by arrogance is very dangerous. It’s particularly dangerous when men with no real experience have it—for they can abuse our great institutions.

Great sentiments from a nice guy. Yes, Bush was an understanding man who went about his jobs with quiet efficiency. Bush gained a reputation in the press of being a wimp—a weakling in foreign affairs and unconcerned with domestic affairs. That reputation is blown to smithereens in these letters. Bush continued Reagan initiatives that resulted in the Iron Curtain coming down, the end of the Cold War, and the break-up of the Soviet Union. He put together a coalition of nations that drove Iraq out of Kuwait—something especially close to me. Those are not the actions of a wimp. The contemporary press got it wrong; history is getting it right.

At 634 pages and ten to fifteen pages a day, it took me a while to get through it. But I’m glad I did. It was well worth reading, and I give it a strong 5-stars. But, alas, it’s not a keeper since you can’t keep everything. I’d put it in the donation pile, except I dropped the book on the patio one day and it split at the spine. So into recycling it will go. If you have an interest in history, or if you have a thing for letters, it’s well worth seeking out and reading.

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The World War 2 Letters of Wayne Cheney

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The Pacific was Wayne’s war theatre.

Last week, actually around June 13, I finished my latest book project. It is The World War 2 Letters of Wayne B. Cheney. He was Lynda’s dad—my father-in-law, of sorts. He and Lynda’s mom divorced long before I came into the family.

Like many soldiers, Wayne wrote letters home, and received many in return, both from family members, townsfolks, and other armed forces personnel. He wasn’t able to keep most of the incoming letters, given how his base kept changing in the South Pacific. But his parents kept most of the ones he wrote home. When Wayne died in 1996, we brought those letters to our house. There they sat in a green plastic bin, moved from Bentonville to Bella Vista in 2002.

It was about this time last year that I decided the time had come to do something with them. I decided to transcribe them, put them into book form for easier reading by family members, then donate the letters themselves to some worthy institution.

From a Kansas town to an island=hopping war. See the world from the nose of a B-24.

Wayne enlisted in the fall of 1942 at age 18. He was hoping to get on the ground crew in the Army Air Forces, but instead found himself in school to become an air gunner. He was assigned at nose gunner in B-24 Liberators and saw action in the South Pacific. He was either based on or participated in bombing missions over some of the famous islands in the war history, such as Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk, Tarawa. His time there was over when the war had moved on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

In addition to the letters, Wayne wrote a war diary. He transcribed parts of this over the years, but only the parts dealing with actual combat. He mixed that with later explanations of what his modern impressions were about what was going on in 1942-1945. I did a full transcription of the diary, interspersing the entries with the letters.

Actually, the letters are not exciting stuff. Subject to forward base censorship (and occasionally running afoul of the censors), he couldn’t write a lot about what he was doing in the war effort. So there was lots about doing laundry, rigging something in his barracks, who he received letters from, talk about what must be happening on Kansas farms.

This book is not a commercial project, and I doubt anyone except immediate family members will be interested. Maybe someday a great-grandkid will ask about what their ancestor did in that war they covered in history class and someone will pull a copy of the book off the shelf. But should anyone else be interested in this small piece of WW2 history, it’s available on Amazon.

Fair warning: I have not yet received my proof copy, so I haven’t been able to go through an actual book to make sure the photos and print came out okay. That’s because I had the proof copy sent to the wrong address. Still waiting for it to be forwarded.

 

books, memories, miscellaneous, Writing

Moving On

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Seems like every part of the house is a mess with photos to be sorted through.

On Saturday last (so two days ago), I completed a project. No, this post is not about that project. It will be the subject of my next post.

Nor am I going to go into detail about what the next project is. I’ve made enough posts over the last year about what my plans are—how they get fulfilled or derailed—that I suspect my readers are tired of hearing about those plans.

Suffice to say I’m moving on to something else. Actually two something elses. Or maybe it’s three something elses. I’m not really sure what’s next. I’ve consulted my last list and have started on the one listed next. But my brother-in-law threw a monkey wrench in the works of two projects and I need to wait on him to send me something. Other ideas are floating about in the space between my ears. I may make a few jottings on them, see which one presents the lower-hanging fruit, and shift to it.

