Warm up those earbuds and chill . . .
Issue 83: March/April 2012
About this time of year, the northern sailors among us get a bit weary of winter. We start attending boat shows. Even shows that don’t have many sailboats have a certain appeal right now. You’ll find us draining our savings accounts for vacation money. A cruise anywhere warm will do. We’re ordering parts for our springtime projects and we’re surfing the web.
This last item on the list is what’s on my mind. You already know about the GoodOldBoat.com website . . . but did you know about our second site: AudioSeaStories.com?
We created this site about five years ago and gave it that name because we were producing audiobooks and thought they should reach a wider audience than might discover them just through Good Old Boat! We thought hiding our audiobooks somewhere in the depths of GoodOldBoat.com would make them hard to find and discourage sales. If you have spent much time there, you have to admit that our GoodOldBoat.com site is rich and vast and even a bit overwhelming. We got that part right: our new audiobooks would have been very hard to find. But sales of audiobooks never exactly went stratospheric anyway.
However, it takes special software to make a download site that can collect someone’s payment and offer a downloadable file. Once we’d mastered that process for the audiobooks, we wondered what else we could offer as downloads. We started with our back issues that — until then — had been available only on CDs. We reasoned that the PDF files on a CD could easily be downloaded for reading on iPads, Kindles, and other readers. The price for the downloaded file is a bit less than for a CD since there’s no shipping and handling. So we posted our back issues. That’s when our AudioSeaStories.com site took off!
As in all things with this magazine, Jerry and I only think we’re in charge. Truth is, we’re usually breathlessly trying to catch up. So based on this unexpected success, we have begun to refer to AudioSeaStories.com as Good Old Boat’s downloads site and stepped up our production of back issues. We’re up to 2007 so far and expect to finish all the way through 2012 by the end of this year. We’ve separated individual issues and are offering them as downloads too, so you don’t have to buy a full year at a whack if you only want one article.
We’re developing collections of articles such as our histories, boat reviews, and the 101 series. We may even add music downloads at some point. And there’s some “free stuff” on the site for download too.
Of course, there are the audiobooks that started it all. Whether we’ve made one cent on this side of the business is debatable, but we’re still recording books we really like and want to share with our readers. We’ve just completed our 13th book and number 14 is in the works.
It all started with Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World. Other favorite circumnavigations and true adventures followed. John Guzzwell reads his own Trekka Round the World and Greg Smith reads his book, The Solitude of the Open Sea. Dave and Jaja Martin team up to bring us Into the Light about their trek north of the Arctic Circle and Geoff Safron produced Russell Doubleday’s classic A Year in a Yawl.
We produced three thrillers too: The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, Telegram from the Palace by Geoffrey Toye, and A Voyage Toward Vengeance by Jule Miller. Add to those a trio of books for youngsters around 8 to 12 by John Vigor: Danger, Dolphins, and Ginger Beer was the first, followed by Sally Steals an Elephant and So Long, Foxtrot Charlie.
I even narrated an audio we called Bookends because it was a recording of the first 50 View from Here (editorial) and Last Tack columns that bookend the magazine, one at the front and one at the end. Both sets of columns are mostly the nautical musings of the editors (Karen and Jerry).
That list comes to 12 audiobooks. The newest, and our proudest achievement so far, is Voyages in Desperate Times. Jule Miller, an accomplished author and researcher, wrote this work of historical fiction about the little-known activities of the Coastal Picket Force (aka the Hooligan Navy) during World War II. The U.S. government conscripted wooden sailing yachts and put them into service along the East Coast searching for German U-boats and picking up survivors from ships torpedoed by the U-boats.
Book number 14 is also a work of historical fiction. Written by William Hammond, A Matter of Honor is the first of a series of excellent novels along the lines of the Patrick O’Brian series. We can’t wait to bring this newest addition to you.
If you have the winter doldrums, no matter where you are, please cruise over to our sister sites — GoodOldBoat.com and AudioSeaStories.com — and see if we have something there to cure what ails you.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
