Tag: eBooks

TBT^2: Inspector Gerard eBook is Coming 1 April 2021 (Out NOW in Paperback)!

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It’s hard to believe that I released The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot three years ago (well, almost three years ago—give it another couple of weeks).  It was my first foray into self-publishing, and it was a fun experience.  I still need to go back and edit some of the embarrassing typographical and grammatical errors in the book, which I will get around to doing eventually.

Since then I’ve released a second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It has not done as well as Inspector Gerard, but at the time of writing, Amazon has it marked down to $11.16 for the paperback version.  That is a steal, as the list price is usually $20, so it’s 44% off.  It’s actually a pretty good book.  Of course, I’m biased.

This week is testing for middle school students at my school, and it was during this same testing week in 2021 and again in 2023 that I slapped together my books.  There’s something about having that extra hour or two a day without my Middle School Music Ensemble class that makes it feasible for me to compile and edit my writings into book form.  I am currently working on my third book, Offensive Poems: With Pictures, but I’m not sure if I’ll manage to get it written and edited this week, even with the extra time.

Still, I hope that by the time you’re reading this post that I’ll have put a dent into it.  The biggest challenge is going to be converting all of the hand-drawn pictures into a digital format.  I imagine the formatting of the entire book will be a huge headache, but it’s just a matter of making the appropriate sacrifices to Microsoft Word and Kindle Direct Publishing.

With that, here is 23 March 2023’s “TBT: Inspector Gerard eBook is Coming 1 April 2021 (Out NOW in Paperback)!“:

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September 2023 Bandcamp Friday; NEW RELEASE!

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Ah, yes, Bandcamp Friday has returned, which means I hope you will consider pitching in a few bucks to buy my music—or my second book!  After a long hiatus over the summer months, this celebration of indie musicians is back.

The first Friday of a bunch of months in 2023—February, March, April, May, August, September, October, November, and December—will feature this pro-indie music observance, a day on which Bandcamp waives its usual 15% commission on sales.

In other words, when you buy my music, almost 100% of it goes to me, instead of almost 85%.

To celebrate, I have a brand new release:  Spooky Season!  Spooky Season is a collection of seven new compositions with a spooky, autumnal vibe, perfect for pumpkin-spiced living and ghostly vibes.  These tracks won’t hit streaming platforms until October, but you can purchase them now via Bandcamp!

Spooky Season is just $5, and includes full scores and individual parts for every track—a $28 value!—plus a bonus track.  It’s also crammed with videos, handwritten manuscripts, and other goodies.

Currently, my entire discography of eleven releases is $18.39, a savings of 50%, which is not bad for eleven releases.  That’s $1.67 per release—not too shabby!  To purchase the full discography, click on any release, and you’ll see the option to purchase all of them.

You can also listen to a ton of my tunes on YouTube (and it’s free to subscribe!).

I’m also selling all of my paintings for $10, with free shipping in the United States, regardless of how many you purchase.  They’re one of kind, so once a painting is purchased, it’s gone.

I’ve also joined Society6, a website that lets artists upload their designs, which can they be printed onto all manner of products (like this throw pillow, or this duvet cover).  Why not get a bookbag with a mouthy droid on it?

I only get 10% of the sales made there, but some of the stuff looks really good—I really want these notebooks with my “Desert View” painting on it (now SOLD!).  Some of them are straight-up goofy, like this church doodle I made celebrating the presidential pardon of Roger Stone (the description for the piece is “Anger your friends with this doodle commemorating the presidential pardon of America’s most dapper political operative“).

I have a few new paintings in the works, and hope to be attending the South Carolina Bigfoot Festival to try to hawk some of my works.  We’ll see how that goes!

My first book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot, is $10 in paperback, and just $5 on Kindle.

My second and newest book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, is $20 in paperback and $10 on Kindle.

Finally, after I finish Offensive Poems: With Pictures, my planned third book, I’ll be uploading those doodles to Society6 as well.  I have high hopes (perhaps naïvely) for this book, but we shall see.  The doodles are some of my best work—and in glorious color—and without notebook paper lines!

Thanks again for your support!

