A Quick Note to My Australian Readers

I know that a number of you Down Under have bought my books on Kindle, and I've heard a rumor that Amazon is changing their "distribution model" there because of a 10% tax. Based on what I've heard, IF THIS GOES THROUGH, some of you may lose access to books you bought from any Amazon site other than the Australian site.

As I understand, this isn't a done deal yet and Amazon hasn't said for sure how this will affect you. But if our worst expectations come true and you do lose access to my Kindle books you've already bought, contact me through my blog's email address. I have no intention of letting you lose access to any of my Kindle books that you've paid for, and we'll get something worked out.

But hopefully Amazon will do right and make sure it doesn't come to that. We'll all keep our fingers crossed.

The Quick Guide Two-Book PDFs Are Available

The special PDFs I create for sale from this blog are finally available for purchase. Remember, if you're purchasing from a VAT country, you'll need to get the PDFs that are available from Smashwords. (Two are up there; three more to go.) My blog isn't set up for VAT purchases at this point.

Confident Swings Pack PDF $8.99 Contains Stop Coming Over-the-Top and Think Like a Golfer

Long & Straight Pack PDF $6.99 Contains More Golf Swing Speed and HIT IT HARD

Short Game Pack PDF $7.99 Contains Accurate Iron Play and The Putt Whisperer

Smart Putter Pack PDF $8.99 Contains The Putt Whisperer and Think Like a Golfer

Tee-to-Green Pack PDF $7.99 Contains Stop Coming Over-the-Top and Accurate Iron Play

And of course, if you want to get all six books, the MEGAPACK is available for download. Just click on the book cover at the top of the sidebar. That's the least expensive way to get the entire set.

Some New Combo Quick Guides in Paperback

Since coming out with the RuthlessGolf.com Quick Guide MEGAPACK, I realized that many people were buying two or three of the Quick Guides but not all six -- or at least, they didn't want to buy all six at once. That's a problem I often face when I'm interested in buying a series of books I want. So I've been working to create some two-guide packs, all of which are out in paperback now. (I figure the paperbacks are the most expensive way to buy them.) Here are the five packs I've put out, based on the combinations in which my records say are the most popular.


If you were to buy the RuthlessGolf.com Tee-to-Green Pack, the Long and Straight Pack and the Smart Putter Pack, you'd get all six books -- although it wouldn't be as inexpensive as just buying the MEGAPACK. However, that way you don't have to lay out so much money at once. (That was part of the concept behind the Quick Guides in the first place.) All of the packs save you two or three dollars over the regular two-book price.

Like the MEGAPACK, all five two-book packs are available through the regular book channels. However, unlike the MEGAPACK, the electronic versions will ALSO be available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, etc. Most of them are out now, but I'm still working on some of them. (It will be a while before I have PDF versions available through my blog.)

Anyway, I wanted to announce that the paperbacks are finally available since paperbacks cost the most. And, as usual, they're all in large print. I'm pretty proud of that too. ;-)

Update on the Quick Guide MEGAPACK

I said I'd update you guys as I got the various MEGAPACK formats out, so here it is.

As I said originally, the ebook versions are available in MOBI, EPUB and PDF direct from the blog here. That didn't help those of you in the EU countries that charge VAT, so I was working to get them up at Smashwords.

Smashwords now has a PDF and an EPUB, but not a MOBI version. They'll let me upload an EPUB of my own making but insist on generating the MOBI themselves. However, their software choked on the file and won't create a decent Table of Contents... and the MEGAPACK is just too big to use without one. That means you can only get the PDF and EPUB from them right now.

But here's the big surprise. There is now a paperback version available! (This link is for the Amazon page, but it should be available at BN and the other bookstores as well.) It's 560 pages long and the price is $39.99, which is much cheaper than buying the individual paperback versions. I simply couldn't do the paperback as an exclusive edition and still get worldwide shipping. (Or free shipping for those of you who qualify.)

I started doing these Quick Guides to try and make quality golf lessons available at an inexpensive price. Hopefully this edition will make them even more affordable.

Announcing the New RuthlessGolf.com Quick Guide MEGAPACK!

