Nimble Books LLC » Forthcoming from Nimble Books

Production Queue

Fred Zimmerman — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:40:39 +0000

What’s going on with Nimble Books that are in production.

U.S. PATROL TORPEDO BOATS IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR, 1939-1945, by T. Garth Connelly(pub. 4/6/2010)
SKEETER USES MANNERS, by C. Michelle Smith, illustrated by Amy Foreman (pub. 5/4/2010)
A YOUNG CONSERVATIVE’S FIELD GUIDE (with author) (pub 4/1/2010)
THE ULTIMATE UNAUTHORIZED GUIDE TO THE HARRY POTTER FANDOM (1st ed. out of print)
FALLEN WALLS AND FALLEN TOWERS (previously HATCHING THE NATION-STATE) (final edit)
BLOOD ON OUR HANDS (final proofing)
HANDBOOK OF FIFTH GENERATION WARFARE (5GW) (needs substantive edit)
COLD WAR SAGA (needs substantive edit)
PERSUADER-IN-CHIEF v2.0 (needs substantive edit)
PROFESSOR BARRISTER’S DINO MYSTERIES #2 — THE ARMORED ALLOSAUR (pub 6/22/2010)
THE CLAUSEWITZ ROUNDTABLE
[Interviews with James M. Cain]
PT BOATS BEHIND THE SCENES
PRINCIPLES OF WAR: ARCHDUKE CHARLES
ECLIPSES OF THE SUN
POCKET BATTLESHIP ADMIRAL SCHEER (c/e)
HISTORY OF THE TORPEDO BOAT #8
Yuri the Lion: School Stories
HISTORY OF THE TORPEDO BOAT #9
Two-Power and Double Standards: The Liberal Government and the building of the dreadnought fleet, 1906-1909
HISTORY OF THE TORPEDO BOAT #10
SECRETS OF THE MODERN WORLD — Fukuzawa
The Regia Maria’s MAS Boats in World War II
Illustrated Guide to Harry Potter Fandom, Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Welcome to the Nimble Books Author Events calendar

Fred Zimmerman — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:45:33 +0000

I have just set up an Events calendar for Nimble Books authors.

“Where Nimble Books authors can post events of interest. All types of events are welcome — book signings, interviews, blog “roundtables,” and so on. The event doesn’t necessarily have to be about you or involve you, it’s ok if it’s something you think is important and that Nimble Books readers should know about.”

If you don’t want to be bothered with technical details, just send me your event dates and I will take it from there.

The cool result of all this is that the events you add will be shown on this page

http://www.nimblebooks.com/wordpress/upcoming-nimble-events/

and on the “Upcoming Nimble Events” widget on the right hand side of every page on the website.

Forthcoming

Fred Zimmerman — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:59:11 +0000

When	What

April 6, 2010	Publication of Professor Barrister's Dinosaur Adventures: The Case of the Truncated Troodon by Stephen Penner Ann Arbor, Michigan
June 1, 2010	Clausewitz's birthday Virtual publicity event for The Clausewitz Roundtable book. http://tinyurl.com/clausewitz Burg Bei, Magdeburg, Prussia
June 1, 2010	Publication of THE CLAUSEWITZ ROUNDTABLE Burg Bei, Magdeburg, Prussia
January 23, 2011	Birthday of Strategist John Boyd http://tinyurl.com/johnboyd Erie, Pennsylvania

#naval #history THE SHIP KILLERS volume 3 cover

Fred Zimmerman — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:06:05 +0000

The front and back covers of THE DEFINITIVE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE TORPEDO BOAT: VOLUME III, 1900 – 1939 by Joe Hinds (Nimble Books, March 31, 2009).

Announcing BORN AMERICAN: A CHINESE WOMAN’S DREAM OF LIBERTY by Sasha Gong

wfz-admin — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 01:55:05 +0000

Forthcoming in Fall 2009

Sasha Gong’s Chinese-language blog: http://gongxiaoxia.blog.tianya.cn/
Sasha Gong’s campaign website: http://www.sashagong.net/

Sasha Gong, author of BORN AMERICAN

In BORN AMERICAN: A CHINESE WOMAN’S DREAM OF LIBERTY, we learn that soon after arriving in the United States in 1987, Sasha Gong felt that something inside of her had suddenly clicked. Everything – her heart, her soul, her mind and her character – felt at home. She discovered that in all of the important ways, she had been born an American; it had just taken her 31 years to get there. She began to look back at her dramatic journey. Born in China in 1956, Sasha was given a Russian boy’s name by her father, who was expecting a son.

