Transplanting a Seattleite

http://www.amazon.com/Exercises-in-Happiness-ebook/dp/B0041VYKQY

That's a weird thing to see.

I've violated absolutely every rule in terms of generating sales: there's no description, no cover, it has a relatively high price ($9.99). Dropping the price makes it unavailable for 24 hours. And it looks like the delivery cost of .02 from each sale is deducted from my royalty. If nothing else, this has been a great little exercise in answering a bunch of dumb questions I had about the process.

Subtitled: True Stories from Letter Carriers Across America
Further subtitled: A book to celebrate letter carriers --- and our customers

This is an extremely rare bird these days: a new paper book (in this case paperback) that is not for sale on Amazon. You can buy it direct from the authors here:

http://carriedawaytruestories.blogspot.com/

It is thin. In addition to a variety of short descriptions of the experiences of letter carriers (by themselves, their surviving family members and/or their customers, or by journalists or writers for union publications), there are a few cartoons, some poetry, and some pictures of particularly novel mailboxes.

It is a quick read, and as with all primary source/oral history being written down, of highly variable quality in terms of literary style. But I don't think anyone reads a book like this for literary style. I think people read a book like this to get a sense of what life is like for someone they see a lot but don't know well, and haven't ever really thought about in any detail -- and this book serves that purpose admirably.

Absolutely worth the time. The authors were profiled on NPR locally, which is how I heard about it.