[UPDATE: The paperback version is now available as well. You can order it through all the regular bookstore channels like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. for $39.99. That was the easiest way to make a paperback easy-to-get and also give you folks free shipping.]

I have always loved the concept behind the RuthlessGolf.com Quick Guides. Instead of a single expensive book that touches on fifty topics but covers nothing thoroughly -- which is common in a lot of golf books -- each Quick Guide is focused on a single topic and tries to give a fairly complete lesson on how to do it properly. I think I've been fairly successful with that goal.

And apparently a lot of you agree, because many of you have bought one. In fact, many have come back again and again, buying different ones each time.

However, since I started doing the Quick Guides back in 2012, the publishing industry has changed. What used to be a fairly simple act of publishing now requires that I do six or seven different formats of each book. So, in the future, I'll be doing my guides in an as-yet-undecided format. The existing Quick Guides, of course, will all remain in print, available as they have always been.

But for some time now I've wanted to do a special promotional ebook, one that would be available only through this blog and from Smashwords (they allow worldwide distribution without going through all the different booksellers). And since I'll be doing future books in a different format, I found myself with a unique opportunity to do just that.

So here it is, The RuthlessGolf.com Quick Guide MEGAPACK, a single collection of all six Quick Guides for $19.99. That's about 35% off the price of buying all six individual books.

As of today you can buy PDF, EPUB and MOBI editions from this page, right here on RuthlessGolf.com, and the EPUB is available from Smashwords. (PDF and MOBI editions will be coming to Smashwords as well, but those are yet more formats I've got to create! They'll show up on the Smashwords page as soon as they are available.)

Some of you may never have downloaded a book that didn't install automatically on your reader. It's actually very easy -- and if you don't learn, you're missing out on the huge number of LEGALLY FREE ebooks available on the Web. (For example, Project Gutenberg, which has sites in the US, Canada and Australia, among others, offers Harry Vardon's book The Complete Golfer.)

You'll find the buttons to purchase each format of the book BELOW, complete with basic instructions on how to load them to your devices. It's not hard at all.

And as usual, EU readers will need to buy from Smashwords since I have no process for handling VAT at this point.

PDF $19.99

Most of you probably use the PDFs on your desktops and laptops, and use Adobe Reader. You already know how the system works. But if you use PDFs on your Kindle or Apple device, they are treated just like the native formats as described below.

MOBI (Kindle) $19.99

Did you know that your Kindles, whether they are readers or apps, have an email address? Just log into your Amazon account, go to the "Manage Your Content and Devices" page, click the Settings tab and scroll down to the section labeled "Personal Document Settings." There you will find a list of email addresses -- the main one for your account (mine is simply called "Michael's Kindle"), as well as addresses for each separate device or app. Then just create a blank email, attach your MOBI file to it, and send your book to the main address. The book will then become available to every one of your Kindles.

EPUB (Apple iBooks) $19.99 

I suppose that most ereaders use the EPUB format, but Smashwords tells me that most of you are getting your EPUBs through the iBooks Store. So if you start up iTunes, you can use File/Add to Library or just drag the book to your Books library. Then you just sync your devices like usual.

SMASHWORDS $19.99

And once again, here's the MEGAPACK page at Smashwords. As soon as the MOBI and PDF versions are available, they'll show up on that page automatically and I'll update this post as well.

So here's your chance to get all six Quick Guides at once for 35% off the regular price of buying them all. Many of you have written to tell me how much they helped you; hopefully this will make them affordable for even more of you.

The "My Paperbacks" Page Is Now Updated

Just to let you know, I went to the blog's "My Paperbacks" page -- the page where you can order copies of the Quick Guides at a discount -- to add the new Think Like a Golfer book and suddenly realized I hadn't added either HIT IT HARD or The Putt Whisperer to the page. OOPS!

Well, that's fixed now. All of the Quick Guides are listed and the discount should be added automatically to all of them when you type in the discount code at checkout. If you have any problems, don't check out. Instead, drop me an email; I'll fix it so the right prices come up and then I'll drop you an email so you know you can check out.

But everything should be working.