Meanwhile, I still have family budgeting work to do (dreading it and so avoiding it), at which I’m falling further behind. I still have filing of bills and paper (same), which still show up in my mailbox even though I’ve gone mostly paperless. I still have boxes and boxes of “things” to sort through after our move (tired of it, and still irked by it). I worked on photographs on Saturday and Sunday, because two of my projects involve dealing with photos. While I made progress, the living room is not yet free of boxes of photos, folders of photos, and loose photos waiting to find their place. It’s possible that by the end of today or tomorrow, I will have all photos in clearly marked boxes, arranged by locations or subjects, and ready for me to do what is needed for the next two projects. That’s my goal, at least.

Welcome to the ides of June.

letters, miscellaneous, reading, The Forest Throne, Writing

Stardate 2026.06.08, Miscellaneous

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  • On Friday, I finally found a box of photos I’d been looking for in our disorganized new home. “It was poorly labeled” will be my excuse. Of course, I’m the one who labeled it. I sorted through the photos and, on Saturday and Sunday, began scanning them to put them in the right format for adding to the WW2 letters book, learning more about formatting photos in G.I.M.P. in the process. It now looks like I might be able to finish the book, complete the formatting, and publish it within the week.
  • Not related to writing, other photos finding/sorting/evaluating is also in progress, with some progress, though also with some dismay at finding many more photos than I realized we had. The task I thought was merely humongous is actually gigantic.
  • I’m sticking to my reading and making my reading goal almost every day.
  • Today, in writing a letter to a friend, I made the first tangible documentation of an idea for another book. I know, I don’t need another book in the queue, but nor do I need this idea consuming so much brainpower with no outlet. Perhaps now I can direct more energy to projects already in progress.
  • After three or four weeks of undisciplined eating and failure to exercise, I’ve at least partially righted those wrongs and my weight is dropping a little. Gotta keep it up. Also seeing progress on blood sugar daily readings.
  • Perhaps related, perhaps not, my sleep seems to be better regulated.
  • The wall I hit, at mentioned in my last blog post, hasn’t totally come down, but it has enough chinks in it to see to the other side.

Bulleted items aside, I start off this week in a significantly better mood than last.

family, letters, miscellaneous

Hitting the Wall

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That’s what happened to me yesterday. I hit the wall. By 9 a.m., I felt like I couldn’t do another thing. Yet, I had done very little except for Monday morning stock market work. I couldn’t work family finances, at which I’m falling desperately behind, couldn’t work on my three letter projects, couldn’t work on post-move organization. I did manage to get my wife to her cardiology test appointment. I also managed to get a long message chain done with a newly found cousin on Lynda’s side.

Today has been somewhat better. But here is it not quite 4 in the afternoon and I’m out of steam. I guess I’ll try to read for a while.

family, moving

Being Lazy Today

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The mirror over the piano was tricky to hang, but the guys did a good job on it.

Yes, taking it easy today. Remembering, though, our service personnel who died while serving. No one in my immediate family did. Lynda had a great-uncle killed in the first day of fighting on Guadalcanal in WW2.

We just finished a busy three or four days. Our oldest grandchild, Ephraim, graduated from high school. The ceremony was Saturday evening. Uncomfortable stadium seating, lots of walking, some rain. But the accomplishment was excellent and I’m glad I was able to witness the event.

Also on Saturday, our son Charles and his husband came in for the graduation (also for a birthday in Mario’s family) and became our first overnight visitors since moving here. We went to the furniture store on Saturday and, with their help, finalized the purchase of living room furniture. It will arrive on Thursday.

We bought this grouping on our trip to Greece in 1988.

On Sunday, as Lynda and I skipped church to be with Charles & Mario, and to hang pictures. Or I should say I found pictures stuffed in packing boxes in closets and they hung them. I have no artistic sensibilities and Lynda has no energy. So I got the pictures out, fetched and handed tools, and they found good places and did the hanging. We concentrated on the living room and breakfast nook. With furniture selected, we knew what spaces we had to fill.