Her determination guided her through very dark days in China. Massive political persecution was rampant, universities were closed and young people were “sent down” to the countryside to do manual labor. Sasha worked in the fields, and was then brought back to the city and assigned to a small candy factory when she reached 16. Throughout, she never stopped her pursuit of freedom through learning and thinking.

Defiance was thus hard-wired in her character, and that character drove her destiny. Sasha sought out a group of like-minded friends, who formed an underground dissident group. Through their writings, they urged people to consider democracy and rule of law as an alternative to communist dictatorship. For that, they were all thrown in jail, including Sasha.

She spent her 21^st birthday in prison. For almost a year, she was subjected to intense interrogation and public humiliation. The painful experience only hardened her, and prepared her for the challenges of her future life journey.

Sasha was given back her life just before her 23^rd birthday. She sat for the national university entrance exam, and despite never having finished elementary school, achieved the highest score among 200,000 competitors in her province. She was admitted to Peking University, China’s top postsecondary school. Eight years and two degrees later, she was on her way to America with a Harvard fellowship.

The American dream often has an accent. Sasha came to America to escape political persecution, to achieve personal freedom and to pursue happiness. And, for the first time in her life, she felt very much at home.

“China’s rise” is on everyone’s lips these days, but the human factors behind this remarkable phenomenon remains something of a mystery. Who are the Chinese who are leading their country in its quantum leap from communism to capitalism? What kind of people are the movers and shakers behind China’s so-called economic miracle? This book depicts China’s baby-boomer generation through the author’s personal anecdotes of the 1960s and 1970s: how they grew up, what they believed, what they feared and what they desired. While a cursory examination would conclude that nothing about the China of 1967 suggested the China of 2007, the stories show that the seeds of the great transformation were actually planted during those years. The author explores how the political system penetrated and perverted family relationships and did much damage to individuals and social groups.

A Harvard-educated scholar who was denied even a complete elementary school education in China for political reasons, the author has very moving stories to tell. She speaks frankly about political persecution based on family relationships, usually taboo subjects in China. She focuses on the psychological damage done by a totalitarian system, and describes how such a system re-shaped family and morality in China.

What makes this book different from other Cultural Revolution memoirs is that the author wrote the stories from the perspective of becoming an American. Embracing American culture, and speaking as one of a handful of scholars who can travel back and forth intellectually between Eastern and Western culture, the author provides American readers with comprehensible narratives about a mysterious, yet not-so-remote, society.

Sasha Gong is a scholar, writer, journalist and a lifelong political activist. She was born in the People’s Republic of China in 1956. In the 1970s, she worked as a mechanic in a factory for seven years. In 1979, she was admitted to Peking University and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in history. In 1988, she began graduate studies at Harvard University and earned a Ph.D. in sociology in 1995. Since then, she has taught sociology at UCLA and George Washington University, worked as director of the Cantonese Service at Radio Free Asia, and served as senior program officer at the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, AFL-CIO. She has published a few books and numerous articles in the Chinese-language press. She is one of the most-read magazine column writers in China. Her blog, which discusses American politics, culture and economics, attracted 640,000 visits in its first eight months.

You are wondering how I decide which books are sufficiently profitable …

wfz-admin — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 02:01:48 +0000

There are (or there should be) two kinds of books to which I say “yes”:

Those that I believe will be sufficiently profitable in the cool light of logic and with my business goals held firmly in mind.
Those for which I consciously overrule my business judgment because the book is important or interesting to me.

I have been doing some number-crunching to help me understand which are which. This does not necessarily mean I will refuse to publish books that aren’t in the first category, it simply means that I want to know what I am choosing to do.

After I calculate the probable cost of production and marketing, I arrive at a revenue target that I want to achieve in the first year elapsed after publication (e.g. the twelve months from pub date of June 1 2009 to May 31 2010). Everything else is “backlist gravy” as far as I am concerned. Since I use a pricing algorithm that makes the net revenue per book sold the same for all titles, it is easy to calculate the number of books I must sell in the first year in order to achieve my revenue target. In theory, I should only publish books that look as if they will meet this goal.