The Paperback of Think Like a Golfer Is Also Out Now

Yes, I'm in shock but the paperback version of Think Like a Golfer is already available. I knew things were moving much quicker this time, but wow! I okayed the proofs this morning but it usually takes a couple of days or so before it actually shows up online.

If you want the paperback, it's available on Amazon at this link. It's still going to take a bit of time for it to hit BN.com and the other online retailers. But I can't believe how quickly they got it up this time...

My Sports Psychology Book is Out!

About 3 years ago I was approached by a sports psychologist from the UK. He had worked with some of the Ryder Cup players, and he was interested in doing a book with me. (Yes, I was a bit surprised as well, but he had been reading the blog and liked the way I approach the game.) We kicked some ideas back and forth for about a year -- put together quite a bit of material, actually -- before outside opportunities got in the way for both of us.

While I learned that I knew quite a bit about sports psychology, I also realized that a lot of important areas were being ignored -- not the least of which concerned the terminology. In many ways modern sports psychology is a child of the self-help movement of the early 20th Century. However, those early self-help writers built their approach using theological terms which were commonly understood at the time. In our modern world, that is no longer the case.

As a result, much of what passes for sports psychology sounds more like "wishcraft." It's hard to build anything lasting if you don't understand exactly what you're trying to do.

So I finally broke down and wrote my own sports psychology book called Think Like a Golfer. It's not an evangelistic tract, but it does explain the basic meaning of all those theological terms. The basics of self-belief are the same whether you're talking about belief in God, belief in yourself, or belief that your car will start when you turn the key in the morning; it's just a matter of degree.

The irony of it all is that by explaining the theological terms that sports psychologists use, it's easier to take a more scientific approach to building a bulletproof self-belief. Once you understand what you're trying to accomplish, the methodology is so simple that anyone can do it.

Here are some of the things I included in this book:

• how true self-belief differs from mere self-hypnosis and wishful thinking
• the mechanics of self-belief—how a belief is actually built and grounded in reality so it improves your performance
• why trying to believe "hard enough" rarely works
• what useful self-talk sounds like and techniques for getting dependable results
• how self-belief helps you make better strategy decisions on the course
• how to avoid the pitfalls of self-doubt and deal with pressure
• what "the Zone" is and how it's related to self-belief

Although I made it one of the Quick Guides, it's actually much longer than any of them. In fact, only Ruthless Putting is longer (and Think Like a Golfer has no diagrams taking up space -- it's all words). But I got to the point as directly as I could and, once you've read through it completely, you can go back, skip around and focus on the areas where your self-belief needs the most help.

Unlike the last book -- which gave me all kinds of problems getting files to the distributors -- all of the ebook versions are already shipping, including the special PDF I do here at the blog. Only the paperback hasn't hit the market yet, but the publisher has everything and I'm just waiting for them to OK the files. I expect it to be available at Amazon by the end of the week, and the other online distributors not long after.

All of the ebook versions are $6.99 and the paperback will be $11.99 when it comes out later this week. I think this may be the most useful Quick Guide I've done so far. I hope you'll all agree.

The Putt Whisperer Paperback Is Finally Out!

Yes, it seemingly took forever but I finally got The Putt Whisperer out in paperback. (For some unexplained reason I had problems getting the cover and interior files to upload properly to the printer. We finally worked out an alternative method but it took us nearly a week longer than expected.) At this point it's only at Amazon but it should get out to the other online bookstores in the next few weeks.

Here's the link to its page at Amazon. It retails for $8.99 but Amazon's discounting it to $8.54.

The Smashwords Edition of The Putt Whisperer Is Out!

I finally got Putt Whisperer out on Smashwords. Smashwords distributes my books to Apple and Kobo's bookstores, among others, although exactly when they'll show up there is beyond my control. However, the various versions are up for purchase on Smashword's website.

Now if I could just get the paperback finished. For some reason, my printer hasn't been able to get my interior file to upload properly. But we'll keep trying...

The NOOK Version of Putt Whisperer Is Now Available

The NOOK version of The Putt Whisperer has now gone live as well. Here's the link to the book's page at Barnes & Noble.

I'm still working on the other versions. I'll update you as they become available.

The Kindle Version of Putt Whisperer Is Out!

Well, the Kindle version of The Putt Whisperer just went live today. This is the link to the book's page at Amazon.

