Handplanes Book Available in Europe

My recently-released book on handplanes in woodworking--Choosing and Using Handplanes: All You Need to Know to Get Started Planing by Hand--is now available in Europe from Amazon.  It will be priced there in Euros or British pounds.

I'm proud to report this expanded availability and hope the book will be well-received by European readers.

Highland Woodworking Now Carrying My Book

I'm pleased to report that my recently-released book, Choosing and Using Handplanes: All You Need to Know to Get Started Planing by Hand, is now being sold by Highland Woodworking.  They are a fine family-owned and operated company that sells a wide array of tools and other resources for woodworkers at their Atlanta store and via the web.

If you are interested in purchasing the book from Highland Woodworking, here's the link.

It's gratifying to have my book being carried by such a major internet vendor as Highland Woodworking.  

Norm

My Book on Handplanes in the Woodshop Released!

My newest book, Choosing and Using Handplanes, has just been released.  Intended for the beginning and newer handplane user, its 90 pages include nearly 100 color illustrations.  In this book, woodworkers will learn:

• The types of handplanes, names and functions
• The first planes you should get
• How to set up and adjust your planes
• How to sharpen your plane blades
• The kinds of sharpening stones
• The different bevels you’ll want on your blades
• How to hold your work for planing
• The body positions that work best
• How to determine the direction to plane boards
• How to plane cupped, bowed, and twisted boards
• How to plane end grain
• How to buy and restore old planes
• How to store and care for your planes
• Sources of new and used handplanes
• How to solve handplane problems

Choosing and Using Handplanes is now available from Amazon and CreateSpace.

For woodworkers who are hankering to learn how to use handplanes, I think they'll find this a useful guide.

I used CreateSpace to publish it, which automatically also posts it to Amazon.com.  It's a very easy way to publish.  It only requires a properly formatted pdf file.  I chose a glossy cover (which I photographed and designed myself) and color interior on white stock.  The photos and drawings (nearly all of which I made myself) reproduced quite nicely; the color was faithful to the originals.  I'm very happy with the result.  Now my attention is focused on marketing it to the thousands of woodworkers around the world!

Norm

Publishing on Amazon

I've been chugging away hard on my newest book, Choosing and Using Handplanes.  This is a book for woodworkers who are relatively new to the use of handplanes that describes them and how to set them up for effective use.  My plan is to publish the book as an 8-1/2 X 11 inch paperback and also in a Kindle edition. 

I wrote the book section-by-section in Word, then pasted it into Microsoft Publisher for laying out the 99 photos and figures in a pleasing format.  I am now only lacking the foreword from having a complete text.  Once I have that in hand and know my final pagination, I'll finish the Table of Contents, convert the book to pdf format and upload it to Amazon.  The cover has already been designed, so that will get uploaded at the same time.  So the hard work has been completed on the paperback version.

Not so the Kindle version.  Kindle books are best submitted in Word format, which means I had to convert the Publisher file back to Word.  Unfortunately, that process stripped all the photos and figures out of the book and they will have to be re-inserted.  Also, for some reason the sections of the book were saved in Word in the sequence in which they were originally written, not their final sequence in Publisher.  That meant I had to do a lot of cutting and pasting to get things back into the correct order.  Then there are the headings to establish so Word will create a Table of Contents that Kindle can use.  And hyperlinks to add; I didn't need those in the paperback version, but I want the Kindle edition to be as user-friendly as possible and that means adding links to resources and to various points in the book to which readers might want to jump. 

It'll take a lot of work to get the Kindle version finalized and submitted for publication review by the folks at Amazon.  Kind of makes me wish I had taken the time to study Adobe's InDesign program, which I believe would have generated a mobi file for Kindle without all the extra steps.  Next time, I promise.

My Handplanes Book

For the past several months, most of my writing energy has gone into the writing (and photographing) of a 90+ page book on handplanes in woodworking.  Titled Choosing and Using Handplanes, it contains well over 90 color photographs and figures that clarify the types of planes available, how to set them up and sharpen them, hold lumber during planing operations and techniques for successful handplaning.  A key feature is a section on diagnosing and fixing common problems encountered in handplaning.

The photo shows the cover I'll be using on this book, which is expected to be released on Amazon in paperback during November and in a Kindle edition soon after that.

I've discussed the process I used to build this cover on my photographic blog, PhotoPlusMore, if you are interested in knowing more about how I did it.

The book will be for sale on Amazon and on my web site.