Dear reader, You may already have noticed the orange graphic in the right sidebar? Yes, I have self-published a book based on this blog. And I’m literally giving it away, the price barely covers printing. What will happen to the blog now? Why self-publishing? What is up with that ecowar.eu site? Answers in the tale below…
After many emails back and forth between publishers, experts and I as well as personal considerations I finally decided to self-publish with Books on Demand. Communicating with publishers is a job in itself and not one I could find the energy to do. At the same time, those publishers and experts who appears to have taken some time to look at my script did offer a bit of praise and encouragement.
“[…] a real pleasure receiving your book. It’s very interesting! Most of it is so very relevant today […]“
“[…] very interesting and significant […]”
“[…] is extremely well written and interesting […]”
“[Interlude A about a Neanderthal family] makes exciting reading […] this might be one way of waking the current generation up to the fact that if we do not solve our ecological problem we could become past history.”
The greatest loss of self-publishing with Books on Demand compared to a regular publisher is in marketing, I think. I’ll have to fund and mail copies to reviewers myself and no copies will sell themselves from simply standing on a shelf in a store. At the end of the day, I find the message to be what’s important to me. Not sales. That being said, it would be nice to sell a couple of hundreds of copies to break even.
To aid the “marketing” of the book I bought the URL “ecowar.eu” (not .dk because it’s not a Danish project, not .com, .net, .info or .org because those have been taken by others or have been cybersquatted) and set up a Google Plus page (please encircle). For now it simply presents the book. But check back later, I may go through with a few of the ideas I have. This blog here, ecowar.blogspot.com, will stay were it is so don’t unsubscribe or remove your bookmark.
Posting frequency will most likely drop, however. At least for some time. That doesn’t mean my research stops. I’ll still get my fine-tuned news alerts and I’ll still bookmark using Diigo and still share whatever news deserve some buzz via my Twitter (using #ecowar when I remember) and/or the Google Plus page. And write new articles here every now and then.
So, wish me luck. And buy the book, please. Currently it’s available at the following vendors:
More vendors to come. Also available via me, the author (email “benno” at ecowar.eu). The price is just ~85 DKK / ~11 € / ~15 US$.
Do you have experience in self-publishing? Do you have creative ideas for what I should do with the book, the blog and the site? Any kind of question or request? Bring it on…
