my year in the making online book launch

Friday 14 August 2009 at 06:45
Hi!

I write this after working solidly through the day, night, morning and early afternoon (it's now 3.30pm, although with the curtains drawn you could hardly tell). I feel a bit trippy, but not that tired. I guess I just needed to get it out there.


For those who don't know, last year I wrote a book, about having healthy and loving relationships, inspired by many life experiences and meetings. I've tried to make it as easy to read as possible, having a good mix of practical advice and useful insights. Topics range from internal dialogues (the things we often tell ourselves) to sex to fear of rejection to how to approach first meetings and developing good rapport, while sharing your true character, to developing your character and accepting others more easily. It's broad enough to show how many of the elements of happy relationships are woven together, yet condensed enough to provide real meat on each topic - I hope.

Since those first weeks of flowing inspiration, I've been editing, expanding and generally improving it (thanks to many friends for all the feedback). Along side that came the software to process, personalize and secure it in digital format so I could sell it as an ebook. You really would not believe the number of hours (and lines of code) that went into all that. Ironically perhaps, I've been a bit of a hermit this last year working on this project. But now, finally it's ready. Well actually the website went online a couple of weeks ago and I sold my first copy only a few hours after it went live (it felt great!), but it is only now that I feel the website is worth shouting about. I've put many new features and refinements in place, a social bookmarking widget, easy book feedback form and display, animated intro banner text, funky page background, nice buttons, new pages etc. plus lots of things you can't see. You can even decide how much you pay for the book! (Thought it would be an interesting experiment and allow those who are really hard up to get it where they might not otherwise have been able to.)

So now, with all the SEO, page compression, image CSS JS optimization, XHTML complience, Google analytics - and what have you - in place, I feel it's ready to meet the world en mass. After I've had a bit of sleep I shall crystalize my plan for putting it all over the web.

Ideally I'd really like a bit more feedback on the book (esp. from guys - it's aimed equally at both men and women, but so far women have been more active in giving feedback) and the free guide and also very much the website, before putting all my energy into letting the world know about it.

So, I have a favour to ask anyone reading this.

A) If you've either read a draft of the book and thought it was good, like what you see on the website or in the free guide - and you're on facebook, del.icio.us, digg or any of the other social networking sites, please take half a minute to click on the share button on the website and share it with your networks, with a couple of words from you. This will really help me!

B) If you're a guy, curious about the book and would be up for giving me some honest feedback on it, I will give you a free copy! Just let me know who you are. I already know it's a great read from the feedback so far, but some more male opinions will help me balance and refine it that last degree.

C) If you take a look at the website and notice something that doesn't look or work right, or think of some addition that would really improve it - let me know! (Or if you think, 'wow, that's really cool!' it would be great to know that too..)

Ok, so if you could help me with one or more of the above I'd be very grateful!

I should probably try and get some rest soon.

Ciao for now,


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