The Blog as a Book
The proof copy I ordered to check that everything looked OK. |
A good while ago some reader suggested that I should publish this blog as a book for people who want to actually read through the whole thing in sequence. And it's not a bad idea, because finding the beginning and then stepping through it, skipping the stuff that's not about farmhouse ale, is a little awkward. But back then I didn't really have time for it, so I didn't do it.
Last summer I started on a new book that I have high hopes for, but I've been struggling hard to get it right. And I found that I wasn't really able to work on it while at the same time working full time, so what progress I've made was made during my holidays. That's not really been a very satisfactory state of affairs, neither for me nor for my family.
Then, earlier this year, I made a list of the books I could start on right now, as alternatives to the one I wasn't making much progress on. When I found that in addition to that one there were four others I could, or perhaps even should, be starting on, I thought to myself: well, at this pace that's going to take a decade or more. And the list had more books after that, which would soon be ready to start.
That feeling of frustration at not making progress on all these projects just grew and grew until I couldn't stand it any longer. So I did the only logical thing: I quit my job.
Mølstertunet museum in Voss. From the last trip I made before the pandemic stopped everything. |
The prospect of soon having no income except for book royalties and what I make on giving talks and writing articles rather concentrated my mind. Suddenly the idea of self-publishing the blog as a book seemed like it was worth the time.
So ... here it is. You can buy it from here.
It starts with the very first blog post I wrote about farmhouse ale, based on nothing more than reading a book. The next blog post is about me going to Vilnius and being really confused. Then I got to taste a Norwegian farmhouse ale. Reading the blog this way you get to follow in my footsteps as I got sucked into this obsession that's now taken me to the point where I have a list of books I need to write that's so long I hardly know where to start.
This book was produced by writing a converter which parsed the blog posts and converted them to LaTeX. Then I used that to produce the PDF for the paper version. I wrote another converter to produce epub format for the ebook version. Both were published using Lulu.com. I investigated the various options and found that this would produce the cheapest paper version with this many pages (204), and also give me the highest royalties. Particularly if people buy directly from Lulu.com.
Now it's out there, and I can go back to that list of books that need writing.
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