In 2008 and so far in 2009, the following books performed well enough (on an annualized basis adjusted for dates of publication throughout the year) to achieve my revenue targets:

Should Barack Obama Be President?
The John Boyd Roundtable
BB-67 Montana, U.S. Navy Battleship
Battleship Yamato: Why She Matters Today
The Shack Critiqued
Globalistan: An Antidote To The World Is Flat
Iowa Class Battleship Conversions
The Unauthorized Harry Potter Quiz Book
The World Is Flat: Not! Cool New World Maps For Kids
Age of Obama: A Reporter’s Journey with Clinton, McCain and Obama in The Making of the President, 2008
Threats in the Age of Obama
The Definitive Illustrated History of the Torpedo Boat – Volume I, Overview (The Ship Killers)

“On the bubble”–i.e., earning at a rate pretty darned close to my 12-month target, and likely to achieve the target in 13-24 months:

In The Shadow of the Battleship
CVN-78 GERALD R. FORD, U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier
Persuader-in-Chief: Global Opinion and Public Diplomacy in the Age of Obama
THE WORLD IS FLAT: NOT! Cool New World Maps for Kids
Misquotes in MISQUOTING JESUS: Why You Can Still Believe
CVN-77 GEORGE H. W. BUSH, U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier (Colorful Ships #3)
A Fandom Of Magical Proportions: An Unauthorized History Of The Harry Potter Phenomenon
CVN-68 Nimitz, U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier
Cool Maps For Curious Kids #2: Afghanistan

In the remaining category of “darn it, not profitable enough!” falls is everything else: conscious experiments, books published for principled or personal reasons, and simple flops. Of course, I wish I knew why things fall into one category or another! I have some ideas, but (like all publishers in all media) I do a lot of guessing, too.

Kriegsmarine Naval Histories: German Pocket Battleships

wfz-admin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:05:59 +0000

German Pocket Battleships: Shipcraft 1 by Rogar Chesneau

. In the volume, the author has chosen the German ‘pocket battleships’ of WW2, the best known of which was the Admiral Graf Spee, scuttles after the battle of the River Plate in 1939. This innovative and infamous class of surface raiders has long been a popular subject for ship modellers, many manufactures producing kits of the Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer and the rather different Deustschland. This book shows model shipwrights how to turn their kits into something really special, while its unparalleled level of visual information is a superb source for the general warship enthusiast.

Antonio Bonomi is working on a volume of Kriegsmarine Naval Histories for Nimble Books that will complement this perfectly.

Yorktown: Why She Matters Today

wfz-admin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:31:20 +0000

Yorktown Class- Aircraft Carriers: Shipcraft 3 by Rogar Chesneau

The subject of this volume is the Yorktown class, the near-legendary American aircraft carriers that kept the Japanese at bay in the dark days between Pearl Harbor and the decisive battle of Midway, where Yorktown hereself was lost. Hornet launched the famous Doolittle Raid on Japan before being sunk at Santa Cruz in October 1942, but Enterprise surived the fierce fighting of the early war years to become the US Navy’s most decorated ship. With its unparalleled level of visual information-paint schemes, models, line drawings and photographs-it is simply the best references for any modelmaker setting out to build one of these famous carriers.

I am thinking about doing a “Why She Matters Today” book on a WW2 aircraft carrier, either Yorktown or Enterprise.

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W. Frederick Zimmerman — Tue, 27 May 2008 06:46:04 +0000

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New and Forthcoming from Nimble Books

W. Frederick Zimmerman — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:44:39 +0000

April 2008: Iowa Class Battleships and Alaska Class Large Cruisers Conversion Projects 1942-1964: An Illustrated Technical Reference by Wayne Scarpaci – beautiful paintings of fantastical battleship makeovers that never occurred … but should have!
May 2008:
Battleship YAMATO: Why She Matters Today
June 2008:
The John Boyd Roundtable from Zenpundit et al.
July 2008:
Through Stranger Eyes by Hugo and Nebula Award winner David Brin