I’ll admit to being something of a tease. Not intentionally, of course, but I’ve been working on and promising our e-book about our earthship project for most of a year now. I’m pretty sure in January 2014 I estimated a May 2014 launch…then a late summer launch.

It’s SO close. So close in fact that we are aiming for a January 15, 2015 launch. If you haven’t already, please join our subscriber/email list at the right top of this page.  We will be sending one email out on the day of the launch to our subscriber list with a discount code. Even if you’re not sure you want to buy the book right away, sign up anyway.  The code will last for a few weeks, but I won’t be sending out a second email.

The e-book is a PDF document. This keeps the cost low for us (no overhead), saves on paper and avoids the carbon footprint inherent in shipping. I emphasize this because inevitably somebody buys our books and then two weeks later emails us asking where the heck it is.  It is not a hard copy.  PDF e-book only.

In defense of our slowness I will repeat what I’m sure people are becoming quite familiar with, “things move slower than we’d like”.

Why does this happen? Well, our available time seems to get the best of our intentions. We homeschool three teens, have consulting work several days a week, have a myriad of chores that require our daily and weekly attention. We like a bit of downtime as well.  In addition, I’ve been dealing with progressive osteoarthritis in my right hip and the stress and uncertainty of the last year has affected both Chris and me. Thankfully, I am now on the wait list for hip replacement surgery so there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Because the e-book is written by both Chris and me, I had to write “around” Chris’ technical parts. While I am capable of capturing much of the technical issues we encountered, I wanted Chris’ much keener focus and knowledge for these parts of the book. As many know, Chris is an engineer.  Many may not know this, as he finds it slightly pretentious to flaunt it.  You will almost never see him sign anything, formal or informal, with his P.Eng. designation. When he was stamping house plans he did, of course.  I like to think of him as one of those true engineers, with a real love of tinkering and thinking and finding solutions.  What it DOES mean is that his depth of understanding of the technical issues is far superior to mine. I wanted all our readers to benefit from that so I had to be patient.

Chris has been very busy this year with an informal maker group that our daughter Helen (14) is involved with. He’s also recently been granted a subject restricted BC teaching certificate. This means he can teach math, science, computer science, physics and robotics in the BC Independent Distributed Learning school system. This is just a fancy way of saying he is recognized by the BC Ministry of Education as having the credentials to teach in the distance education system.  He is very excited to be working on a Grade 10 (for credit) course in robotics prototyping.  He has done some informal math tutoring this past year as well.

He is also my go-to tech guy. I can write, format in Word and otherwise navigate very well in many computer programs without asking for help.  However, integrating a landing page into our web store, setting up new products on the store, implementing a product discount code in anticipation of the launch of the book…well, it is far faster to ask him to help me with that.

So what’s left to do on the ebook? I have worked on a landing page for the ebook using Instapage.  Rather than itemize what’s in the e-book, you will have to wait for the landing page to go live. I’ve worked pretty hard to encapsulate the contents. I’m rather pleased about the landing page and I have to say that technically it was fairly easy to create…user friendly.  I now have one more edit of the book (which I do backwards to catch typos…yup, when I edited professionally I did this as well!).  I then have to create a PDF file.  What’s different this time from when we launched our rocket mass heater book, is I’m including about 6 or 7 videos which will be embedded in the PDF document. Turns out I need Adobe Acrobat as embedding videos into PDF through the Word function is not possible.  I’ve downloaded it but it seems to have disappeared. As I type this Chris is working on fine-tuning the 3D printer so I’m loathe to ask him for help…but I will.  Then it’s all about landing page and store integration.  We are almost there!

Big thanks to my cousin Gerald, who is a graphic artist.  I had a photo picked out for the cover and laid out text over top in GIMP but was having issues making it look nice. He took the photo, imported it into Photoshop and about 3 seconds later (o.k. 40 minutes) he sent me a version that looks oh, so, professional!  In the midst of his work he messaged me, “don’t have Binner, it’s a bit 80s, can I substitute?” (Binner was the font I’d chosen.). I replied, “sure, sub all you want” (I was just so happy to have a pro working on it).  A few minutes later I messaged him, “a bit 80s?…you say that like it’s a bad thing.”  He never replied. 😉

Also a huge thanks to Nicole Bennett and Kris Plantz of Manitoba Earthship Project and Jim and Lynn Knell of tirehouse.ca who were my pre-launch reviewers.  They also shared their financial information with me so I was able to include a comparison of three very different earthships. I know anybody who buys the book will find this invaluable.

Please join our email list to get the discount code and Happy New Year!