{"id":2017,"date":"2014-10-16T09:12:07","date_gmt":"2014-10-16T13:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=2017"},"modified":"2014-10-16T09:12:07","modified_gmt":"2014-10-16T13:12:07","slug":"thursday-16-october-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2014\/10\/16\/thursday-16-october-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, 16 October 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

09:12 –<\/span> One of the first things I do when I start a book is scope out the competition. I find the best book and the best-selling book on the topic–often not the same book–and scan through it\/them to make sure I can write a better book. Ideally, of course, I want to crush the market leader, to make the author slink home whimpering with his tail between his legs. (This doesn’t always work out; there have been several books I’ve considered doing, but I found that an existing book would be hard to beat. If I can’t beat it, it’s pointless for me to write a new book.)
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

So, when I was stubbing out The Ultimate Family Prepping Guide<\/em>, I did some looking around. Apparently, both the best general prepping book and the best-selling one is The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster<\/a> by Tess Pennington. I ordered a copy on the 11th, which arrived yesterday. (Oddly, Amazon Prime charged me only $19 on 10\/11, but the price is now showing as $27.) This book really is a best-seller. Its current Amazon rank is #245, which means it’s probably selling several thousand copies per month.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The book arrived yesterday, and I spent an hour or so flipping through it. It’s not a bad book, but she’s obviously trying to write in detail on many topics that she has little or no actual experience of. I can write a better book. Interestingly, her book is pretty much a collection of the articles from her web site<\/a>, so you don’t really need to buy the book if you’re willing to scroll through 50+ separate articles.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

My book may not sell as well as hers because I have neither the time nor the inclination to market the book as heavily as she does hers. Still, word of mouth has worked pretty well for our science kits and I suspect it will for this book as well.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

09:12 – One of the first things I do when I start a book is scope out the competition. I find the best book and the best-selling book on the topic–often not the same book–and scan through it\/them to make sure I can write a better book. Ideally, of course, I want to crush the market leader, to make the author slink home whimpering with his tail between his legs. (This doesn’t always work out;<\/p>\n

 » Read more about: Thursday, 16 October 2014  »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prepping","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}