We sent out this latest GIMME SHELTER email newsletter last week. I started doing these maybe 10 years ago, originally for sales reps. The main orientation is on the state of Shelter’s publishing projects. As I’ve gotten more into blogging, I send these out less frequently, but they still do reach people who don’t read the blog.

https://www.shelterpub.com/_gimme/_2012-08-07/gimme_shelter-2012-08-07.html

BTW, I use MacSpeech Dictate whenever I can. It works amazingly well at transcribing your speech into words. For Windows users, it’s Dragon Naturally Speaking.

This is the single most useful site/blog on the web for me. I can’t say how many useful things this blog has turned me on to. It’s like the electronic Whole Earth Catalog, but what’s better is that it uses no paper, and it’s daily.

Kevin Kelly, ex-Whole Earth Review editor, founding editor at Wired mag, author, photographer, explorer, runs this operation, with daily reviews of useful stuff.

“Cool tools really work. A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We only post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted. Tell us what you love.”

Easiest way to get there is to go to kk.org, then click on “Cool Tools” at the left.

Going to Hong Kong in November to print this book was the last stage of a 2-year project. I felt like I’d roped a steer, and was hanging on until it was down — until the book rolled off the presses. Now it’s done, and has arrived (all the way by water, up the Mississippi to Gulfport, and thence only a few hundred miles by truck to the Tennessee warehouse). Whew! Two things:

Review Copy Dept.: If you are interested in a review copy, write us, giving type of media it might be reviewed in (newspaper, magazine, blog, website, etc.), and indicate readership. For electronic media, indicate daily viewers and page loads. Plus yr. address.

Note 1: We also have a spiffy electronic copy (the entire book) available for reviewers.

Note 2: Please give us email addresses of anyone you know who might write a review.

Shameless Commerce Dept.: You can get the book from us for a 25% discount through January 31st: https://www.shelterpub.com/_tiny_homes/tiny_homes_book.html

Also, you can get any 3 or more of our building books for a 40% discount: https://www.shelterpub.com/_ad/TH-sale.html

Proud Papa Department: this book has a glow, an aura, if that’s possible. The printers (Paramount Printing, Hong Kong) did such a beautiful job. It’s slowly sinking in that it’s not only done, not only printed, but in bookstores. I gotta say I’m proud, being able to show the creativity and joy unique designs of the 150 or so builders in this book.

Above: Crystal River Treehouse by Stephen A. Novy, AIA, Green Line Architects, pp. 150-151, TINY HOMES: Simple Shelter

I left Hong Kong at 1:00 AM Monday and somehow got into San Francisco at 9PM Sunday night. My brain was slightly scrambled. Thanks to the individual screens in the 747 and 100 movies and 800 TV shows, the time went fairly fast. I never look at the time on a long flight. I’ve always loved movies. As a kid, my friends and I would take the streetcar down to (Market Street (San Francisco), get off at Van Ness, where the magnificent Fox Theater was, and walk 6 or 7 blocks down toward the Ferry Building, deciding which of the 20 or so theaters to go to. On the 2 flights I saw Goodfellas (had never seen, fabulous role by Joe Pesci), Killing Bono, a Clint Eastwood where he’s a Texas Ranger, a runaway train movie with Denzel Washington, a lovely French movie about a bachelor dad and his daughter, and watched 2 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I’d never seen, piercingly funny, one episode with Rosie O’Donnell, another with Ricky Gervais; funny as all get-out.

The Green Festival is in San Francisco this weekend. A bright spot when I got back was these 15″ x 22″ blowups of pages from the tiny homes book for the festival, where we’ll have a booth; Rick made these on our Epson Stylus Pro 4800. We’re also putting up a 27″ x 34″ blowup of the cover.

Big news: Two advance copies of the book and 100 copies of the tiny tiny book are set to arrive by 4:30 today via FedEx. Our printers (Paramount in Hong Kong) are really on the ball. Am I excited!

Things are poppin around here now. We’re approaching the finish line with the tiny homes book. pieces falling into place. It’s been a long haul, and still 6 months to go (Feb 2012) until books are in stores. This sure ain’t no instant book. Every day here is exciting right now. From our little recycled wood studio in the middle of a vegetable garden we’re in touch with the world via our many Macs and the web. Yesterday for example:

I did about a dozen emails preparatory to going to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. It’s a huge event, been going on since the 1500s, the super bowl of the publishing world. I stay in a small hotel in the elegant spa town of Bad Homburg, about 20 miles north of Frankfurt,and usually use my 3-wheel K4 scooter to go the mile or so to the train station from the hotel; thinking of taking my new Bhangra long skateboard this year. So far I have appointments with publishers or agents from Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Scandinavia, Russia, mainland China, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, and South Africa.

We’ve been having repeated problems with our DSL connection, and may have, knock on the pine desk here, solved it yesterday when we talked AT&T into replacing the fiber optic card down the road. We’re really crippled when off-line. Thanks to Steve, our tech guy…

I feel like a juggler each day. Sometimes it feels as if things are skidding out of control. Permissions requests (mostly to reproduce drawings from Stretching), reprinting books when inventories get low, marketing, watching sales, trying to get the $$ to update our stretching software for Lion, and the big one: trying to figure out how to use the web to maximize publicity and sales.

Someone once said, at a publishing conference, that no one was in this business for the money. It’s true, and my publishing brothers and sisters know this: we’re doing this because we love books. We’re readers! And communicators. For some 40 years, Shelter has been tiptoeing through the publishing game, trying to get the money from bookstores in time enough to pay printers. We’ve always seemed to squeak by. In the old days, Random House would advance us money, Lately we’ve been making it on our own, but we’re approaching a very lean period, with sales down and the tiny homes book taking forever. We’re betting the farm on this new book.

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