My roots were in the USA (Connecticut, Chicago-area, Connecticut, New Jersey, Upstate New York, and finally Indiana), but about the time I retired my wife and I were drawn to Prince Edward Island–an island province in Atlantic Canada. We bought an old house there in 2000 and, over the next few years transitioned from visitors to residents to citizens. I wrote in detail about those early days on the island in Prince Edward Island Seen “From Away”. For many years remodelling the house, improving the woods around on the 50 acres, and improving a newly-acquired sailboat took up much of my time.
In 2008 I became a “publisher“…mostly of small-run books about Prince Edward Island along with the one technical college textbook that drove me to it. Layout and photo manipulation have fascinated me from the days at Purdue University where my associates called me “font-man” because of my love affair with Microsoft WORD and styles. Most of my layouts are done in Adobe Framemaker because it handles large, complex documents better than WORD. The photo editing is done in Adobe Photoshop Elements now.
The fatal flaw to my publishing is the lack of marketing–for that each author is on their own at this point, but local-interest books can be sold in local gift shops.
With two of my own non-local-interest books in the works I had the thought that developing blogs would be a modern marketing tool–traditional bookstore marketing seems unreachable and probably ineffective for my books. For a while I ran two separate blogs–one about sailing and one about Scripture and theology–in hopes of discovering ways to grow interest for books that need a wider market. Subsequently I merged those separate sites into this one because the cost of keeping them hacker-free and spam-free exceeded any benefit I was deriving. I do maintain C and the 8051 as a separate site because the subject matter is so different and that book continues to sell.
If you are interested in blogging, perhaps some of my web-development posts might be of interest. I find the process to be like peeling on onion–a layer at a time–as I get the basic Word Press machinery running and then find more and more features to add.
The internet landscape has changed so much in the last years I no longer think blogs are the best answer unless you can find a way to increase traffic. Very similar post site functions can be hosted on Facebook and they even have a low-cost way of “boosting” a post so it comes to the attention of more Facebook users that fit the parameters that might describe people most likely to be interested. The caveat is that, since the content is not on your local computer, you lose control/ownership and could be put out of business at the whim of the company. In any case, since the actual files reside outside your control unlike the early days where you produced and stored your material locally and then uploaded it to the host, it is wise to keep a backup of anything you post on your own personal computer in case you have to regenerate it at some time in the future. As I have said for decades, “Never type more at one sitting without saving than you are wiling to retype!”