Tell HN: I wrote a book about the earthquake and made Branchrock Books

Since my friend introduced me to Hacker News, I've been hit with a flood of information about design, coding, entrepreneurship, and being independent. The "move fast" article on CFDY and the articles about 99-cent eBooks were especially inspiring. I knew I wanted to write an eBook about something and then use all of these new things I was learning to make a site to publicize the eBook, but I just didn't know what to write about.

Then Japan was hit by an earthquake.

I thought about writing an eBook about my experiences that day and talked about it with my friend Pat. He told me I should go for it. Of course I was nervous at first, afraid that it would look like I was trying to take advantage of a terrible situation. I'm not.

It took me about a week between blackouts and brownouts to write the book, design the cover, reformat and publish it on three major markets (Amazon, B&N, Lulu), and design/code the site (my first 960.gs project!). I could keep tweaking the site design and content, but I want to get this out there now or I'll be tweaking forever.

My book tells a good, solid story and has gotten fantastic reviews from my alpha readers. There's a lot of media coverage on various aspects of the quake: the nuclear plants, the tsunami effects, the future effects on the economy, etc., but I haven't seen much on how it's affecting individuals in Japan. Every day, people ask me what things are like here.

Enter: Shaken and Stirred. The story of my day on March 11, 2011 when the first earthquake hit. Available now for the Kindle, Nook, and PC (pdf).

http://www.branchrock.com