Once the furniture arrives, with the walls decorated in the room we use the most, it will seem less like camping out and more like home. There’s still a lot of pictures to hang, but we had done all we could and they are for other rooms that can wait another day.

Cloth items bought in China in 1983 on the left; our kids’ graduation photos on the right.

And this relatively small amount of exertion over a couple of days has worn me out. I expect to do relatively little today. Maybe some household budgeting. Maybe get through 20 or 30 pages in my current read. Re-stow a few boxes and photos; prepare other boxes to go out next recycling day. Empty one box of table games to put in closet spaces no longer occupied by wall hangings. Perhaps work a little on my three books of letters projects. Maybe write a letter. And watch some TV.

Try to come to Tuesday rested up, ready for regular routines with a smidgeon of helping a friend out with transportation to a couple of things.

 

book reviews, Magazines, Politics, reading

Book Review: Orthodoxy

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Bought by mistake, read with hope and anticipation, abandoned at the halfway point.

My wife claims I don’t look before I grab things from the grocery store shelves and make the purchase. I think she exaggerates. True, I did somehow get home with jalapeno ranch salad dressing instead of regular ranch. And I’ve been known to buy frozen peas and carrots when I wanted mixed vegetables. Ah, but these are minor, and they are still edible. And I never buy decaf when it’s regular coffee I want. I mean, priorities matter.

So maybe it should not be surprising that, when I saw a book titled Orthodoxy at a used bookstore I grabbed it, thinking it was G.K. Chesterson’s famous book of that name. It sat on my bookshelf for some years, came with us in the move, was reshelved, and then finally selected by me for my next read.

Only then did I notice the subtitle: The American Spectator Anniversary Anthology. This wasn’t a Christian text: it was political, commentary on life, sociology, economic systems, and all that jazz published in 1987.  It’s a magazine I don’t remember and am not familiar with. The titles of the sections are:

  • Media, Books, and Criticism
  • Americans
  • The Sexes
  • Communism and Fellow Travelers
  • America and the World
  • Conservatives

I quickly concluded that the American Spectator must be a conservative magazine and that the title of the book meant to imply that the mag’s stories defined some kind of orthodox view of conservative beliefs. I.E. if you didn’t agree with what the mag said you weren’t orthodox in your conservative thinking.

What the heck, I thought. I might as well read it. I might find much I agree with and it will be entertaining, maybe even captivating. Alas, no such thing. I gave it a good go, reading about half of it. I read all of the first three sections and then spot-read the rest. I found the first section, book reviews, to be essentially a ridiculous rehashing of books of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, books that no one has read for fifty years and no one cares about now. Here’s how I saw the reviews (note that this is not a quote from the book):

Schmidt wrote his autobiography in 1955, claiming he never agreed with the communist Smitty’s views of 1926, but Schmidt’s contemporary Smith has proved otherwise in his analysis of Schmidt’s ten magazine articles in the 1930s.

Not even knowing who Schmidt, Smitty, and Smith were (names changed because I don’t feel like thumbing through the book to find a real example), I found myself not caring a whole lot. But I suppose the American Spectator published that article in 1980 and included it now in the anthology from 1987 to say that the article’s author, I’ll call him Smythe, was a true orthodox believer in anti-communist views.

I tried to read 10-15 of the book’s 504 pages a day, making it some days, never exceeding it, and falling short somedays as I quickly zoned out. I consider myself a conservative, but just couldn’t get through this. The world has moved on to new issues and new discussions on old issues. Maybe that’s why most magazines are for contemporary things but rarely have contents that pass the tests of time. The articles in this anthology, which I assume R. Emmett Tyrrell, the editor, selected as being both the best of and most representative of twenty years of the magazine’s history. To me, they seemed more for the purpose of showing off the authors’ obvious brilliance rather than informing readers or convincing them to orthodox thinking. These are not my kind of articles; this isn’t my kind of book.

