Technically, my book, How to Improve Your Hobby Building Skills, was released on Kindle June 3rd, but now it is available as a paperback as well! If you wanted to learn more about the book, or how you can help, this post is for you.
When I was writing the series on How to Improve Your Hobby Skills, I kept trying to balance between going too deep, and thus blowing up the size of a blog post, and covering enough details to make it helpful. This spawned the idea that I could take each part (building, painting, showcasing) and expand it into a full-sized book.
It’s a crazy idea for a guy who struggled in English class! But the more I dug into what it would take to self-publish a book and all the tools to get it done, the more excited I got.
What is in This Book?
When I started writing this book about building miniatures, I started with thinking about what are the things hobbyists struggle with. Many of these ideas came straight from you, my readers as you sent me emails or left comments, I have been listening.
I also thought about the most basic topics that many of us now take for granted, but someone just getting into the hobby might not understand. You can see this in the first section of the book where I cover building your first miniature, tips for using the tools safely, what the most basic tools are, and what glues are what.
The second part of the book goes further in depth on how to build miniatures, including how to prepare each bit (wash and mold lines), bit bashing, filling gaps, base options, and how planning out projects.
The last section gets into more advanced techniques to help hobbyists start to explore where this hobby could take you. From basic sculpting, and converting bits, to understanding composition within the pose.
How You Can Help
Want to help support Broken Paintbrush and my effort to write more books? I’ve got three different ways you could help:
- Buy it! That would be swell 🙂 I’ve been able to publish the book on a ton of different platforms, and the link, books2read.com/hobby-building-skills will show the full list. Currently, the paperback is only available through Amazon.
- Review it! If you did buy a copy, I would love a positive review on the site you bought it on. Getting reviews, especially 4 or 5-star reviews, really helps others find the book and decide to pick it up themselves.
- Share it! Thanks to the timing of #New40k, I completely understand that many of you are a bit low on the hobby funds. So while I hope that you can save the book to your wish list, I could also use your help to spread the word. You could click the share widgets on this page, or point people to the book page at: brokenpaintbrush.com/books/improve-hobby-building-skills
I also want to give a huge shout out to Rory from Stepping Between Games for reviewing the drafts and giving a ton of helpful comments. Thor from Creative Twilight and Adam from Sprue Grey also provided some great feedback.
Also, thank you, my readers and fellow hobbyists. This great community has helped support me from a fledgling blogger years ago, to being building the courage to write a full book.
