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Summer 2019’s second most talked about Reboot – Joe D’Eramo releases 1993 title Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired as Kindle

Summer 2019’s second most talked about Reboot – Joe D’Eramo releases 1993 title Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired as Kindle

photo of the cover of Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired by Joe D'Eramo and John "Walter" ReedIn 1993, Millis native Joe D’Eramo co-wrote and self-published Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired: A Comical Look at Eating and Living with People as a paperback. In the spirit of the reboot of Beverly Hills 90210, D’Eramo decided to put it out as a Kindle book.

Why?

“Well, even after all this time, the recipes are damn good—the meatloaf, mac and cheese and tuna noodle casserole are to die for; best BBQ recipe out there, too. Second, and more importantly, I got tired of looking up the pages in the paperback, placing it down on the counter, repeat…. you get the idea. So, I went for it and it’s now available as a Kindle on Amazon,” said D’Eramo, a freelance copywriter and marketing and PR consultant.

The initial paperback, co-written with D’Eramo’s former roommate, Chef John “Walter” Reed, sold at local bookstores in the Boston area. The new Kindle title will sell strictly online.

“The world, just like John and I, has changed dramatically since we put out the book way back when,” said D’Eramo. “We’re both married with children and John has gone on to do some great things with his culinary consulting practice in the greater Chicago area.”

The new Kindle version include updated and editor’s notes where things get a little uncomfortable.

“People’s sense of humor is not quite the same as 1993 and we needed to edit things a bit for today’s reader,” said D’Eramo.

Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired teaches readers how to: Create very edible meals on a limited budget with minimal supplies; improvise for those times when your roommie has gone on a binge; impress overnight (ahem) guests with your other talent; and more. Along the way, Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired lampoons the many oddities and consistencies that make the roommate experience so darn interesting. This includes such sections as: What to Make While Watching the Brady Bunch; What You Should Do With Your Chicken; Things That Grow in Your Bathroom That You Can Eat; For Better or (Liver)wurst; and more. It’s a regular smorgasbord of entertainment and information packed into the most unlikely of places: a cookbook.

The reboot version of Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired is sold on Amazon at a special introductory price of $2.99.

“We’re not going to keep it at that price for long,” said D’Eramo. “But for $2.99 you can get the world’s best meatloaf recipe, put it on your smartphone or tablet, and never had to dog ear a page.”

For more information about Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired, visit Amazon.com.

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Is there a better way to create ebooks online?

Is there a better way to create ebooks online?

A Review of Designrr’s Agency Plan

Strange to be writing “a better way to create ebooks online” so shortly after posting a scintillating review of Designrr but a few short months ago. Particularly when you consider the speed with which you can have a customized ebook. It literally took minutes to create my first ebook, 15 Keep-it-Simple Tips for B2B Networkers . I don’t even want to think about the hours/days/months putting together my other books and ebooks.

So that initial review was based largely on three things. The speed with which you could create ebooks. The quality of those ebooks. Finally, the ridiculous $27 to buy the standard version of Designrr. Talk about a no-brainer.

Was Designrr perfect? No, but you shouldn’t expect perfect. Just value. And the incredible value made me want to take it up a notch and purchase Designrr’s Agency Plan. Especially after I was able to create some ebooks for clients and charge more than double the cost of the Agency Plan.

Making better ebooks

You may have heard the expression “more is less”? That doesn’t apply when comparing Designrr Standard vs. Designrr Agency. You have more templates to choose from, bigger photo library, more cover designs (a lot more), etc. Yet the more that helps the most has to do with the number of formats that you can create an ebook from.

With Designrr standard, you are limited to blogs and copy and pasting text as well as importing one-time from Facebook groups. With Designrr’s Agency Plan, you can import your text from MS Word documents and PDFs, as well as unlimited imports from Facebook groups.

Importing from PDFs is a huge benefit. The book I mentioned in the previous blog, Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired, was written in 1992. I stored it on a floppy and by that I mean 5-inch floppy. That left me nothing but the hard copy to convert a book I spent an entire year on into an electronic format.

That left two options: scan it or re-type. I chose to rescan. With the PDF from the scan, I could create a Kindle version of Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired. I could not do that with Designrr’s Standard.

So Designrr’s Agency Plan does make it easier to get text into the document.

Working with the text remains a challenge. You have to use the backspace button rather than the delete. The version of your document you upload better be as close to final as possible. It’s probably not as bad as I’m making it sound. It’s just not as convenient to edit text as Word.

Other features for making better ebooks

The extras in Designrr’s Agency Plan are subtle but do go a long way toward creating more professional ebooks. For example, you can create ebooks with two columns instead of one. So your ebook can look more like an ebook than a Word document you saved as a PDF.

You wouldn’t think page numbers and a table of contents would be such a big deal in a 20-30 page ebook. Surprisingly, it does matter to the reader. After all, who wants to be scrolling down or page up/page downing all the time?

Creating the TOC is another feature that can be a little difficult to work with. It would be nice if it would automatically update. You have to manually do it and it takes some time using Designrr to feel comfortable with how to do it. CONFESSION: I have looked up how to do this in the help section more than a few times. Yet that’s actually another positive about all Designrr plans. It’s pretty easy to find an answer or get a response from tech support.

Some additional features for creating better ebooks

Again, if you’re looking to create more of an ebook as opposed to a PDF, you have a few options that help in that endeavor. One is the 3D cover creator.