Happy Friday!

—TPP

Offensive Poems: With Pictures Preview: “Cute But Offensive Extraterrestrial” & “Space Frog”

The Portly Politico10 Comments

The following is a re-posting of this past Sunday’s edition of Sunday Doodles (Sunday Doodles CXCV), which is normally a perk for $5 and up subscribers to my SubscribeStar Page.  The post serves as a preview, of sorts, to the kind of content that will make up (I hope!) my third book, tentatively entitled Offensive Poems: With Pictures.  I thought I’d bring it to the masses—you, my beloved free subscribers and daily readers—to get feedback—and to let you in on this new project.  —TPP

Typically, Sunday Doodles is reserved for the classy $5 and up subscribers, while $3 a month gets the first Sunday of the month to gawk at doodles.  However, I’m opening this post up to all subscribers.

That’s because this weekend’s edition of Sunday Doodles features a preview of my current book project, Offensive Poems: With Pictures.  This project started almost by accident—I was doodling at an open mic night on Tuesday, 18 July 2023, and started sketching people around me.  Two nights later—Thursday, 20 July 2023—at another open mic, I drew “Cute But Offensive Extraterrestrial”; he prompted me to write the haiku “Learn to Code.”

That got me thinking:  what if I wrote a red-pilled haiku for every doodle?  I was already toying with the idea of writing poems to accompany each doodle, but I wasn’t thinking of making them a satirical commentary on the strange times in which we find ourselves.  Now, I can’t stop coming up with pithy verses about the various sacred cows and empty bromides of our time.  It’s remarkable how many Leftist slogans are seven-syllables, which works great for that second line of each haiku.

Why haiku?  I like the challenge of stating a complex sets of ideas in seventeen syllables.  The structure of a haiku—five syllables in the first and third lines, seven syllables in the second/middle line—means I have to be extremely efficient with words.

And, to be totally honest, I just find haiku easier to work with than other poetic forms.  It offers enough flexibility in terms of rhythm, meter, etc., for a hedge-poet like myself to play around with.  Once I have to worry about iambic pentameter, for example, and stressed and unstressed syllables, it’s a bit too much for yours portly.

That said, I wanted some form, as I find most free verse to be too loose.  There is something to be said for structure, as it forces me to think intentionally about every word.  Also, I find that much free verse quickly becomes indistinguishable from prose.  Much of it seems like prose writing with random or mildly clever line breaks.

So!  Enough rambling.  Let’s get to the doodles!

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Back-to-School Update 2023

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly is not quite back to teaching just yet, but I am back to work.  That means I’m entering into this odd period of quasi-work before the storm of the school year begins.  It’s a kind of ramping up to the main event, but I’ve been teaching for so long, it feels a bit more like spinning my wheels.

Whatever the case, I’m no longer allowed to enjoy leisurely mornings, and have to be somewhere other than home during an arbitrary stretch of hours that another person dictates.  In other words, I’m doing what everyone else does year-round.

With school looming, some of my projects and their output will slow down a bit, but I do have a few updates to share with subscribers, some of which will interest them greatly (or, at the very least, slightly), including my next book project idea.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Lazy Sunday CXCV: Arizonan Sojourn, Part II

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A quick blurb before today’s post:  I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Pick up a copy today!  Even sharing the above links is a huge help.

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

***

With the release of my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, it seemed like the ideal time to post the second half of the six essays that make up the first section of the book (apologies for that confusing sentence of numbers and ordinals).  These three essays are Chapters 4-6 in the book, and were originally published on my SubscribeStar page, and cover my trip to Arizona with my older brother:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures PDF

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

A quick blurb before today’s post:  I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Pick up a copy today!  Even sharing the above links is a huge help.

Or, you can subscribe to my SubscribeStar page at $5 a month or more and get access to the PDF right now!

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

***

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  Most Saturday posts are accessible with a subscribtion to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

However, for this Saturday only, subscribers must be at the $5 level or higher.  Why?  Because I’m posting a PDF of my new book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  That’s a $20 value, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for a $5 a month subscription—do you?  There are perks, after all, to paying a little extra—ding!

