My POD Book Arrived This Morning

My new Print On Demand (POD) book just arrived in the mail. To be clear, this isn’t what I consider a “real” book. It’s not a novel, or even an organized work of non-fiction. It’s a collection of blog posts that I cut and pasted into an application that allowed me to print my blog as a book.

Why, you might ask? I created this little beauty to offer as a thank you to folks who donated to a new project I’m working on (called the Digging Deep Campaign – Unearthing Fact and Fiction About What We Eat). I don’t expect to make any money on it, other than the donations my partner and I have already received toward the project, but damn if it isn’t fun to see my name on the cover of a book.

It’s shiny, it’s in color, it looks just like a real book and it’s been tickling my vanity all morning. Even though I have emotionally set it aside as “not a real book” it has me very excited for the day that my work will actually be published. When I’m ready to take my novel or my narrative non-fiction book out to the world I intend to use a traditional publisher, so I know the road will be a lot longer, but just seeing this little “for fun” book has inspired me to hang in there. There’s something very satisfying about seeing one’s name in print.