National Forests, National Parks

USFS plans to eliminate Day/Year Adventure Pass fees from some National Forest Areas

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Yep, that means that you can visit some forest areas free of the $5 daily or $30 yearly Adventure Pass fees!  Hikers and off-roaders rejoice!

Or that may be just what they’re expecting us to do.

I will always look a gift horse in the mouth – especially if that gift horse is coming from a governmental agency.  The plan is called the “Federal Lands Recration Enhancement Act” – or REA.  When you walk around it and kick the tires, it seems like a good idea.  But when you look under the hood, there’s some hinky.  There’s ALWAYS some hinky.  Here’s a portion of what the REA says in their summary:

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eBook

Vellum Simplifies Ebook Conversion So Authors Can Focus On Their Craft

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Digital Book World has added a release about Vellum’s ebook creation software for OSX.  From the article:

Authors who want to create their own digital books are often frustrated when converting their manuscripts into ebooks. A Seattle software company called 180g has created a tool, Vellum, that handles the technical ins-and-outs of building EPUB, MOBI, and iBook files—simplifying ebook conversion and giving authors more time to focus on their craft.

Vellum ebook creation software, introduced today, runs on Mac OS X and allows authors and small publishers to easily create beautiful ebooks for iBooks, Kindle, and Nook without any prior experience or training.

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Inspiration

On this date, the 1,000,000th Ford rolled off the assembly line

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”
– Henry Ford

This wasn’t a recent milestone.  On one of the 25 operating Ford assembly lines, sometime during the day, the one millionth Ford Model T rolled out of the factory and into the light in 1915.

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eBook, Writer Reference

Why self-publish an ebook?

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

This seems to be the season of really awkward reports on self-publishing. In yet another “remarkable study into self-publishing,” that distracts with colors and pictures, self-publishing gets another black eye from someone who doesn’t really know the topic.

Well, as someone who helps writers become self-published authors, I have a slightly different viewpoint.

When I first saw the three parts of the “debate” I quickly came to the conclusion that the author didn’t know her subject very well. It certainly didn’t help that the very first two sentences included “road to nowhere” and “in my research.”

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