Today I’m speaking on the Blog to Book panel at the 2008 BlogHer conference. If you want more information on my experience going from blog to book, read my Blog to Book series which is almost (but not quite yet) complete.
I will be at the BlogHer conference at the Westin St. Francis this July 18th-20th in San Francisco. Registration is closed, but if you are attending, my panel is on Saturday, July 19th and 3:15pm and is called “What We Do: Blog to Book Redux.” I’ll be speaking along with Ellen Gerstein from Wiley & Sons, literary agent Neeti Madan from Sterling Lord, and fellow blog-to-book author Rita Arens. You can also stop by the BlogHer bookstore right after the panel from 4:30pm-5:15pm where I’ll be signing books. You can buy a copy there or bring your own. (I won’t tell nobody.)
I will also be speaking at the inaugural Blog Indiana 2008 conference on Sunday, August 17th 2008. It’s being held in Indianapolis at IUPUI (my alma mater) in the swanky Campus Center, which they did not have when I went there, but my tuition money helped build. So, I’m looking forward to finally using the wi-fi I helped pay for.
My session is called “How to reach out to bloggers (without pissing them off)” which is about effective communication between marketing professionals and bloggers. I chose this topic as an excuse to scare the crowd with all the horrifyingly, bad press releases I’ve received over the years. *shivers* You can register for the conference with a 15% discount because I think you’re special.
I won’t directly be talking about my book at the Blog Indiana session, but it will be a nice opportunity to meet other Indiana bloggers. If you’re in the area, feel free to drop by and say hi or bring a copy of the book by for me to sign.
Read the other parts of this series:
Every baby needs a name and every book needs a title. For the first few months I was writing my book, we had a working title everyone was happy with. Then it had to be abandoned for reasons I won’t go into in detail. I’ll just say it involved a domain name registration and a cease and desist letter.
A good title is important for selling a book. Most people take 3-5 seconds to read the title and then decide whether to keep browsing the bookshelves or to pick up the book for more information. Three to five seconds. That’s the amount of time I had to convince people that my book was worth another 20 seconds of their time to read the back matter or flip through the chapters, which would then hopefully convince them to buy the book.
Granted, not everyone buys a book from a bookstore. Some people will read the title in a magazine review or a blog post or hear the title mentioned in a radio or TV interview. However, the title makes a big first impression on the reader. I once bought a book just for the title, called Girls Just Want to Have Funds. If it had been titled A Girl’s Guide to Investing, I’m not sure if I would have noticed it in the crowd of finance books. The fact that the cover was hot pink made it stand out too.
I started brainstorming possible titles in a notebook. I wrote big lists of adjectives related to weight loss and tried to use them in funny phrases or sayings. I wanted my title to be funny, but it’s incredibly difficult to be funny in only 5-7 words. Anything longer than that and your title starts to sound more like a subtitle. I used a thesaurus to look for similar words. I used a book of popular phrases, quotes and sayings to try to come up with puns. As I was editing and revising, I hoped a phrase would suddenly pop out at me screaming, “I’m the perfect title!”
I also went to the bookstore and looked at the titles of books that would be shelved next to mine. I wanted my title to stand out next to the competition. I read lots of titles on the shelves and examined which ones I thought were best and why. I walked to the humor section and tried to figure out why the funny titles were funny.
The difficulty with staring at lists of titles for hours at a time is that you no longer know how people will respond to them within those first 3-5 seconds. I had become so familiar with my titles that I had no idea what my first reaction to them had been. The other problem was that most of them were complete crap. So, when a title that was slightly less crappy appeared among this festering pool of diarrhea, it looked golden by comparison. I would become convinced that this title was not so bad, when it actually was so bad, just not quite as bad.
The other problem was that I sometimes came up with a very good title for a book, just not for my book. I have a fabulous title for an angry fat acceptance memoir, a couple good cookbook titles, and several good titles for weight loss blogs. I just didn’t have any titles for my book.
I asked my friends and family members for suggestions and quite quickly regretted it. Like me, they too were unable to come up with any good titles, only instead of beating myself up over it, I had to beat them up over it.
“How about Totally Crappy Title?” A friend would say.
“Um, no,” I’d reply.
“How about A Good, but not quite fitting title?” Another friend would say.
“Well, that would work if my book were more serious.” I’d say.