The other versions are in the works, but this is the only one that is available for order so far. I'll post as they become available.

The Putt Whisperer PDF Is Finally Out!

I'm celebrating the Fourth of July by finally releasing a book I thought I'd have done back in January. At least, I'm releasing the PDF version -- the paperback, Kindle, Nook, and other versions will be coming out over the next week or so.

When I wrote Ruthless Putting back in 2009, it focused on turbocharging your existing putting stroke so you could make more putts with less practice. Back then, it never occurred to me that golfers might not have an existing putting stroke. But then the USGA and the R&A announced their upcoming ban on anchored putting.

That was the genesis of The Putt Whisperer. I didn't just want to rewrite Ruthless Putting -- I personally don't like having to buy a book again, no matter how much it's been changed -- so I decided to write a book that would complement the original. Although I tried to make it a self-contained lesson, it does tell you where you can find more complete treatment of some subjects in Ruthless Putting.

The Putt Whisperer teaches you how to build a new stroke completely from scratch. I've nearly gone nuts writing it because I wanted to teach you how to build a swing you could FEEL, a swing that focused on getting the ball in the hole and not just having a technically perfect swing -- but that's easier said than done. The reason most players think they can't putt is because they're way too tied up in mechanics... and everybody feels things a little differently.

So here's the deal: The Putt Whisperer explains exactly why the belly putter appears to help some players while not helping others. It teaches you how to build a personalized putting stroke that incorporates all the necessary fundamentals. While it explains a large number of fundamentals that make a stroke work, those fundamentals are interrelated -- changing one affects a number of others -- so you can focus on the ones that you have the most trouble with. The others should be incorporated automatically when you use the included drills that teach you how a good stroke feels. I also outline a simple process that will help you put it all together without tying your brain in knots.

In essence, regardless of whether you're moving from a belly putter or just having trouble with your regular putter, this book teaches you how to incorporate all the advantages of an anchored stroke without actually having to anchor the club. Cool, huh?

But unlike other putting books, The Putt Whisperer also contains an extended section discussing what it means to have a "light grip pressure." A full 20% of this Quick Guide details the techniques you can use to adjust your grip pressure until you're putting with a repeatable stroke. This section in particular drove me crazy because each grip needs to be adjusted a bit differently to get the best results... and I covered 6 different grips in that section. But I think you're going to find it very helpful.

So the special PDF version that you can download only from here is ready to go today. The other versions will, as I said, be available by the end of next week (hopefully!) and I'll put up short posts to let you know as each one finally becomes available through its respective sales channel.

I hope you find The Putt Whisperer helpful. And Happy Fourth of July, everybody!

Will Shakespeare's New Book Is Out!

This is the first of two posts today -- the second is the regular golf post. But I wanted to let everybody know that my alter ego Will Shakespeare's new book is out.

It's called The Exercist: A Not-So-Divine Comedy about Health & Fitness in Devilishly Clever Verse and it's a parody of Dante Alighieri's classic, The Divine Comedy.

Here's the plot: When an overweight guy's family forces him to get help dealing with his demon pal Sloth, he goes to see an Exercist. (That's a specialist who gets rid of demons by working 'em hard at the gym.) But neither the Exercist nor the demon is very cooperative and our guy is caught in the middle... until he comes up with his own plan for dealing with BOTH problems.

It seemed to be a perfect match for all those readers with broken New Year's resolutions!

It's only available in electronic editions because it's the size of a short story, not a novel. (Amazon figures it at around 36 pages, which sounds about right to me.) You can get it on Kindle and Nook, and at Smashwords (which distributes the book to Apple and Kobo, among others). You can also get a special PDF version from the book page at Will's blog.

If you're in the mood for something fun to read, you might enjoy it.

HIT IT HARD Is Finally Out!

Well, it seems like it's taken forever but the new Quick Guide is finally finished!

It's called HIT IT HARD and it took so long because... well, it teaches you how to do something that a lot of instructors say can't be done.

I'm sure you've heard instructors on TV say something like this: "We like to teach kids to hit it as hard as they can when they start, and we can straighten them out later. If they don't learn to hit it hard first, it's too hard to teach them later."

