Nimble Books LLC

Dear authors,

A quick note to bring you up to date on this month’s activities.

I must apologize that this month I made a few frolics and detours, which put my release schedule a bit behind. Here is what I did accomplish:

• I completed production on one excellent book, volume III of Joe Hind’s DEFINITIVE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE TORPEDO BOAT, but I had hoped to publish two others this month, and they are now on tap for April, along with the others previously scheduled for April.
• I moved the website to another hosting provider this month. This was a necessary distraction because our old provider was prone to unpredictable service interruptions.  Things at the new place (PressHarbor.com) seem much better so far.
• The Nimble Books Store was down for a while, but it is now all the way back up.
•  I added a public calendar of Upcoming Nimble Events that lists all signings and appearances by Nimble authors. If you want to add an event, just send me an email. If you are tech savvy, you can post your own events to the shared calendar by entering this iCAL address in your calendar program (Outlook, Google, etc.):

 http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/nimblebooks.com_i0vi4o8qcguqlnqh1884oirc14@group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

• I established a Twitter presence. To follow me, go to http://twitter.com/nimblebooks.  
  • It was discovering the Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King that motivated me to explore Twitter: this plugin integrates Twitter and WordPress, so all my Tweets show up in my blog, and blog posts  show up on Twitter.  I don’t like doing social networking things unless they are additive to my existing activities.   
  • When you see a message marked “Please RT”, and it is about one of your fellow Nimble authors, please do retweet: we all benefit from building the network around Nimble.  
• I am in the process of adding a Help Desk for Nimble Authors that will enable you to file “trouble tickets” when there is something that you have been bugging me to do. The advantage of this over email is that it forces a structure of open & closed tickets that makes it harder for me to lose things in the shuffle.  For the test version, see http://www.nimblebooks.com/wordpress/2009/03/help-desk/.  Note that I’m still straightening out some bugs and tweaking the look and feel, so keep sending me email as well for now.
• The end of the printer’s accounting period is Friday 4/3, so author’s comp statements and payments should come out towards the end of next week.

On tap for April: publishing a lot of books!

Cordially, 

Fred Z.