It was very demoralizing. On top of that, when I threw out suggestions to my friends, they would lie to me. They wanted me to find a good title, so they went into the process wanting to like the titles I showed them. They were incapable of having an objective view of my titles and gave me more positive feedback then I deserved. If your friends hesitate more than 2 seconds when giving you feedback on your title, they don’t like it. They are trying to convince themselves they like it. When I finally came up with a title that worked, my friends’ responses were subtly different. They smiled a bit quicker and said stuff like, “That might work,” instead of looking upwards thinking for 5 seconds trying to decide what they thought.
Before we finally agreed on the final title, my publisher and I each proposed three titles. Each time it was pretty certain that we were going to stick with that title and I was relieved when the decision was made. A month or two would go by and then something happened that made us decide not to go with that title and my anxiety level was cranked up to insane levels. I know I’m a writer, but I can’t explain how stressful this was. It was by far the worst part of the book publishing process for me. (Even worse than proofreading.) I thought everything was hunky dory and then everything was flipped upside down again. I would go to dinner with friends and be completely distracted trying to brainstorm a brilliant title. I went out to the theatre and couldn’t concentrate on the show because I needed to find the perfect name for my book by the end of the week or else I would be doomed to be an utter failure as an author and a human being. At least, that’s how I felt.
And I needed to get an author photo. My photo would be printed in the back of the book with my bio, but since this was a weight-loss memoir I decided to wait until two months before the deadline to get my picture taken so I would be at my thinnest. I wasn’t overweight anymore, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to see if I lost a couple more pounds. No one wants to buy a weight-loss memoir from a fat girl.
I decided to spend some money to get my photo taken professionally and even got my makeup done by a pro. I looked at a lot of other author photos and had a good idea of what I did and did NOT want mine to look like. Some author photos looked downright silly. I thought the photo shoot would be fun, but it was not. I wrote about how awkward and self-conscious my modeling experience made me on my other blog.
If you have to get an author photo taken, I would recommend you bring a friend along to chat with. This will help loosen you up so you can act naturally. Either that, or drink a lot beforehand. Your best choice is probably to look through your own photos and find a good shot of yourself looking relaxed and happy because that’s what will make you look good, not your makeup or hair. My makeup and hair looked great and I ended up looking goofy in my portrait shot. I ended up using a photo I took of myself with my digital camera.
While I was at the photographer’s, I decided to have a photo taken of me standing in one leg of my old fat pants. This seems like the thing to do if you lose a lot of weight. I thought it might be good to use for promotional pictures, but I mostly just did it for fun.
It was getting pretty late in the process and we needed to finalize the title. I was going through my notebook scrawls and the list of suggestions I’d gotten from blog readers. For some reason the phrase “Half-Assed” popped out. I had considered this as a title earlier, but I’d hesitated using it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell my mother I’d written a book called “Half-Assed.” Did I want to be a “Half-Assed” author? Did I want to write a “Half-Assed” book? While I certainly hoped to write more books, there were no guarantees in life. If I only ever published this book, did I want it to be called “Half-Assed”? It was also possible the title would offend some people, which could limit sales or stop some stores from stocking it.
However, I had six pages of crappy titles and I’d run about three liters of stress hormones through my body in the last several months, so I decided to go for it. I ran the title “Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir” by some friends and I could tell they liked it and weren’t just convincing themselves that they liked it. I decided to pitch this title hard to the publisher, so I made a mock-up of a possible cover to sell them on the idea. I included the image of me standing in one leg of my fat pants in one corner with the title in the other and sent it off to them.
They liked it. I liked it. Everyone was happy.
A couple weeks later I searched for my name on Amazon because I liked looking at my book page and reading the phrase “Jennette Fulda (Author).” Seeing the word “author” in parentheses after my name made it seem much more official. Frighteningly enough, my Amazon listing had appeared a month before I’d turned in my manuscript, so you could preorder my book before it was even done. Normally, the image next my listing was a generic blank Amazon image, but when I pulled up the page this time, it was an image of me in my fat pants.
I freaked. I didn’t get any work done for the rest of the day.
This was the first time I’d seen the cover. It looked awesome, but I’d never expected to be put on the cover of my own book. If I’d known they were going to do that, I would have put much more thought into my choice of shoes.
I love my book cover. I think it’s striking and it makes people want to pick up the book to read more. I’m really glad I happened to work down the hallway from the photographer who took the winning photo. I’m also glad I got to be such a big part of the design process. Hell, I scheduled the photo shoot myself.
After all the anxiety, brainstorming, and hairspray, everything came together to create a great package for my book. Thank goodness. Now I just had to promote it.
