June 14, 2012
Table Tennis Tactics: A Thinker's Guide (and other books)
Here's an update. The text is done, and I'm currently doing the page layouts. The final version will be about 240 pages, with around 70 photos or graphics. It's about 97,000 words, over twice as many words as in my "Table Tennis: Steps to Success" book, but with fewer graphics. It'll be published both as POD (Print On Demand) and as an ebook, and sold online at amazon.com and other locations. Other than the cover, I expect to have it done within days. (I'm playing around with covers, and have three possible ones. Soon I'll decide on the basic idea, and then I'll likely hire a designer to fancify it.)
I'm about to go bigtime into selling my books online. I just bought the domain www.LarryHodgesBooks.com. Within months I hope to be selling the following as both POD and ebooks:
- Table Tennis Tactics: A Thinker's Guide
- Table Tennis Steps to Success
- Table Tennis Tales & Techniques
- Professional Table Tennis Coaches Handbook (updated and expanded)
- Instructor's Guide to Table Tennis (updated)
- Pings and Pongs: The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of Larry Hodges. (I should sell enough stories to have its sequel out in 2013, "More Pings and Pongs." I'm already 2/3 there. I only use stories I've already sold elsewhere, which is what gives the story the stamp of approval as being worthy of publication.)
All of the books will be 9"x6", with color covers but black & white on the inside. Right now I only know how to create ebooks for Amazon's kindle, but I expect soon to learn to publish in EPUB format, which along with the kindle version is the most popular ebook formats. And then I have to learn how to sell them in that format, since I wouldn't be able to use Amazon's platform for that. (Life was so much easier when all I did was teach people how to hit forehands.)
As a trial run, I spent the last few days preparing "Pings and Pongs" for POD and as an ebook, and this morning it went online as an ebook for $6.99. (I already downloaded my copy!) It should be ready for POD within days. The POD version would be ready now but all POD books at amazon.com have to be reviewed by staff before publication. While it's a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories, there is one story that features table tennis, "Ping-Pong Ambition," where a table tennis player is imprisoned inside a ping-pong ball by a genie for 10,000 years, where he practices table tennis and studies to be a genie himself - only to discover a surprising truth. Table tennis also comes up here and there in other stories, such as "Defeating Death, which is online at Weird Tales Magazine. Here's an excerpt:
Zargo walked to the basement door. It had been boarded up ever since an incident involving a rather unfortunate former assistant and a rather unfortunate game of ping-pong that had gotten out of hand. ("Magic and ping-pong," Zargo had solemnly said, "don't mix.")
I've also done most of the POD page layouts for "Professional Table Tennis Coaches Handbook" (about 50 pages) and am debating whether to get that ready for POD and ebook publication (about one day's work) or whether to put that off until "Table Tennis Tactics" is ready.
And then I start the layouts for "Steps to Success," "Tales & Techniques," and "Instructor's Guide" for both POD and ebooks. These days, when I'm not coaching or writing, I'm pretty much Larry the Layout Laborer.
I'm sort of in a rush to get as much of this stuff done as possible over the next four days. On Monday we start eleven straight weeks of training camps at the Maryland Table Tennis Center (Mon-Fri each week, 10AM-6PM), and I won't have much time or energy to spend on this during that time. We're also getting players ready for the U.S. Open in Grand Rapids, which I'll attend, primarily as a coach, as I'm only entered in one event, Hardbat Doubles with Ty Hoff (I've won the event twelve times, eight times with Ty), plus I'm in a few meetings. I leave for that on June 29, returning July 4.
Wanna Be a Champion or Just a Wannabe?
It's been a while since I posted a link to the "How to Be a Champion" series of eleven articles by top coaches. This is required reading for all table tennis players.
Cape Fear Open
The first Cape Fear Open in Fayettesville, NC, made it into the Fay Observer!
Paralympics
With both the Olympics and Paralympics coming up this summer, here's a promotional video for Paralympics (7:44).
Google Table Tennis logo
Way back in 2004, in honor of the Olympics, Google created this great table tennis google logo.
Non-Table Tennis - another cover story, ho hum
On Monday I wrote about my science fiction story "The Oysters of Pinctada" that had just gone up in the new issue of Flagship Magazine, with my name on the cover. This morning the cover for the upcoming July issue of Penumbra (a high-paying "Pro" magazine) went online, and again my name is on the cover, this time for my story "The Dragon of the Apocalypse." (It's SF even though there's an apparent dragon in the story.) Here's my Science Fiction & Fantasy page.
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