At the Speed of Foot was published three years ago this month. I made some marketing effort early on but lack of response and my natural disinclination for self-promotion meant that the entire project has been mostly on autopilot since that initial burst of enthusiasm. The decreasing frequency of posts to this blog are testament to growing inertia.
That said, Speed of Foot has met my expectations. Sales have been respectable: 162 Kindle editions and 46 paperbacks. I assume Kindle buyers are mostly strangers. Virtually all paperback sales are to people I know. I've recovered about two-thirds of my costs which is good enough for me. I never expected a best seller.
Reviews have been generally good. I posted some early comments from friends. Three of four Amazon reviews gave me four stars. The fourth gave me one star. Reading that review conjured up all the doubts I had as a writer and I knew for sure that my sketches were elementary. But if I had waited for perfect, Speed of Foot would still be a manuscript. Beyond the images, the sketches represent time taken to think and see the trail and its environment. All that is part of the book, some of which I present better than others.
Writing the book was an adventure in itself. It required as much discipline and frustration as the actual thru-hike. Parts of it had rattled around my brain from the earliest days on the trail. I had always thought that the insights and cumulative experiences would be the focus rather than a south-to-north trail journal but I found that I needed the linear progression to carry the narrative. With more time and effort maybe I could figured out a better approach but I was ready to be done with the project.
Except that publication meant marketing. That's where I began this post and will wrap it up there. The simplest way to summarize my thinking about Speed of Foot is that I wanted to write the story, I did, and I am happy with the results.
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