To be continued…
Read the other parts of this series:
After I uploaded my “final” manuscript to my publisher’s FTP server, I got an entire month off where I didn’t have to read my book. Instead, a professional copyeditor did that for me. A copyeditor is different than a proofreader. Copyeditors are less concerned with your punctuation and more concerned with the flow of your writing. They’re the housekeepers who pick up dangling participles while mumbling, “Somebody’s going to trip over this sentence.” They check your grammar, but they also read for comprehension and check the internal consistency of your document to make sure you don’t contradict yourself. If you said you were 24 years old at the beginning of the chapter, they’ll make a note if you say you’re 25 years old at the end of the chapter, unless the chapter takes place at your birthday party.
The copyeditor sent back a list of queries and changes, which I went through point by point and could either approve or challenge. The copyeditor also sent a word list of all the unusual words that I used to make sure they were spelled correctly in the final manuscript. These consisted mostly of delicious snack items, 80’s cartoon characters, and TV shows. It was like viewing a twisted snapshot of my brain.
All of these queries were sent to me in Word documents. This was the last stage in the editing process where I could hypothetically make any large changes. If we needed to rip out a paragraph here or add a paragraph there to correct something, it could be done. Major reconstruction was discouraged unless absolutely necessary. It got difficult because I wanted to continually tweak my work by switching word order or replacing words with a better synonym. However, there was only so much of that I could get away with before I became an annoying, prima donna, control freak. After copyediting was done, we moved on to the first proofread.
After copyediting, the manuscript was sent to a book designer who laid out the text of the book in Adobe InDesign as it would appear when published. I have experience as a graphic designer, and though I’ve never designed a book I have some appreciation for all the tweaking it requires to get a document to fit precisely into 250 pages without words dangling alone at the bottom of paragraphs or single sentences appearing on otherwise blank pages. Because it takes so much time and effort to get the book to look nice, it is important to get all your changes done in copyediting. If you try to make any major changes in the proofreading stage, it will create a cascade effect that will screw up the entire design of the book and seriously piss of your book designer. See who will adjust your kerning then!
The UPS man knocked on my door right after I came home from work one day and I immediately knew what he was handing me even before I saw my publisher’s return address on the package. I opened up the manila envelope and inside were over a hundred 8 ½ x 11 sheets of my book, two pages laid out on a sheet, as it would appear in print. It was like my book put on some make-up and wore its nicest dress to meet me after work. It looked so much more beautiful and professional than the umpteen Microsoft Word documents on my computer screen. This looked like an actual book…that someone had pirated at Kinkos.
The manuscript I was sent had not been proofread by anyone yet. A professional proofreader was reading it at the same time I was and I had a week to review it and send in any changes. The proofreading handbook my publisher gave me (yes, there was a handbook!) said I was supposed to limit my changes to things that would not be apparent to the proofreader, like the misspelling of a name or a foreign place, or incorrect details. I wasn’t supposed to concentrate on typos.
But of course I did.
If I saw that “from” was spelled as “form” I was going to mark it this time because I might not see it next time. I marked all my changes on the paper in red ink. I tried to use official proofreading marks, but I’m not very familiar with them and the paper didn’t leave much room, so I also typed up a document explaining all my changes. I mailed this back to the publisher.
At this point I was really sick of reading my book.
No one ever told me this before I wrote a book, so I will tell you now. If you ever write a book, you will read it more times than anyone else on the planet. Even if you were to lock someone in a cell for 20 years with nothing but your book and the back of a candy bar label, you will still read your book more times than him. You will be able to recite your book from memory. You will read it and be able to remember alternate versions of the book, like the Star Trek universes where everyone is evil. You’ll remember where you veered off in other directions or went off on tangents. You will start seeing all the things that are no longer there. If you write a memoir, you will get so sick of hearing about yourself that you will want to leave your body.
However, no matter how many times I read the book, there were some parts that always made me laugh or passages I was particularly proud of. Sometimes I would read a certain sentence and remember how difficult it had been to get it to sound right, knowing that the reader would never know all the trouble that went into it. It was odd reading some parts because my life had already begun to change since I’d written the book a few months ago. I was at a new job, I’d flirted with exercising in the mornings, and I had counted calories for a couple weeks.
I also felt I was at a disadvantage because I read very slowly to begin with, and when you proofread you need to read even slower to make sure your brain isn’t making you see what you expect to see instead of what is actually there. I would reach a point of exhaustion and only be able to do 4-6 chapters in one sitting before the quality of my work dropped. This was bad because I was running out of time. I had put off the proofreading because it was boring and I thought I could do it all in one weekend. I bribed myself, rewarding myself with Indian food after three finished chapters. I finally got it done by deadline. When people say writing a book is hard work, this is the crap they’re talking about. I never had to deal with this on my blog.
