It has taken me 4 hours to conceive, write and publish a book.  Now I’m not claiming that this is a literary masterpiece, it’s not.  I’m not claiming that it is comparable to a novel, it isn’t.

What it is though is a how to book on a very niche subject.  The point of this is to show that there are a huge range of book types which all come under the heading of “a book” and my article about writing a book not being hard or taking a long time to write is true.

I was doing some repairs to my own cafe blinds and developed the method which is shared in the book.  I decided that there would be others who could benefit from this method so I took some photographs of the steps involved and wrote it all out.

I used OpenOffice for this as it creates PDFs quickly and easily as I explained in my post How to create a PDF in Open Office.  I edited the photos in the Gimp and saved them as png files because they are smaller than bmp, jpg or gif files.  Embedding the images in the correct place, adjusting the layout so that it looked a bit better and made sense, to me at least, and created the front page took a couple of hours.

I created the pdf and uploaded it into scribd so there it was, published on the internet and available for all to see.  I could have made it a “for sale’ edition but decided that I would rather, at this stage, have the book bring targeted traffic to Bearly Books so I just put a link in it.

Next I went back the the Gimp and created a 3d book cover as explained in the Mr Bearly’s Guide to creating 3d book covers and uploaded the book and image to Bearly Books.  It was then that I spotted an error in the way the book cover was generated and had to make some adjustments.

That done I then re-uploaded the book cover and published the book to the catalogue.  All up it guess it took about 4 hours no more to write, edit the photographs, create the cover image and upload to the internet.

I just searched for repair cafe blind straps in Google and my book is now #1 for that phrase out of 2.6 million pages that contain those words.  That isn’t such a big deal really because I doubt that there are many people who are searching for that phrase.  That isn’t the point of the exercise or this post.

The point is that you can write a book on any subject you like and have it published and listed by the search engines in a matter of hours.  Why are you delaying your writing?  Don’t make me come round there.

By the way, you can find the new book here – Repair broken Cafe Blind strap and here on scribd