Frank Giovinazzi

Saw the space shuttle the other day — and put the camera away, deciding instead to actually...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:21:04 -0400

Saw the space shuttle the other day — and put the camera away, deciding instead to actually see what I was looking at.

Of course I’m going to write something good today — Im vacuuming and scrubbing the...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:20:13 -0400

Of course I’m going to write something good today — Im vacuuming and scrubbing the toilet.

#thatshowzombiemoviesstart

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:15:57 -0400

Don’t pet the cat crying in her cage at the animal hospital after hours

How I Published an Out of Print Book on Kindle and Nook

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 09:10:00 -0400

I read How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World about 20 years ago as a self-help book. I liked the message, and the granular way Harry Browne took the reader through questioning assumptions and offering alternatives. I found the book to be energizing and hopeful then, as I do now. It helps you think about your own life and options and encourages you to do what you really want to do with it.

Fast forward 20 years, and I am selling used books on Amazon.com as a sideline. In general, older books, especially self-help and philosophy, are not worth very much in the used market, as this genre tends to age badly as they are often based on the fad of the moment. One day I stumbled across a listing for HIFF and noticed that used copies are selling from $30 to $100 on both Amazon and EBay. In simple economics terms, that means there is a greater demand than supply, which explains the premium pricing.

I am also a writer and have published books on the Amazon Kindle platform, so this was essentially a “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup” moment for me — a couple mouse clicks showed me there was no digital version of the book – so the combination of high demand for an old book and no digital version turned on my entrepreneurial lights.

Harry Browne passed away in 2006, after a long career as a writer, investment adviser and two-time Libertarian candidate for President of the United States. I contacted his widow, Pamela Browne, along with her representative and asked them if they held the publishing rights and if they would allow me to issue the book in digital format. They were delighted to have the book issued in this format and we signed a contract – and if sales of this book support it, we are going to go ahead and publish other Harry Browne titles as well. As a point of interest, I have never met or spoken with Mrs. Browne or her rep, everything has been done through email, so here’s another case of the Internet being super awesome.

No changes were made to the original text; Mrs. Browne vetted the digital draft; my goal was simply to make the work available to what I thought was a waiting audience.

So far so good. We are enjoying good sales since the book’s release in mid-March 2012, especially as the marketing has so far been on the strength of Harry’s reputation and my own email and Internet outreach.

Links to purchase How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World:

Kindle

Nook

Smashwords

So egg-cited for the Easter egg hunt tomorrow, eggs are stuffed!

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:10:26 -0400

So egg-cited for the Easter egg hunt tomorrow, eggs are stuffed!

Editing a Book I've Already Written

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:50:33 -0400

This post is written for digital writers and publishers to give an idea of the thought and work process necessary to achieve the goal of publishing titles that will generate a profit.

So I’ve got this business book I wrote over the course of 2011 that I have decided to dust off and publish. It is a series of entries and lessons I gathered while running an online selling business. There is some good, funny and ugly stuff in it, and it’s worth publishing because, a) there is worthwhile information in it, and b) there is a customer base.

But now that I’m looking at the draft, I realize there is a lot of work to do. With previous projects, I have started with a fresh file and simply retyped the old text, editing as I go.

Because I have to look at this project as being worth between $500 and $5,000 over the course of its lifespan, I am going to set up a time limit on how much I can invest in it — at this moment I figure I want to spend 25-50 hours, which comes out to a range of $20 to $100 an hour.

For his project, rather than re-typing the existing 45,000 words, I will create a new file and paste acceptable entries in as I look from the old draft to the new, and edit them as I build the manuscript. Old ideas I never got around to writing will come up during this process and I will add them as I go. I expect the finished book to be about 50,000 words, allowing for all the deleting and additions.

At the same time, I will be creating a new table of contents that is compatible with the Kindle and Nook platforms, as that is where I intend to sell it.

My digital sales are trending up at the moment, and I want to get to financial self-sufficiency as writer/publisher by the end 0f 2012.

One title we are having success with is an out of print work I published with the cooperation of author Harry Browne’s estate: How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World is available at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble in digital editions:

Kindle

Nook

Smashwords

Gas is so expensive you’ve got to consider your odds of getting the job before driving 45...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 09:33:03 -0400

Gas is so expensive you’ve got to consider your odds of getting the job before driving 45 miles for the interview.

Amtrak employees in Alexandria VA rock!

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:49:08 -0500

They were a lot of help when a birthday party of 15 kids and parents showed up — the Amtrak people were friendly, helped with info, held luggage in baggage check and one fellow even handed out kiddie train books to teh little ones. Very nice!

Black Friday Assault on my Inbox

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 19:08:27 -0500

How many sale emails did you delete today? I’m up to about 30.

More kayaking

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 12:53:26 -0400

More kayaking

Kayaking on the Potomac

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 12:44:38 -0400

Kayaking on the Potomac

If fantasy authors keep building on each other's work

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:39:54 -0400

will they eventually become realists?

Stolen joke:

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:41:11 -0400

Two cannibals are eating a clown, one turns to the other and asks, “Does this taste funny to you?”

Cracked iPhone glass

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:05:00 -0400

can fix it myself, sure, but I contacted ‘reliable iphone repair’ and he hasn’t gotten back to me in a week!

What's with all the tweeting of famous quotes and news articles?

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 01:04:29 -0400

Obsessing over old ideas that failed us is not going to make a better future — offer something original or shaddup — there is an energy cost to all this pointless electronic activity.

The Moon is Just Past Full

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:56:45 -0400

Both hatches are off the boat for painting, the cicadas and the water are keeping a rhythm, the air is temperate enough for shorts and a t-shirt on deck and life is good.