Finally we came to the second proofread, the last time I would be forced to read my book in its entirety. This time my publisher sent my book as a PDF file. I read it on my laptop on the couch and made notes in a Word document as I found errors, making note of the page, paragraph and sentence. Again, I only had a week or two to review the book and I had the added pressure of knowing this would be the final version sent to the printer for publication, so I was extra careful looking at every word. I broke the book into four-chapter blocks and assigned sections to friends who were kind enough to volunteer for proofreading duties.
I found that once I noticed one particular type of error, I fixated on it. I became OBSESSED with hyphens. I found myself staring at my laptop seriously wondering whether the proper usage of the word was “flesheating” or “flesh-eating.” I completely gave up on commas, leaving that to the professionals.
By far, proofreading was my least favorite part of the writing process. I hated all the technical, detail work involved. I hated the nuts and bolts work required to create a solid book. Who needs nuts and bolts? Let’s tie it together with chewing gum and string! I hated that even after hours and hours and hours of work, my friends would find errors I had never noticed in chapters that I had read literally dozens of times.
The one good think about the proofreading process was knowing that the book was locked into the form it was in. At that point, my psychological immune system kicked in to convince me that the book was fine as it was. When I was still writing the book, I would fret and worry constantly that I should revise a chapter or come up with a funnier story or move something around. Now that changing things wasn’t an option, my brain went about the task of convincing myself it was fine as it was, as brains are prone to do. It was much easier to read the book now because I didn’t feel the need to open up Microsoft Word and make a revision every other paragraph because I was no longer allowed to. I just had to accept it as it was.
Once I made note of all my proofreading changes in a Word document, I sent them to my publisher. Now they would take all my words and print them in a pretty little package – a package with a title, cover and my author photo in the back.
I’ll let you know how that came together in the next blog-to-book post. (Should that be hyphenated?)
Continued in Blog to Book - Part 8: A title, an author photo, and a cover
I was invited to write a guest post titled From blog to book to The Today Show for Living with the M-Word about how my blog has helped promote my book. The M-Word in question is “marketing” and the site focuses on how to market your writing without selling out your muse. It’s written by Writer’s Digest blogger Scott Francis who I shared a table with at the Bluegrass Festival of Books a couple months ago. Thank you to Scott for the opportunity to hang out in his blog for a day. I tried to leave things as tidy as they were when I arrived.
I recently found out that I’m going to be in New York on Thursday, July 31st to appear on CBS’s The Early Show and I’d like to plan an event on Wednesday evening, July 30th, for my New York readers. Anybody got any ideas? Book signings are usually planned two months ahead of time, so it’s too late for my publicist to schedule anything on her end. The Early Show tapes at Trump International Plaza at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue (next to the glass Apple Store), so a location near there would be good – either a bookstore, coffee house, or some other locale that would be okay with people gathering and watching a woman read aloud and wave a large pair of pants in the air. An independent bookseller would be lovely because they could handle book orders. If not, I still have a handful of books in my trunk that I can personally sell on the street corner of the park if it comes to that. Do I need a license for that? Do they crack down on that stuff? I’d hate to spend the night before my national TV appearance in a cell next to a hooker named Trixie. Though I’m sure my Aunt Lori would have a hell of a story to tell at the family reunion when she came to bail me out.
I would like to schedule the event for either 7 or 8 o’clock. That way I can get to bed early, but it also gives people enough time to get there after work. I’m also assuming that some of you would want to come, right? Please comment below if you think you could come, otherwise I’ll just go ride the mechanical bull at Johnny Utah’s, which I missed the last time I was in New York.
I would also like to give big props to my publicist, Isabella Michon, for her great work setting this up. It’s not like I call Les Moonves and arrange these things myself. Special thanks to Jen Rios at Seal Press for being my travel agent and booking all my flights. I am truly grateful for all the hard work everyone has put into promoting my book and I feel so lucky for all the good things that have come my way as a result. As for the question I know someone will ask – will I be able to say the title of my book on television this time? I do not know, but I’m working on a workaround if I can’t. Cross your fingers for me.
