50 year Adventure

search is working

50yearadventure — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:58:53 +0000

Finally the book search is working on my web site! I guess I just had to be patient until books.google.com processed my book. I thought at the time I added it to my web site that it would work immediately. Now if I enter “churchville” into the search box and click on the “search books” button, then I get six results in a custom search page. If I enter “saudi” I get nine matches. If I enter “india” I get thirty two matches. I am very happy with the search results as they show the matches within my book and when you click on the page, the actual page in the book is shown. This is a great thing.

The search box on the left hand side works as you can change the search word or words and click on the “go” button and a new set of search results are shown. The search box at the top on the results page does not work, but at least one step was made in the right direction.

book on google continued

50yearadventure — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:24:36 +0000

I am still struggling to get the books.google.com search to work on my web site. I finally got the search to return something instead of the dreaded no match found message, but I am beginning to wonder if I am expecting something that was never intended from that search. I went back into google.com and searched for “50 year adventure rick evans” and found a couple new sites selling my book today:

wikio
tower books
Amazon in Germany

Now after looking at all of the matches in Google for “Rick Evans”, I think I should have picked a pseudo name as an author. There are just way too many Rick Evans doing stuff that Google has found.

book on google

50yearadventure — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:37:53 +0000

Well it is official as I received notice yesterday that my book is available on books.google.com. I am not sure why the cover is a generic one as I can find the real book cover when searching elsewhere.

Besides Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I discovered that Book A Million also has it for sale. I am still waiting notice from Borders.

This morning when I went into Google and searched by using my ISBN of 9780557127320, I found other places that are selling my book, some of which are overseas:

Book Topia
Valore Books
Eruditor
IBS IT
The Knee Slider
Bookya
bol.it

books.google.com continued

50yearadventure — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:14:23 +0000

Yesterday I received an email from Google that they could not automatically determine whether I was the copyright holder for my book. I am not sure how they determined that, but all I had to do was send an email to a special email address with the following statement:

“I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of each item listed above.”

Fortunately for me I did not have to consult an attorney like they suggested since my book publisher (lulu.com) up front was very clear that all copyrights for the book are mine. Now let’s see how long it takes for Google to accept my email as proof.

weread vs. books.google.com

50yearadventure — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:27:51 +0000

When I completed my book publishing with lulu.cm, at the end of the process they suggested I sign up with a site called WeRead. It was an interesting concept and since it was free I tried using it. Then as I waited for my book to be listed with Borders and BooksAMillion, I tried search for my book ISBN (9780557127320) in google. I found that Google has setup a similar idea called books @ google. This morning I tried adding my book to their library of books. Hopefully by tomorrow it will show up when searching in Google. The other interesting thing that happened was that as a book author with a google account, they supplied me with a book search ability which I added to my book web site. It is supposed to allow anyone to search for terms within my book, which is like an on-line searchable index! I will know it is working when I can search for “Churchville” and all of the matches in the book are shown in a google like search results window. Book publishing needs to enter the web age!

book is available everywhere now

50yearadventure — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:46:48 +0000

My book is available at Amazon at: 50 Year Adventure.

My book is available at Barnes & Noble at: 50 Year Adventure.

I am still waiting for it to show up on Borders and BooksAMillion web sites.

I believe now

50yearadventure — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:23:01 +0000

The whole year long process of creating a book finally ended today when I received the very first printed hardcopy of my book in the mail. I started thinking about the content for my book long before I began the actual writing process. I created a blog back in January 2007 to practice writing. I recorded everything I could think of that was memorable. It did not matter to me whether anyone read the blog or not. I was determined to get better at collecting my thoughts and recording them in written form. Initially I blogged about mostly work related things. As personal events happened that I thought my mother would be interested in, I started recording them. For two years I tried to blog at least once a week no matter what. In the summer of 2008 I started thinking about things that had happened in my whole life. I wrote them down as I remembered them. Finally during Christmas break in 2008, I decided it was time to start writing my book. I wrote for four months in the early mornings, late at night after getting home from work and in the mornings on the weekends. By the end of April 2009, I reached a part of my life which I was writing about that was a little too depressing and I decided to stop and take a break. For the next two months I collected my photos and drawings and tried to decide how to organize them for my book. I did not want to do a set of photos in the middle of the book but instead scatter them throughout the book. I immediately had way too many photos, so decided to make collages from related photos. At the same time I started think about the title for my book since I wanted some of these photos on the cover. After I finalized the photos and had everything production ready, I went back and finished writing. Then I gave the first edition to my mother to edit it for me. While she was proof reading the whole thing, I went back and started rereading the whole book and editing it myself. The editing process took around four months and at times I felt like I was writing the whole book a second time. I decided to do self publishing and picked a local company called Lulu to help me. That was a great decision as the final product is very well done. I am so happy that I am thinking of writing another book!

finally ready

50yearadventure — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:37:13 +0000

My book is finally published and to celebrate I went ahead and created a photo album today using Lulu’s new photo album wizard, which is really nice.

A Journey to India (photo book)

50 year adventure (memoirs)

I also re-did also my web site to have screen shots of both of the books at http://50yearadventure.com.

getting close now

50yearadventure — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:02:24 +0000

The editing and formatting is complete and I am waiting for the final review before I can really say it is ready. The people at LuLu.com have been so helpful all along the way. I mentioned that I would like to have my book finished by my 50th birthday and they completed the initial format quickly. I definitely picked the correct publisher to help me. Since this was my first book I decided to purchase the Premier Pack to get a little help all along the way. I do not regret that decision in any way. For the formatting alone it was worth every dollar. It did help that when I purchased this plan that they were offering a substantial discount! I would really have liked to have a professional editor review my book but I enlisted the help of my mother and wife who could definitely vouched for the authenticity of what I wrote. My mother really helped a lot as she always wanted to be a literary editor, so I was able to help her fulfill a dream in her old age, which in itself was worth it. Now the end is in sight and the book is almost done.

raw book photos

50yearadventure — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:55:06 +0000

I went ahead and posted the raw unedited photos that I used for my book illustrations. I added captions to all of them. I have many more photos from trips to India and Saudi but these were the ones I selected. One day I would like to post all of the ones I have and illustrate them. I will never have time, so will have to make time. I have not made a direct link on my 50yearadventure.com web site. You can find them all at
http://50yearadventure.com/rawPhotos/album.html. Every after writing my book, I still like original photos and the story behind each one on them. I think the next book I write will be a illustrated book as that would be fun. It is obvious from the raw photos that my gift in life is not a photographer. I would like to be better but I am not willing to put the time and effort into being a great one. Which reminds me that I forgot to mention that the photo that I use for this blog is not mine. It is way too good to be one I took. However, a good friend of mine took it and let me use it since it is one of my favorite photos that he took of the Indian Himalayas.