Owning a Boat, Green Acres Edition

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 03:55:43 -0400

The warning sound on the inverter went off, and since I was laying down and trying to sleep, it went through me the way I’d imagine a siren in a biohazard lab would sound.

What the…? I immediately had my ‘jump to conclusions’ mat out and decided the damned inverter had already failed — at less than three months old! Damn, I threw out the packaging! I can’t return it! I have to buy a new one! Wait, that means I can get a better one! A 1500 watt model! I can run a microwave!

But then I turned a couple lights on and noticed they were dim. Shut one light off and the others brightened. Aha Watson! Deductive reasoning strikes again — the battery is weak and the inverter actually functioned correctly, warning me that the battery didn’t have enough power.

Damn! Now I have to buy a new battery! They’re a hundred bucks! And so on.

Perhaps not. I unplugged the inverter and shut off all lights and let the charger work for a few minutes. Then I plugged in the inverter which did not set off the Anthrax alarm, and my iPhone started charging again.

This is like the Green Acres scenario where they can’t run the dishwasher and the toaster at the same time, but I am thinking of taking the battery home, with the charger, and letting it replenish for a few days without drawing any power. We’ll see. This reminds me that I have to learn more about electrical and 12 volt systems — and that most learning on a boat is dictated by stuff as it happens.

Another Great Reason to Own a Boat, Tea Party Edition

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 03:36:25 -0400

There’s no government program that guarantees the right to own a boat.

No section 8, no cash for canoes, no means, that I know of, for people who have not worked for the privilege of owning a boat to get one for free and have the maintenance and operating expenses of the vessel paid for from the sweat of someone else’s brow.

Everyone who is on the water has earned it. They bought the boat, paid for supplies, gas and dockage and most important, if they make a mistake they are going to have to fix it themselves.

This notion occurred to me one day when I was by myself and slipped while tending the mainsail. “Whoa!” I righted myself, “I’m out here alone — and I can die!”

It wasn’t that big a slip in itself, it was more the split second awareness that I had to be more careful because there is no net.

I’m not a major tea party ranter, though the reason that meme has proven persistent is that there is some kernel of validity to the idea that self-reliance is a neglected responsibility.

Once I started riffing on this concept, I looked at my fellow boaters and the water a little differently — the overall community is a shade different than land-based life, where it seems everyone is in your pocket or working a scam to enjoy the easy life. And let me be clear, where I diverge from the tea partiers is that I include a broader list of freeloaders in my estimation — not just garden variety welfare recipients, but the politicians, bankers, lobbyists, retirees, lawsuit beneficiaries, double dippers, the self-handicapped, bogus protected classes and so on. If you take the current attack on freeloading to its logical extreme, the fact is a good deal of the well-to-do slice of society has secured their position by taking their points off the honest labor of others.

But you can’t do that on a boat that’s actually in the water. Even if you obtained your vessel by your little scam of making others pay for it, once you off the dock it’s up to you to fend for yourself and make sure you get back safely.

I think this goes part of the way to explains the bonhomie among the boating class — every one knows that every person they meet has made an effort to get there and stay there, and you are met with a higher level of trust than in ordinary land-based dealings. Where else do people wave to each other as they pass by on the way to their destination?

And since I’m talking politics, there is a subtle phenomenon to this idea of earning your place. Since everyone in boating knows that you earned the right to be there, there is an openness to helping one another that doesn’t exist in the land of scams — it’s a case of assuming the best about someone before learning the worst. Now imagine if our primary society had a shared sense that everyone was doing their best, that they weren’t out to scam you or take what you had earned for yourself? I would say that our society is suffering under a mutual suspicion, that since everyone is working a scam, people are operating with a closed fist. There’s an argument to be made that curtailing entitlements would not only encourage people to work harder but also engender a greater level of cooperation and goodwill among folks that, right now, have good reason to believe their neighbor is getting something for nothing.

Forget Two-Foot-Itis, I've Got Eight-Foot-Itis

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:19:34 -0400

You know the old saying, ‘if I knew then what I know now,’ and in terms of the boat that means I am looking for something in the 34-foot range. Still capable of single-handing, but but enough to cruise in style. The headroom on my Pearson 26 requires me to stoop and it’s just a little too tight.

I am going to skip the two foot growth spurts and go for what I want, which allows for a hot water system, shower, maybe a reefer box and most of all, enough floor space to do yoga. Not that I will but you get the drift.

Sometime Prudence is the Better Part of Maritime Valor: Cue the...

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:08:43 -0400

Sometime Prudence is the Better Part of Maritime Valor: Cue the Jaws theme song — duh, duhn, duh, duhn. That’s what I was thinking when I saw some big honking floaters on the Chesapeake today. I’m talking ten foot logs, which I suppose would be more accurately referred to as trees, floating along, the aftermath of Hurricane Irene and non-Hurricane Lee getting washed from rivers into the bay.

This stuff is no joke — I actually barreled over a three foot piece of firewood and the clunk as it hit the keel was the sailor’s equivalent of getting kicked in the nuts. I read in some news coverage of a 40-foot section of dock floating semi-submerged off North Carolina. That kind of debris can change your status from sailor to swimmer in short order.

When I was motored into the dock, a neighbor on a quite nice 38-footer yelled, “How is it out there?” and I told him about the firewood. He followed, “We went out yesterday and turned around.” At first I thought to scoff at this, after all, boats are meant to be sailed and all that bravado, but then I realized that this man has more experience than me as well as a nicer boat, and that his caution may be hard won. There’s no point in wrecking your boat just to say you went out there, when the stuff in the water is tougher than your fiberglass skin. I don’t know how long this stuff expects to hang around, but I figure I can spend tomorrow working on the deck and letting Nature wash the aftermath away.