I spent most of the day Saturday driving around to each of the Barnes & Nobles, Books-A-Millions, and Waldenbooks in the greater Columbia area handing out book-themed business cards to the store managers, and asking them to put a few copies of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design on their shelves. As productive as that trip was, I knew that the Amazon rating I saw that day was not caused by my own marketing efforts. Regardless of the cause I was so excited, that I took a screenshot:

56? When I first saw that my book was listed on Amazon it was ranked somewhere around 100,000. Somehow though, for most of the weekend, the book was listed in Amazon’s bestsellers list! But why? I didn’t know the answer to that question until I got in to work this morning and one of my coworkers asked if I read Slashdot on Friday. I have no idea who Trent Lucier is, but he posted a very thorough and positive book review that I am happy to recommend to anybody who is trying to decide whether or not to buy my book. Check it out:

http://books.slashdot.org/books/07/02/23/1512241.shtml

Although I haven’t talked much about the details, it’s no secret that I was working on a design book for SitePoint. Most of my friends and relatives have been asking me “How’s the book going?” and “Are you done yet?” since I started the first chapter back in early April. After several months of late nights, long weekends, and increased caffeine consumption, I’m excited to announce that “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” is now available!

My personal copies arrived about a week ago, but I didn’t want to post anything about it here until my parents and a few influential people had received the copies I sent them. I thought I would have a few weeks to prepare a promotional page before the book “hit the streets”, but it became available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, and Wal-Mart around the same time I received my box. There’s even a review up on Amazon already. In a rush to get something posted for people to link to, I set up principlesofbeautifulwebdesign.com. Yea, I know it’s ginormously long for a domain name but I couldn’t think of a better available name. I’m quite proud of how that little page turned out for the amount of time I put into it. I still have a lot more ground to cover in marketing the book. I printed up some glossy business cards over the weekend that I plan to take to some of the local book stores and ask if they can put a few copies on their shelves. SitePoint also let me send some copies of the book to a few select celebrity designer/developers. For better or worse, I’m looking forward to hearing what these people think about the book. I am personally very excited with how it turned out and think it will benefit a pretty broad range of people who are looking for a primer in graphic design principles as they apply to the web.

This whole experience has been a wild ride. I was excited (and a little scared) by the idea when SitePoint initially asked me to write the book. Somehow though, in the flurry of working on it, I lost track of what being a published author would be like. Being a quiet and humble person, it’s still strange to see my name on the cover. It’s weirder still when all my friends ask me to sign their copy when it arrives. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that, but it really makes all the hard work worthwhile.

For anybody who sits in front of a computer all day, it’s important to get exercise during non-work hours. With that said, I’ve done very little to make working out a critical part of my week. If anything even remotely requires attention, exercise is the first thing to get dropped.

When I do have time to exercise, I generally prefer going for a run through our beautiful neighborhood or tossing my mountain bike in the back of the truck and heading over to the nearby trails at Harbison State Forrest. I’ve never competed in either of those arenas, but I’ve been slowly building up my endurance and can now run about 4 miles. I’m rather proud of that accomplishment, but the idea of running 6.2 miles (10K) by the end of March sounds like a big challenge. One that I’ll start training for this week.

How did that happen? Well a bunch of our friends from the University of South Carolina have been talking about participating in the Cooper River Bridge 10K (bridgerun.com) in Charleston, SC on March 21, 2007. Some planned to walk and some planned to run. I wasn’t planning to do either, but yesterday Amy’s friend Adriana said she would walk it if Amy signed up, and Amy said she would go if I would run it…and if Amy wants me to do it, then I’ll certainly give it my best effort. So here I am, a novice runner, trying to figure out how to train for a 10K. I don’t plan to really compete with anyone there, but as a personal goal, I’d like to be able to run the whole thing. One of our friends recommended Hal Higdon’s 10K novice training program. Fortunately, it’s an 8 week program and there’s just enough weeks before the race for me to go through the entire thing. I plan to push each day back so that the weeks start with Sunday and end with Saturday, since that’s the race day. In an unrelated turn of events, I also just ordered my first “real” mountain bike last weekend: A 19” Gary Fisher Piranha from Harrell’s Bicycle World. I’ve been talking about getting a decent bike since before we moved to South Carolina, and after a lot of research and test rides, the Piranha seemed like the best bang for my buck. I’ll probably post more about the new bike after I’ve ridden it a few times, but you can bet that on my cross training days I’ll be tearin’ up the trails.

Anybody have any advice for this first time 10K runner and novice mountain biker?