I finally finished my second book on Sunday. It is very similar to the book that I have already made into an ePub that is available for download on this site. I say similar because it’s the same idea behind it and basically the same format. In the first book, Living My Dream, I took the blog entries that I made during my first real trip around the world and combined them with the photos that I took to make a book. At the time, and even now, I don’t really believe anyone really cares what I did. I got very limited interest as I traveled and made entries into my blog. So there really wasn’t any reason for someone to actually care when the book was made. The second book that I just sent to the publisher is basically the same thing, it is a collection of all the blog entries that I made while traveling the following year.

Alright, so what’s different? The first book was a milestone mainly because I’ve had a life goal to write a book. It was a goal that I never really believed that I could accomplish, in fact, I treated the creation as almost a joke. As I mentioned I don’t think anyone is interested in my adventures, so I didn’t have any expectations with it. When I was finished, I was proud of myself, but I knew that I did it the ‘safe’ way. I didn’t really tell anyone, I didn’t try to sell it, and I didn’t take it to actual print. The result was I wrote a book, but I didn’t really feel as if I had accomplished what my life’s goal had been.

With my second book, Living my Dream v.2 (I know, creative title), I’ve decided to take it to the next level. First of all, I had planned from the beginning that I was going to have it printed. Having it printed changed nearly everything too. It means that writing and designing the book is not the end of the process.

As the title of this entry states, I sent the book to the publisher on Sunday. This print will only be one book. I want to make sure that there aren’t any issues with it before I order about 30. I will also decide whether I will have the publisher try to sell it for me. Selling it through the publisher will mean that I take myself out of the equation. It will cost much more, but I’m not good at marketing myself, so the results might be better with the publisher as a middleman. They will sell it through Amazon, do marketing for me, and they have a service that will review a book for a fee. At this point, I really don’t know what I’m going to try, I just know that I am taking it further than I did the first book.

Before I write too much, I want to make sure that I state, I don’t really have any expectations for this book either. I don’t expect anyone will purchase it, and if someone does I would be afraid that they may leave bad reviews. I am going through with it though. It’s an important goal for me.

So I was outside yesterday and I’ve decided I’m going to do another book. I have two choices of subjects that I’m interested in. The first and probably the easiest is to do another travel book. I could do it the same way I did the other two. The second choice of subjects is what I’m leaning towards, and that is a book about computer graphics.