Like the name implies, you can create a 3D cover, which looks kind of cool. Designrr has a tool that enables you to create the 3D image and then it’s just a matter of replacing the image you started with. You would like to think it might be a bit easier than that. Still, it’s not that difficult and gives your ebook a bit more of a professional appearance.

You could say the same for the flip-book feature that’s in the Agency Plan but not the Standard. To be honest, this feature is a bit of a letdown. You can create the flipbook but you can only view it by its unique url. Here’s an example of a book I created for a client.

As you can see, the flipbook looks kind of cool. But when you try to download it, you lose the flipbook effect. Is it the end of the world? No. But it is a minor drawback to a very cool feature.

Creating ebooks with video

This is or isn’t a big depending on the intent of the video. If it’s a lead magnet, this feature adds a lot. Especially to an “About the Author” section where the video can talk to the reader. How cool is that?

Send in the clones

Copying. That’s probably the least sexy but biggest upgrade from Standard to Agency. You can clone an ebook and edit as a separate document. This is a huge development whether it’s a lead magnet or you’re creating ebooks to sell on Amazon. Much like the website, ebooks are working documents. There’s always a change or upgrade you would like to make or that typo that snuck through. Cloning enables you to keep the previous iteration and create a next version to edit.

Last but not least: Kindle-ready

You cannot understate this fact. Once you create your ebook, Designrr enables you to save it in .mobi format. That’s the format to upload Kindle books to Amazon. So, if you have text to create an ebook in less than an hour you can get that book ready for sale in far less time like that.

Again, I will reference my three book publishing experiences. Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired, a self-published paperback, took 18 months to complete. My first ebook, 25 Ways to go from Stepfather to StepDad, took six months.  Finally, creating my next ebook, 15 Keep-It-Simple Tips for B2B Networkers took less than an hour.

About creating ebooks online in less than 10 minutes

There is a little salesmanship to the claim of creating an ebook in less than 10 minutes. Yes, construction of the first version of the book will take that long. And there’s the large assumption that you have the existing content. But let’s presume you do and you want to create an ebook that’s not more than 10 pages. You can create it in under five minutes.

But…

Actually, there are a lot of buts to this and it has nothing to do with Designrr as a product. While you may have five posts on a related topic, you will need to create a little cohesion between each post for the ebook. That will take a little time.

You may want to sprinkle in some images with your blog posts. Those images will not transfer seamlessly from the blog post. So you will need to finesse those in a bit there. Maybe mess around with sizes, etc.

You will also want a call-to-action for your ebook/lead magnet. Yes, that could simply be “give us a call” or “check out our website”, but you will want to put some thought into.

Then, there’s editing/proofreading. Even with previously published content, you will want a second set of eyes—preferably skilled eyes—to review your ebook. It’s not uncommon for typos and grammatical mistakes to occur in a blog post. Those take on a greater significance in an ebook or lead magnet that’s positioned to show you as a subject matter expert.

Finally, as a writer, we are perfectionists. You do want to make sure all the proverbial i’s are dotted and t’s crossed. So you will piece together your ebook, review it , have somebody else review it, and then do it again yourself. Maybe even a time or two more. And all that takes some time.

With that said, Designrr makes creating an ebook online an incredibly fast way to put together an ebook/lead magnet. And it’s not an overstatement to say you can have a finished product in less than a day. Even in less than a morning.

Conclusion: Creating ebooks has never been easier

Once you get accustomed to using Designrr, you develop a confidence that you can create a quality ebook without being a graphic designer. As long as you can navigate a template. And if you can successfully create an ebook using Designrr’s standard plan, you can create an even better ebook using the Agency plan.

So what’s the real difference between Standard and Agency? The former will help you create an ebook. The latter can do that and win you clients to write ebooks for them. Simple as that..

Check out this video where I demonstrate the cool things about Designrr Agency.

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Cats in the Cradle vs. Leader of the Band

For most people, this one is a no-brainer. Cats in the Cradle, the Harry Chapin classic, rules over any other “Call Your Dad” song. Except in Movember. Then it’s all Leader of the Band by Dan Fogelberg.

Before I explain why, let’s define “Call Your Dad” songs. Those are the songs you hear on the radio and it makes you want to phone your Dad that second—usually because you haven’t in a while or there’s some sort of conflict that the two of you haven’t resolved.

So why Leader of the Band?

While Cats in the Cradle talks about all the times a father misses in their children’s lives due to work, Leader of the Band goes a bit deeper. In addition to the whole “too busy” theme, It delves into sons trying to be like our fathers but never quite getting there–at least in our eyes–and then being okay with it.

Yet that’s not why this song rings truer in Movember than other “Call Your Dad” songs. It has more to do with the fact that Dan Fogelberg died of prostate cancer at age 56.

He was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2004. Could his life had been extended with early detection? Without knowing much more than what Wikipedia provides, it’s difficult to say. But with the advances made in recent years—thanks, in part, to funds contributed by the Movember Foundation—I feel comfortable in saying there would have been more music.

Even if Dan Fogelberg or Harry Chapin aren’t your cup of tea, we need those songs in our lives. The ones that touch our hearts, embrace our souls. It’s why we need to donate to Movember to help ensure the next Fogelberg doesn’t leave before his song should be over.

To donate to my Movember campaign, click here.