After more than a year of chasing literary agents and being told “thanks, but really, you’d have a better chance of weaving your bellybutton lint into an area rug than getting me to represent your work,” I finally bit the bullet and used an online publishing site to make my book available to the masses.
You can preview (and buy! Buying is good!) *The Man Rules *here. If you’re a long-time reader of The Straight Dope message boards, you might recognize some of the stuff in the book - about 20 percent of it had its genesis in my posts here.
At $4.99, it’s an amazing bargain - using the same type of calculator as that favored by world-famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, I’ve estimated you’re spending less than 1/10 of a penny per laugh!
Seriously, if you have the time, visit the site and sample a portion of the book for free. You don’t HAVE to buy it, but my starving children would appreciate it.
Dung Beetle, your comment made me realize I need to market my e-book differently. So now, it’s not that I couldn’t get an agent and a print publisher - it’s that I was so concerned for the environment that I didn’t want to kill trees. Hear that, everybody? I’m funny AND environmentally conscious!
Plus, I’ll make this offer - if anybody wants an autographed copy, just send me your tablet or e-reader, with the book file open on it. I’ll sign the screen in permanent ink and send it back to you.
I’m so far behind in my reading..but if this statement is a sign of the humor involved, I need to put this on my list.
Hmm. Can I send you my list, so you add the book to it?
Actually, it didn’t. But in the process of trying to get it from my computer onto my Kindle, I had to reset the Kindle and it lost all its “collections”, so now I have to resort all my books. Including yours, which will go into “Humor”!
But a nice Amazon support person told me how to email a downloaded file from my computer to my Kindle instead of transferring it via USB, which is going to be very useful in the future. So your book taught me a new skill before I even read it!
First, I’m gonna buy the book like right now. But I’ll admit to more than just a twinge of disappointment to learn that your name is not actually Sauron.
Congratulations, Sauron! I’ve enjoyed your writings here, and if the book lives up to the first few pages of the sample, I think I’ll enjoy that even more.
My thanks to you all for the kind words … I’m beyond flattered. In a real sense, the book wouldn’t exist without the Dope – this site provided a creative outlet for me to keep writing when I didn’t think I could. You folks, and many others over the past 14 years I’ve been here, have inspired and motivated me in ways I can’t even begin to describe.
Three books sold thus far! Only 349,999,998 to go to pass Stephen King!