That's just crazy talk. If you can teach them to hit it straight AFTER they learn to hit it hard, you can teach them to hit it hard AFTER they learn to hit it straight. And that's what this book teaches you to do -- hit it as hard as you want without losing control or the ball!

So why did the book take me so long to write? Because there are several components to hitting it hard. This book was originally going to be three different books! And when I realized they could all be combined to teach you how to hit the ball as hard as you want, it took me a while to figure out the clearest way to do it. You see, the problem for most people is TENSION, and I needed to find a way to teach a full-out swing while simultaneously teaching you how to eliminate the tension.

HIT IT HARD is a series of drills that begins with simple rotational exercises (without a club) and gradually builds, one swing element at a time, until you are swinging the club as hard as you want. Scattered throughout the book -- as in my other Quick Guides -- are detailed explanations of the mechanics of each move (yes, with diagrams).

As you can see from the cover, the drills focus on skills that you need no matter how hard you swing; it's just that doing those skills properly becomes crucial when you swing hard. The drills teach you the following basics:

• maintaining proper posture
• what proper lower body movement looks like
• synching upper and lower body movement to create separation (the power component) while maintaining swing plane (the accuracy component)
• controlling the tension that makes your swing jerky when you swing hard

In addition, there are little tricks like simple ways to check your swing plane and how to use your breathing to control tension during your swing.

I kept tweaking the book every time I tried to edit it, which is another reason it took so long. There are things that I'll probably expand on in future blog posts and probably in other books, but I wanted to make sure everything here was clear enough that you could do things properly with just this book to guide you.

The Kindle version went live Sunday night (some of you already found it!) and the PDF and EPUB versions are available for direct download from my site. The Nook version may be available later today -- although they've changed their publishing procedures and I'm not sure it didn't change the layout a little. (For those of you who want to avoid that possibility, just remember that the EPUB from my site runs on the Nook.) The paperback will hopefully be available late this week -- initially at Amazon, then at other online retailers over the next few weeks -- and the Smashwords versions, which include Apple and Kobo, also hopefully starting sometime next week. (Again, Apple and Kobo both use the EPUB format, so you can download that version direct if you want it sooner.)

Although you don't want to swing all-out all the time, there are times when you need to muscle the ball. HIT IT HARD will teach you how to do it -- and the techniques will improve your swing whether you swing hard or not.

New Book Announcements

I finally have some new books to talk about. One is the new long-delayed Quick Guide -- I'll get to that one in a minute -- but I've got a non-golf book out as well.

Many of you know I have a poetry blog called Will Shakespeare for Hire, which I write as -- tah dah! Will Shakespeare. While I occasionally do serious poetry, the vast amount of it is, shall we say, off the wall. (Even more so than the Limerick Summaries I do each week or the odd song parody on this blog.) I do Will's blog purely for fun... but he's been writing a lot of stuff!

As a result, Will now has a book out. It's called The Murder at Muffet's Place and Other Poetic Parodies. Although it's a collection of some of my favorite funny stuff from Will's blog, a lot of it is completely new material -- somewhere between a quarter and a third of the book, in fact. I'm quite proud of it, actually.

At any rate, the ebook is already available on Kindle and Nook and I expect to have the paperback available sometime next week. (It takes time to get my proof copy via snail mail.) The Smashwords version -- they do the Apple and Kobo versions -- is in the works, but it's hard to give hard and fast times on when it will be available. The ebooks are $4.99 and the paperback will be $9.99.

The golf book should be out sometime in the next three or four weeks. It's been a real pain to write because I've had to rewrite it several times. Why, you ask? Because the focus of the book kept changing. Originally I had planned to focus on connection in the golf swing... but if I did that, I was really writing about how to control your plane. So I rewrote it about swing planes... but when I did that, I had to go into detail about legwork and footwork.  And after I rewrote it to include that...

Well, each Quick Guide focuses on only one idea, which is why I think they've been so popular. That singular focus makes them easy to understand and start getting results quickly. Once I added all those components, what was the focus? It took months of trying different things to figure it out.

