Everything else is just made up
The Internet is a wonderful thing. If you know how to use the medium to market a product, you can reach a wide audience at very little cost. That’s exactly what I’ve been able to accomplish with my book 35 Miles From Shore. So when my distributor informed me a few weeks ago that the [...]
Amazon recently tested a marketing program called 100 books for under $3.99. This is for Kindle books only. The test program went so well that they decided to make it a regular feature. Hey, everyone likes a good deal. So when my distributor asked me a few weeks ago if I wanted to participate I [...]
It’s now been a little over three years since the release of my book 35 Miles From Shore. The picture on the left was taken at my very first book signing, which happened to be at a Borders store in Chicago. By now I had fully expected that the book would have made its way [...]
A review of Overboard by Micheal Touglas Rating ***** This is the story of two sailboats, a storm, and two men tossed overboard. The incident took place in May of 2005. The 45 foot sail boat Almeisan was sailing from Connecticut to Bermuda when it, like the other sail boat, got caught in a massive [...]
The Unbroken campaign was shut down as planned on January 22 after a two month run. It was a tough decision. I contemplated letting it run a while longer. I won’t have final sales numbers for another few weeks, and even then I won’t have sales figures for the exact period in which the campaign [...]
As I approach the final three days of the Unbroken Adwords campaign, I made a number of changes that will hopefully drive more sales and give me one last opportunity to make it on to the Amazon book page for Unbroken. While there’s little chance to make it on the regular book page, I might be able to get on the Kindle book page. The Kindle version of 35 Miles From Shore has been in the top one through three position for aviation titles for the past week.
The idea for this case study was born in January of 2009. That date may not seem significant to you until I mention the fact that this was the day that USAir Flight 1549 ditched in the Hudson River. The accident was especially significant to me personally because I had written and published a book about a lesser known airline ditching that had occurred in 1970. My book 35 Miles From Shore: The Ditching and Rescue of ALM Flight 980 tells the true story of the first and only open-water ditching of a commercial jet and the efforts to rescue those who survived.
It was May 2, 1970. A DC-9 with 57 passengers and a crew of 6 left New York en route to the tropical island of St. Maarten. They never made it to their destination. Instead, the passengers and crew were thrust into a life and death battle for survival as their plane ran out of fuel and was forced to ditch in the Caribbean Sea.
I was 13 years old when Apollo 13 lifted off for the moon on April 11, 1970. Two days later when the explosion happened, I stood outside in my backyard and gazed up at the moon knowing that three astronauts were headed for an uncertain future. The Apollo 13 space flight had a huge impact on me. Like thousands of kids my age I wanted to be an astronaut. When I realized that that probably wasn’t going to happen, I chose the next best thing and became a pilot. My first company was called Apollo Software. My second company was called Odyssey Interactive, named after the Apollo 13 command module.
I’ll be doing a BlogTalk radio show tomorrow with host Gailen David starting at 1:00 pm EST. We’ll be talking about the upcoming anniversary of the Hudson ditching and how the events that took place in 1970 in the Caribbean had an impact on the outcome of Flight 1549. The radio show will be available as a podcast after the show.
