Speaking of books, even though we temporarily weren’t, I’ve been speaking with Darling Daughter Number One about co-authoring a book on parenting next year. She likes the title The Dragon Mother. Darling Daughter Number Three likes The Komodo Mother (going along with the dragon motif) . My personal pick would be How You Like Me Now<\/a>?<\/p>\n Having one book on the market that is selling respectably well (Winning on the Ground<\/a> – it’s on knocking people down, choking them and breaking their arms) I am well aware of the fact that while writing may be an art, publishing is most definitely a business. No doubt the title is going to be decided based on a focus group or some other means of determining what is going to sell.<\/p>\n Another book that I started on and have yet to finish was on statistics and a naked mole rat. There are a whole lot of statistics textbooks and academic journals on statistics or with statistical results. There is not to my knowledge a book of someone just rambling on with statistical shit thrown in there, plus a naked mole rat.\u00a0 Like Malcolm Gladwell but with more statistics, more swearing, probably worse writing, but I will have a naked mole rat (which he does not) and if I do happen to discuss eigenvalues I will spell the word correctly.<\/p>\n Maria and I have kicked around the idea of taking some posts from this blog and turning it into a book, particularly the ones on 55 things I have learned.<\/p>\n Whatever book I write next will almost definitely be done with a mainstream, traditional publisher because of an experiment I did a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n Many years ago, when I was traveling to North Dakota a lot, before any Internet except for AOL on dial-up, I was pretty bored in the evenings. I could only fit so many books in my suitcase and there was only one bookstore within 100 miles, then it closed and there were none. So, while I was sitting inside avoiding the snow, I wrote three books – I don’t know why, I guess because I can’t knit. I published one on Smashwords<\/a> and the same book on Amazon<\/a> , because I still hadn’t decided yet whether I was going to self-publish my judo book or go with a traditional publisher. What I discovered was that if you want to sell books that way you have to get out and promote them, write blogs about them , tweet about them to the point of being irritating. Otherwise, you sell about one book a month.<\/p>\n So, I went with Black Belt for my judo book and it is now #1 on Amazon in the mixed martial arts category, #7 in martial arts and from #17,000 – #48,000 or so out of\u00a0 the over one million books they sell.<\/p>\n You see, I don’t LIKE doing any of that marketing stuff and I like the work I do.\u00a0 I don’t have any mad passion to be A WRITER like all of those people who say, “If I couldn’t write, I’d die.”<\/p>\n If I couldn’t write, I’d probably learn to knit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whatever I was going to do productive on the plane was interrupted by me reading Sh*t My Dad Says. This convinced me that I will never be a best-selling author because I will NEVER be that funny. The book is hilarious. Read it. Thankfully for me the book was so funny that it was either…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-de-mars-general-life-ramblings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3298"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3303,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3298\/revisions\/3303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"nakedmolerat\"](\"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/nakedmolerat-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n