Read the other parts of this series:
After I finished the first draft I took a week or two off from working on the book. I had been so immersed in writing for the past 4-5 months that I needed to step back to gain perspective. I was so familiar with my writing that it was difficult to tell if it was any good. Did I only find it interesting because it had happened to me? What would someone with a fresh perspective think? This is where my editor came in.
The original plan was that my editor would give me comments as I wrote. This didn’t happen. Due to a shake-up in the publishing world, our distributor went bankrupt, my publishing house was bought by another company and half their staff was cut. During the reorganization I was assigned another editor, the publisher herself. To add even more excitement, my web hosting company decided to upgrade my spam filtering software without telling me, so several important emails detailing these changes were devoured by the server monsters. By the time everything was sorted out and I started getting notes, I had an entire rough draft of the book completed.
My editor started sending back notes by saving my chapters with new names and making changes to them with the “Track Changes” feature turned on in Microsoft Word, a feature I hadn’t known existed. When this switch is turned on, Word makes colored scribbles on your document stating what has been changed by whom. You can accept and reject changes. In addition, when my editor felt the need to make comments on my text, she typed notes in the document using different colored text. The “Track Changes” feature also lets you view the document with and without changes, which made it easier to read when it looked like a 2nd grader had colored on my monitor.
An editor’s work is invisible, but my book is much better for everything you can’t see that she did. As most people probably assume, editing involves a lot of technical work. My editor would rewrite my long convoluted sentences to make more sense. She was able to cut out the unnecessary parts of my paragraphs and my sentences, distilling them down to the essentials, making the writing much stronger. I learned that shorter was usually better, but much harder to write. As Mark Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
My editor also guided my style and helped shaped the direction of the book. Being a first-time author, I was a bit insecure. At times I took jokes too far or tried too hard to show people how funny and clever I was. She reeled me back in and cut the bad jokes. She also noticed my blind spots, pointing out questions that readers would have about my life that had not occurred to me. Why hadn’t I talked about my father? Did my family ever talk about fat? How come I hadn’t talked much about men? It was like going to therapy, only they were paying me instead. I had to give a lot of thought about how much I wanted to reveal about topics that were only tangentially related to weight loss.
I believe being edited made me a better writer, but it also made me aware of many of my own personal writing quarks, which I’m not going to detail here. (You can figure out my flaws for yourself, thank you very much.) All writers have their own style and all writers have their own bad tendencies. After my editor pointed out one particular quark I have, I noticed that I committed this error EVERYWHERE. It permeated all my writing and started to annoy me as much as it must have annoyed her while reading my book. I spent days reading through chapters, rewriting sections to get rid of this habit, wondering how I’d never noticed it before.
I suspect everyone’s relationship with their editor is different. I felt lucky that I had such a good rapport with mine, especially since she was not the editor who I originally signed on with. I didn’t accept every one of her suggested changes, picking a few tiny battles to fight, but for the most part we were on the same page. Sometimes I wish I still had her around to edit my blog entries.
I also wanted other people’s feedback, so I sent copies of the book to friends while it was in various stages. Different friends were good for different things. One friend was good for building up my self-esteem, telling me how awesome the book was. Another friend was good at analyzing the structure of the story and pointing out holes. Another friend would give me straight-up constructive criticism. I sent chapters to different friends depending on what I needed to hear at the time.
However, no matter how many people I sent it to, they all harped on a few of the same points. Everyone thought the opening of chapter X was confusing. Everyone thought that joke in chapter Y was in very poor taste. And no one knew what I was talking about in chapter Z with that mixed metaphor. When everyone agreed on something, I knew it wasn’t working.
For the last four or five months between the completion of my first draft and my manuscript deadline, I worked on revising several problems with the book. As I had practiced writing a book, I had gotten much better at it. This was a problem. The last half of my book was a well-oiled machine, but the first half was a broken down engine, which was unfortunate considering that most people read books from front to back. I worried that readers would toss the book out before they got to the good stuff. Not knowing how to solve this problem, I sat on my couch for two weeks, ate a lot of chocolate, and freaked out. Then I went for a really long walk and figured out how to fix everything.
Another issue I had to address was chronology. The chapters in my book are arranged by themes, but the narrative also progresses forward linearly. I end up jumping forwards and backwards in time, which confused some of my beta readers. I ended up going through my blog making a timeline of significant events and my weight at the time so I could get everything straight.
