After writing on this blog for a few years now, I’ve realized that I kind of like writing. And some of you kind of like reading it. So writing a book about the hobby would make sense then yeah? So that is what I did, I wrote a book. Well, two books so far.

A Free eBook

If you enjoyed the How to Improve Your Hobby Skills series of posts, I hope you will like these books. Especially since the first is the three posts (Building, Painting, Showcasing) and formatted into PDF, Kindle, and eBpub books.

I struggle to read books as PDFs, especially on my phone. So I felt stupid for providing only a PDF for that series of posts. Now, you can get the book (still for free) on nearly every eBook platform. Kindle, iBooks, Nook (still around), Kobo, and a few others.

Even more stores through this link.

Improve Your Building Skills

So, getting the free book published on all these different stores was an adventure (one I’m still figuring out). But it got me thinking about expanding out the series into an actual you-might-pay-to-read, kind of books.

No visions of retiring soon here, but earning a trip to Adepticon next year? That would be cool.

So I took the first third of the free book (~5,o00 words) and expanded it out to 25,527 words of how to build miniatures. Not the sexiest subject to write about, but I had such a good response to each section of the series, I want to turn each into a full sized book.

Right now, How to Improve Your Hobby Building Skills is on pre-order for a June 3rd release. And since I’m down to the final tweaks proofreading, I feel pretty comfortable that I will hit that arbitrary date 🙂

More stores at https://www.books2read.com/hobby-building-skills

 What’s Next?

If you are a regular reader here, have no fear that I will turn into a book sales pitch machine. In fact, not much will change on the blog at all as this is part of my hobby as much as picking up a brush. Don’t want to buy a book? Cool, I’ll still put together tutorials, showcases, and Good Reads as always.

But if you do like books, and hopefully my books, I have more in store. The first up is a print version of the Building book. This is an experiment in print-on-demand and so far is a lesson in pain. But I love physical books, especially resource style books, so I want to make it happen.

Next up will be the Painting and Photography books. Both are going to take some time, and in the case of the painting book, I need to decide on what topics to cover in this book. My dream would be to have a whole series, covering topics from absolute beginners, to award winning tips.

But I hope to not do it on my own. When I looked for similar hobby books on Amazon, they are almost non-existent. Not even regarding Games Workshop focussed books, but miniatures in general. In the future, I want to enable others to write their own books and be the publisher.

Crazy? Sure, but so is our hobby 🙂 If that sounds like a cool idea to you, stay tuned to future thoughts on that topic. (still, have lots to learn!).

Want to Help?

I would love your help with the project by getting the word out. Send your gaming friends a link to the free book. Download it on your favorite device to get the ‘sales’ numbers up which gets the stores to share it more.

And most helpful of all: leave an honest review. Though, if you think something is terrible about it, email me instead so I can fix it 🙂

You guys are awesome, and I appreciate being a part of this community and adding something to it.