The World Changes Monthly

Change? You want Change? Change we can believe in, change we can live with, a little spare change – any and all change, just for something different. There's a great line in “Paint Your Wagon” where the woman is about to be auctioned off to a new husband. One of the women says, “But you don't know what you'll get!” and she replied, “I know what I've got now!” Yes, sometimes any change is better that the existing scene.

But if you really want change, get into the new technologies. Twitter was once something my heart did when certain starlets walked down the red carpet. Now it's something I update regularly and everyone is on it. I have three MySpace sites, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Gather, Naymz, Reunion, Capture Carolina and Inside 919. I've canceled Tagged because it appears to be just a dating site and I married my date. It seems every month, another one jumps up. Once again, if we could just guess as to what would be the “Next Big Thing” we'd be millionaires. Well, not really. One has to have the money to back up such knowledge. Once I got a hot tip but didn't have any money to invest. The tip was regarding Viagra and the fellow who told me made millions. (Heavy sigh!)

In case you don't know, I write books. I enjoy writing books. But that's not all one does when one writes books. Once written you have to market them and that means putting them where people will see them. Having a web site isn't enough. Mine is www.jonbatson.com, incidentally. But no, it's not enough. Now you have to go digital as well.

So now as well as hard copy books, you can also download my books onto your computer as a PDF. That's Portable Document File, for those who don't know about them. That's what your Adobe reader is for. But wait, there's more! Want your book on Amazon as a download? You can, all you have to do is to translate it for Kindle to read. That alone takes an engineer's degree. But then there's MobiPocket – with it's own reader and it's own software and it's own jargon and it's own extensions. Microsoft has it's own reader and so on and so forth. Then there's E-Books, with it's free download reader onto your computer but, of course, they also sell a hand-held. There's special software to make those files.

I'm downloading all the software, learning all the file extensions, converting all the books and keeping track – somehow – of all the places my e-books are listed. Pretty soon, I'll have them on my web site, which means something else will have to come off my site, because there isn't enough room for everything. But you can buy my books in a number of different forms – including in Large Print versions on Lulu.com/jonbatson.

It seemed so simple when I decided to write a book. The daunting part, I thought, was writing the book. I had no idea how my world would change – and continues to change every month.