A lot of my revisions were boring technical matters, trying to get sentences to flow exactly right, removing extra uses of “just” and “really,” inserting cues so readers would know at what time in my life events were happening, or cutting out things that were cute but ultimately not necessary. I had a list of ideas and experiences that I tried to wedge in where I could, but they didn’t all make it. It is amazing how much of this work I did that you will never see or know that I did. For instance, I frequently have to refer to “when I was fat,” however I don’t like to keep saying “when I was fat” and instead had to come up with a zillion different ways to refer to my former obesity, like “back when I shopped at Lane Bryant” or “before I could buckle my seat belt on the plane again.”
After nine months of this, I eventually got sick of my own voice. I toiled on the manuscript for so long that I was happy that the deadline was approaching. A month beforehand I completed a complete read-through of the book. Then I sent a copy to everyone I mentioned that I knew how to contact. I didn’t promise them that I would change anything, but I did want them to be able to give me feedback while I still had an opportunity to change things. I completed another read-through a couple days before the deadline. After some final tweaks, I uploaded it to the FTP and let it go. I felt a serene sense of accomplishment. I was also somewhat naïve in believing that most of the work was over. Oh, ha, ha, ha!
One of the frustrating things for me about design or writing is that I’m never 100% sure when something is done. I know when my laundry is done because the buzzer goes off. I’m never quite sure if a blog entry is done. Could I perfect a paragraph or clarify a point? Eventually though, you have to let go. I could revise my book into oblivion if I wanted to, but it was in good shape and it was time to move onto the next phase. That phase was copyediting.
Continued in Blog to Book - Part 7: Copyediting and proofreading
I’ve spent the last couple hours reminding myself why I never pursued digital audio editing as a career. I don’t particularly enjoy slaving over waveforms. However I did it anyway because I don’t want you to sit through commercials if you choose to listen to the radio interviews I did in June. Three MP3’s are available below of the radio shows I did without ever stepping into a radio studio. (You can do it all over the phone these days.) If you prefer, you can also listen to the two shorter interviews on my YouTube channel. And as of today I am officially sick of hearing my own voice. I am going to use the American flags I got at a 4th of July party to conduct all future interviews via semaphore.
Reading with Robin, WHJJ-AM - June 28, 2008 (Download MP3 file) 9.79 mb | 34:14
Heart & Home Healing Show with Faith Ranoli - June 19, 2008 (Download MP3 file) 16.5 mb | 57:52
The Maria Sanchez Show, KVTA AM-1520 - June 18, 2008 (Download MP3 file) 4.43 mb | 15:31
I ducked into Kroger yet again this week, this time to buy the August issue of Shape magazine which features a positive blurb about my book on page 28. Sweet! Not only am I near the front of the magazine, but they named me a “must-read.”
I’m happy to see my book featured next to another Seal Press book, About Face: Women Write about What They See When They Look in the Mirror. I’ve had a great experience working with the lovely ladies of Seal Press and I feel honored to be on an imprint that puts out books by women, for women that hopefully make the world a better place. I’ve also been known to stop by the message boards of the 3 Fat Chicks on a Diet web site, so I’ll have to add their book, 3 Fat Chicks on a Diet: Because We’re All in It Together, to my “to read” list too. That list is getting kind of long, and I’m adding books to it faster than I’m reading. Too bad I never figured out how to read on the treadmill.
I’m happy to announce that Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir is now being distributed in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand via Palgrave/Macmillan. If you live in any of these countries, you can go to your local bookstore and request that they order a copy for you. If you’re lucky, they might already have one in stock. Karen already wrote in to report a sighting at the Borders in Auckland. It doesn’t matter what store you go to because my distributor accepts orders from big chains and independent retailers. And yes, Britons, please request “Half-Assed” not “Half-Arsed.”
I want to apologize that I did not have this information for you guys sooner. If I’d known the book would be available internationally, I would have told my foreign readers to wait to buy it locally instead of paying to have it shipped overseas. You could have saved money on shipping and I would have saved my hand cramping up filling out bizarre custom forms. I want you to know that I’m genuinely sorry and hopefully the shipping costs were worth the two month head start you got on your neighbors. If it makes you feel any better, after Helen sent me pictures of her reading the book on a beach in Mexico, it occurred to me that my book has now traveled more places than I have. I wish my body could visit the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, but my words will have to suffice for now.
If you’re a techie, you might be happy to know you can also get the e-book edition of Half-Assed, for Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device. I saw one of these on a plane last month and now I wish I owned one just so I could see how my book looks on it.
The entry period for the viral video contest is now over. I will draw a winner as soon as I finish confirming entries. I’ll announce the winner on the blog when I do so. Thank you to every one who participated. As of this moment, my video has 6,566 views!