So, despite my general agreement with the worldview underpinning much of the book, I rate it a measly 1-star. If you find it on a used bookstore shelf, leave it there and look for something by Chesterton. This is not a keeper. But I may not donate it to Goodwill. I have a friend back in Rhode Island who might eat this stuff up. I’d be willing to foot the bill to mail it to him.

family, stock market, Writing

Getting Things Done, Version N+1

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It’s a mess for a while, but it will all come together fairly quickly.

Retirement sure is a busy time. As much as I have to do, I wonder how I survived 45 years in the working world (not including 8 years pre-college graduation). But I did, and am now—surviving, that is.

By saying “surviving” I’m not implying a lack of enjoyment. I have plenty of enjoyment times: my noon reading time on the covered, screened patio, evening TV time, before bed reading time, morning devotions, church activities, frequent times with our daughter’s family. Yes, in the midst of my self-imposed busyness, I have plenty of time for enjoyment.

Take this last week, for instance.

  • On Saturday, I pulled out a large box of packed photos with the intent of sorting them and finding permanent filing for them. That job is half done, and the office floor is a mess. I hope to finish today, Monday.
  • Last week I made major progress on the book of my father-in-law’s World War 2 letters and journal. As of work completed yesterday, I have only 27 letters left to proofread, a one-day task including adding them to the book file. Between 20-40 letters require comparison to the original letters, a Tuesday task. Hopefully I can get that done in a day.
  • Then I scan to text his war journal, which may not be as many pages as I thought it was. No prediction on when I will get to that, though hopefully it will be this week.
  • Now that our home in Bella Vista AR has sold, it’s time to get serious on replacing the tub/shower in our bathroom with a walk-in shower, and buying the furniture we need (chairs and a table, maybe a replacement couch). I’d like to get the ball rolling on that the week, but fear it will slide to next. I did a little scouting last week on Friday.
  • Two of the ideas for future books, which are far enough out that I can’t predict if/when I’ll ever get to them, have started to gel in my mind. I hope to have some outlines done, at least in part, by the end of the week.

So yes, life is busy. At least in part fulfilling. Oh yes, two more things I should really do this week: Catch up on mail/filing/budgeting/bill paying. And figuring out how much I have to pay the IRS in quarterly payments this year in anticipation in next year’s taxes. That’s a two or three hour, spreadsheet-driven task I’m not looking forward to but which will be very good to have behind me.

expatriate life, History, letters, memories, self-publishing, Writing

A Project Never Seems Done

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In the full cover, the photo and text is not out of center. This Amazon photo of the cover is, though.

About a month ago, I wrote about the projects I had on my to-do list and what I might tackle next, what would come after that. I have no shortage of projects in some stage of thinking through.

So after thinking through my projects list, and after having finished my income taxes, I spent a little time at paperwork reduction, then jumped into my list. The first item that seemed best to me was revisions to my book The Saudi Years in Letters. This promised to be the shortest of my projects, and it truly did go quickly.

First, I loaded the recently found letters into the book and formatted them. That added around 16 pages to the document. Next, I proofread the book using Word’s text-to-speech read-back feature. I was able to go through the book in three or four days. I probably could have done it all in a day and a half except for the concentration fatigue. Proofreading caused me to flag four letters to check against the originals. That took only an hour to do.

That brought me up to formatting the overall book. I had to do that page by page, making sure to have text and photos in right relation to each other, eliminating excessive white space and adding white space where needed. This took a day of work and eliminated about five pages from the file. I uploaded the new text file to Amazon without re-doing the cover. Alas, the extra pages from the extra letters were a few too many for the existing cover to work, so I had to re-do the cover. Fortunately , I was able to re-size the cover and upload the book to Amazon in about an hour.

So the project is finished, right? Not quite. As I went through the on-line layout checking of the book, I saw that it would be possible to add six to eight photos without having to reformat anything. Should I do it? That would mean finding the right boxes in storage closets (not impossible), going through the photos, making selections, scanning and formatting. A day or two of work, most likely.

I decided not to do that right now. If I let the book go out to my kids and grandkids, the intended audience, with a little extra white space, I’d say no big deal. I’ll take a few weeks to work on something else, then maybe come back to this.

On to another project.

Author | Engineer