Category Archives: Books

Zen and the Art of the Book Cover

I have good memories on reading M.Pirsig’s novel ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance‘. It was the Dutch version, so I now know some nuances were lost in translation. Also, it was over 45 years ago, and with that, it is long overdue for a new read.

Covers:

If I may believe the more than a handful of accomplished bestselling writers’ groups on Facebook, I have to invest in hiring a professional to design the cover of my books. In traditional publishing, with a publisher’s house, they will take care of this as it is included in their fees. But when self-publishing as I am, the consensus seems to be to hire an accomplished artist with experience in book cover design, and let this person create an attractive cover for your book. Continue reading →

Ukraine – Book sales donated

Summary:

Today, the money collected from the book sales for my book ‘Ukraine – Infrastructure victory’ was transferred to the organization Help99. Exactly 20 books exchanged hands; some were sold, others donated. For the donated books, I footed the money it would have made in sales. Two buyers chose to pay more for the book than I was asking; I thanked them and added the full donation to the account. Those who bought a copy off me: thank you!

Two copies landed in different libraries, one in a private community library in Spain, the other in the communal library in Knivsta, Sweden, where we live. Of course, for these books I also footed the assumed sales profit.

Some books have been promised as a donation but have not yet been delivered. I preemptively added the assumed profit to the list. Continue reading →

The art of the sale

Anyone who knows me can vouch that I’m not much of a salesman. Au contraire, I can easily state that I have got to be the worst salesperson in the history of sales! In my latest project, I decided to write a book about a covert espionage operation in russia, with the goal to undermine russia’s infrastructure to the point where it would be more than noticeable in society, government, and military. The book was written and then published earlier this year.

The idea of this project was to sell as many copies as I could, deduct the (very low) printing cost from each sale, and send the remainder – the total profit – to an organisation that helps civilians and military in Ukraine. Due to my poor sales skills (it cannot be the book, ’cause that’s great!), hardly any sales were made. Continue reading →

New book – Ukraine (all sales profit will be donated to Ukraine)

Again, a new book is close to publishing published and available for sale:

Ukraine – Infrastructure victory

The total profits of this book go to help99.co, an Estonian nonprofit that collects funds to help Ukraine. The help is not only Ukraine’s citizens with everything from medicines and fully equipped ambulances to solar panels and generators. But also for the front lines eg. by supplying ambulances that can work in combat circumstances.

So, buy the book and you contribute to the freedom of Ukraine, it’s as simple as that. And as an added bonus, you get to keep the book! Continue reading →

KDP – How to self publish your book

In the past few years, I’ve managed to write and publish four books. Three of them are in English while only one is in Dutch. But, writing a book is just one of the many steps between the idea and the book being bought and read by someone.

As I live in Sweden, and none of my books are in Swedish, I presume my readers are most likely be found abroad in Europe and the US. Reaching out to established publishing companies abroad to persuade them to publish my books seemed like a stretch for a newbie writer, so I did not pursue this avenue. Of course, it would be easy to have my books printed locally and then sell each copy myself, but that would require a considerable investment in printing. And I’d have to go door to door to sell them, which is not my thing. Thus the idea of self-publishing them came up. Continue reading →

The slippery slope of AI in books

‘What, AI in books!’ you may say. Indeed, with generative AI you can ask your AI application to write a text, given a set of parameters such as number of words, subject, genre, and much more.

When I recently was editing the blurbs of my books on KDP, the publishing platform for the Amazon book store, I was asked this question:
Of course, my answer was a solid No as I do not engage any AI form in writing my books for me. Or do I? Continue reading →

Writing and hobbies

One of the many perks of writing is that you get to incorporate things you fancy in your stories. After all, as a writer, you own the story! I regularly make use of that perk. Readers who know me will recognize these details, while others take them for regular book content.

One of the things that always has had my interest, apart from reading, are cars, motorcycles, and sailing. So I eagerly jump to every opportunity to put in my favorite cars or incorporate cars or sailing in my stories.

Nuremberg:
When I was working on my first book Nuremberg in 2021, I could not resist using a 2CV as a means of transport in the center of Amsterdam in the 80ies. Even if the make and model are never mentioned in my book, when reading the attached text snippets you’ll probably agree the car cannot be anything other than a 2CV. Continue reading →

Paperback weekend!

This weekend I’ll be publishing all my four books on amazon in paperback format. Until now, I had my ebooks on amazon (Kindle) and my paperbacks on bravenewbooks.nl. This last webshop turned out to be quite expensive for readers outside of the Netherlands, myself included, that had to face excessive shipping costs up to €25. With amazon, I hope y’all at least get better shipping costs as the books can be printed on demand more locally. Continue reading →

Audiobook – Follow-up

A short message this time. This is a follow-up to my previous post on creating an audiobook with an AI voice. You can read that post here.

While all the techy bits were sorted when I posted that article, there was still quite some administration and distribution going on after I posted. Today it was pointed out to me that my audiobook ‘The Big Day‘ is now available for listening on several websites specializing in Audiobooks. Here are a few of the webshops: Continue reading →

The Art of Translation

My all time favorite SF-writer is Jack Vance who died at May 13th 2013 at the age of 96. He wasn’t a follower of the hard science fiction category, there are far more qualified writers for this genre like Larry Niven with his fabulous novel Ringworld, full of hard core science.
In fact Niven had to write a sequel to Ringworld because he wanted to correct a rather stupid technical error in the original story. One which was pointed him out by MIT students. Continue reading →

Translation, human or AI?

As the idea came up to translate one of my books from the English language it was written in, to what is supposed to be my native tongue: Dutch, I decided to have a go at this challenge. To be fair, it wasn’t really a formal challenge, more like a curiosity of mine if I could do it or not. After all, with all the AI presence online, why would one be as mad as to undertake such a laborious task manually Have I gone mad? Continue reading →

AI? For an audiobook? Are you mad?

Well, that remains to be seen. The question is if I can publish an audiobook using AI?

Good question, I’ve written a few books, and published them both in paperback and ebook format, but never given the idea of publishing them as audiobooks much thought. While I’ve always been an avid reader of printed books and more recently also of ebooks, audiobooks never really became my thing. I tried one of them once a long time ago but never managed to finish it. Mind you, that was in the age when CD’s had just become fashionable. Continue reading →