For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

I finally released my second self-published book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, and as a reward to $5 and higher subscribers (and as an inducement to my $1 a month subs to upgrade), you can get access to the PDF!

There’s not much else to say.  Subscribe for $5 a month, and get access to the full book (as a PDF), plus Sunday Doodles and a bunch of other goodies.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $5 a month or more.

Phone it in Friday XXXV: My Second Book is Live on Kindle!

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

In case the daily reminders at the top of every post this week weren’t reminder enough, I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.  The Kindle version went live today, so if you pre-ordered, you can now read the book!

I’ve been eager to release a second book ever since I published The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot back in March 2021, but various time constraints always seemed to interfere.  Ironically, maintaining the blog—even with help from good friends—is one such hinderance, while also serving as the source material for this book!

Blogging daily (today marks the 1545th consecutive day of blogging) is great fun, but it takes time.  Longtime readers will probably have noticed the increase in guest posts (especially from Audre Myers and Ponty), as well as lighter posts from yours portly.  Those lighter posts are partially out of necessity—in order to maintain my busy work and private music lessons schedule, I have to write some fluffier posts here from time to time.

No worries—I have not given up on political writing entirely, nor have I abandoned writing seriously about music, faith, art, etc.  Sometimes, I just need to upload some pictures of a LEGO set I built and call it a day.

That said, blogging daily is also the source of Arizonan Sojourn, as blogging daily will likely be the source of my next book (topic to be determined).  Pulled from four years of travel essays, with a particular focus on the six-part trip my older brother and I took to Arizona in December 2022, the book regales readers with tales of my not-so-outrageous exploits.

So, I found myself last week with a modicum of extra time because Middle School students were taking some horrendous standardized test, after which they were dismissed for the day.  That removed my duty to teach Middle Music Ensemble for a few days, and that extra fifty-six minutes each day, along with the lack of private music lessons with Middle Schoolers, enabled me to complete the compiling, organizing, and edition of Arizonan Sojourn.

Unlike Inspector Gerard, I also made sure to proofread and revise Arizonan Sojourn much more carefully this time.  I cannot guarantee it is free of grammatical errors—I found one as soon as I published the book (it is now fixed)—but it should be substantially less embarrassing in this regard than Gerard was.

That’s all to say that you should buy it.  I’ll also be uploading a PDF manuscript of the entire work to my Subscribe Star page for $5 and up subscribers tomorrow.

Of course, it’s much better to have a physical copy, no?

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Happy Reading!

—TPP

TBT: Inspector Gerard eBook is Coming 1 April 2021 (Out NOW in Paperback)!

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

I released my first self-published book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot, two years ago.  Two years on, I have finally released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.

Here’s where you can pick it up:

With the release of this new book, it seemed apropos to glance back at the release of Inspector Gerard, and all the excitement of yours portly at the time.

With that, here is 26 March 2021’s “Inspector Gerard eBook is Coming 1 April 2021 (Out NOW in Paperback)!“:

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Myersvision: The Books

The Portly Politico15 Comments

The Bigfootmania continues here at The Portly Politico, and after going back with Audre Myers about the big lugs whereabouts, I asked her to write a piece about the books on Bigfoot.

I imagine there are quite a few cranks out there who are, uh, cranking out click-bait-style eBooks about the hide-and-seek world champion (I’ve long encouraged my Ph.D.-wielding, tenured older brother to write some hack book about ghosts or the like, using his doctoral degree as a way to sell books via the fallacy of authority).  Audre’s book list does note include those kinds of cheap money grabs.

Indeed, one is a Ph.D. (there’s the authority fallacy!) who has endured considerable professional scorn for his research on Bigfoot (perhaps that’s why my brother never took me up on the ghost book suggestion).  The other is a YouTuber who is not even convinced that Bigfoot exists, but who is looks at every bit of footage of the creature with a critical eye.

Perhaps belief in Bigfoot is wishful thinking, but we’re limiting ourselves intellectually if we don’t hear out the reasoned conclusions and evidence of the true believers.

With that, here is Audre’s brief bibliography of Bigfoot books:

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