Humbly submitted…

So there’s this book, and we’ve been tinkering with it, trying to get it all just so. Is it perfect?

Of course not. Not by a long, arcing shot. There are typographical errors in the text. There are flaws in the formatting. The only thing that keeps either me or Pretty Publisher from spiking the whole damned project is the sure knowledge that there are no perfect books.

This one is pretty good, though.  It’s vivid, it’s decent and it’s as true as we could make it. It might make you cry. It might make you laugh. Certainly it’s done those things for me.

Certainly, if you read it, it will make you think.

Is it worth 15 dollars, the standard price of a trade paperback? I don’t know. Seems a lot for a personal story that’s soft-covered, softhearted and most likely soft-minded. I think a lot of things are over-valued these days, but if you order a book that’s set up to print on demand, your order is alchemically transmuted from your mouse clicks and credit card digits into a binary code, which is transmitted to a robotic custom-printing machine that outputs a colored glossy cover into which it then binds 300 pages of printed text. That’s a tidy little miracle for 15 bucks.

Is it worth the three-dollar Kindle price? Yeah. I’m pretty sure it is. You can spend more than that on a coffee in my town, and the book runs 300 pages. Some of those pages are worth considerably more than a penny, if I say so myself.

There are bits of it that have shown up in a Washington Post “Book of the Year” and a chapter that was nominated for a Pushcart, but those aren’t the best parts. There are guns and tools and lovely girls and lively dogs in it, but they’re not the best parts, either. Not even for me.

Nothing in Reserve: true stories, not war stories was laid up, typeset, formatted for print and e-publication by the same Pretty Wife who designed the cover, kept me on track to finish, and reminded me to write this note to you, Dear Reader. We made a book together under our new Litsam, Inc. imprint. That’s about as exhilarating and terrifying as having a baby that we designed ourselves.

That’s the best part for us.

Nothing in Reserve has been kindly reviewed by a few folks who have read it. If you should chance to read it, please leave a review on Amazon.com or a note here, because we’d very much like to know what the best part is for you.

Thank you, Gentle Reader.

Respectfully submitted,

Jack

P.S. Oh!  Where can you find Nothing in Reserve, you ask?  It’s available from Amazon.com at this link:

http://amzn.to/fqk95E

The version that you can read on your Kindle (if that’s your chosen literary poison), is here:

http://amzn.to/ebqcoX

For Barnes & Noble readers, the NOOKbook version is available at this link:

http://tinyurl.com/NOOKBook-without-reserve

Pretty Publisher tells me Apple, Sony and Kobo buying options are coming, and that in 4-6 weeks your local bookstore will be able to order shelf copies, should they get requests.

We do hope you enjoy it. Again, thank you for reading.-JL2