Pulp Non Fiction: All The Beauty and Truth You Can Stand for $9.99.

I have been wanting to try to write a book for a while now and the ideas for this project came along easy enough:

1) There really are very few books about the Cumberland Plateau.

2) I have a lot of adventure stories about the Cumberland Plateau, and I could mix them in with a lot of other educational facts like history and ecology lessons. Fun stuff!

3) I bet the book will pretty much just write itself.

I was right on the first two points anyway. Two years later, here we are. The really crazy thing is, because I write a detailed story about almost every hike anyway, the content was probably 50% finished before I even began.

I have had so many maps and notes spread out in the dining room that it looked like I was planning an invasion of Crossville.  There has been a cardboard box full of proofs, and drafts, and drafts of proofs, and proofs of drafts, sitting at my kitchen table for the better part of a year. I have named so many Word files and Adobe files that I am going to have to start using exponents. I have seriously worried that the mountains were going to erode into the ocean before I finished. But somehow or other, I got it done.  Here are some of the lessons I have learned along the way:

1) Yeah, it is nothing like writing a blog.  I can’t ever remember working for a month on formatting a blog post or worrying too much with sources. But I will have to give a shout out to my Amazon Overlord for making the process easier.

2) All of those authors that churn out a book or more every year….they don’t have a team of proof readers and editors working behind the scenes, they have an ARMY.  On the final and 708^th review, I had about 78 errors to correct…on a 130 page book.  Is it perfect now?  HECK NO. It is in English. It is legible. I think.

3) It ain’t about the money.  Even I sold 1,000 copies, which is ridiculously unlikely, considering the time I have put in, my profit would work out to be about the hourly minimum wage, in 1795. 

So, in short, if you are looking for a quick-read piece of travel literature that will enrich your life beyond the bounds of your wildest imagination, look no further. It’s available on Amazon (Prime too!!!) at:

https://www.amazon.com/Seem-Have-Been-There-Before/dp/1543196691

Or just search Bill Parnell. I ain’t gonna lie.  It’s pretty cool to 

see your work pop up in an Amazon search.

So if you get a chance, buy a copy, or a few dozen! And don't forget those super positive Amazon reviews! Can you do a six star rating now? I didn’t include a critical review on the back cover, but if I had to write my own it would be something like…..

“Bill Parnell has once again pushed the limits of human artistic achievement. Seem To Have Been There Before possess both the humor of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods as well as the epic plot devices of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, all bound together with Shakespearean prose and really neat maps.”