The new Quick Guide is simply called HIT IT HARD, and it teaches you how to do just that. You may ask -- quite rightly -- what makes this book different from More Golf Swing Speed. MGSS is about getting more distance without swinging harder. The new book is for when you need to muscle the ball out of a tough lie or want to use the techniques from MGSS to hit the ball as far as you possibly can.

And it does that through a series of drills that build on each other, one motion at a time, to teach you how to swing as hard as possible without losing control. It teaches you how to control your swing plane, improve your balance, and swing hard without tensing up.

I'll do a post about it when it's finally available. Like I said, it should be ready in the next three or four weeks.

The Quick Guides Are Now in Paper

It wasn't planned. The Quick Guides I've written so far were only going to be available as ebooks because the setup fees for my normal printer would have run hundreds of dollars.

And then the things started selling like crazy. (Thank you all very much for that!) But they're selling primarily as PDFs through my website and the Kindle version at Amazon. Two of them actually made it into the Kindle Top50 golf books for a while, if you can believe it. So I decided to explore CreateSpace (Amazon's POD unit) as a possible printer for paperback versions. That way I could get around the expensive setup and still get the books out on Amazon and through this blog.

As a result, the paperback versions "went live" at Amazon sometime Friday. Here's the deal:

I tried to make the books as useable as possible. I've discovered that traditional book design is a bit less versatile than ebook design, so the Quick Guides have been designed as large format books incorporating as much ebook functionality as possible. That means that they're larger than normal -- 7.5 x 9.25 inches -- which let me put huge diagrams in them and large print. That not only makes them easier to use when you're actually outside practicing, it also makes them usable for people with less than perfect vision. (I believe that's one of the strongest selling points for ereaders -- adjustable print size.) There aren't many golf books designed for those players, so I figured I'd include them too.

In addition, I tried to add the "flip book" feature to Stop Coming Over-the-Top that I included in the ebook version. The last chapter was redesigned so lefties can flip through a swing sequence with their left hands while righties can do the same with their right hands. It's not as neat as the ebooks, but it does work.

If you order the books through Amazon, More Golf Swing Speed will set you back $6.99 and the other two books are $7.99. If you have Amazon Prime or are ordering $25 or more to get free shipping, you're all set. That's simple enough.

However, I know some of you don't order a lot of stuff from Amazon, so I'm trying to help you out. If you click on the My Paperbacks button under the blog's masthead, you'll go to a page I call the "Defiant Publishing Store" where you can get the books at a discount. You put your books in a "shopping cart" -- you know how this works, and there are complete instructions on the page if you don't -- and then check out. There's a discount code on the store page that you can put in at checkout to get $1 off on every book you buy. Instead of $6.99 and $7.99, you'll only pay $5.99 and $6.99 which should help offset a lot of the postage.

Eventually I'll make the Quick Guides available everywhere... but that costs money I don't have right now. In the meantime those of you who want paperbacks instead of ebooks at least have a choice.

My Newest Kid's Book Is Out

I considered writing about the Sybase Match Play today, but they had so many upsets Thursday that I figured I'd have a better handle on things if I waited until after Friday plays out. Can you believe that 2nd-year player Jodi Ewart took out defending champ Suzann Pettersen 3&1? That's why we love match play -- it's unpredictable!

So I'll tell you instead about my second Mick Michaels book, Prince Jonathan's War: A Bible Story, that just came out. Like the others, it's for kids reading at level 2-3.

It's a retelling of the story from 1 Samuel 13:15-14:23. In case you're unfamiliar with it, Prince Jonathan is the son of King Saul. (He was the king just before King David.) Saul had just disobeyed the Lord and been scolded by Samuel, the "big" prophet in Israel at the time. Maybe Saul was still moping about it, but in any case he was unwilling to lead his army against the Philistines who had overrun the land.

In fairness, perhaps the fact that the army had only two swords had something to do with it as well! The Philistines had gotten rid of all the blacksmiths. That way it was less likely the Hebrews would try to fight back. As a result the army had only two swords -- Saul had one of them and Jonathan had the other. Everybody else had to use clubs, farm tools, or whatever they could get.

Jonathan saw an opportunity to attack the Philistines, but knew his father wouldn't do it. So he took his sword and his armor bearer and the two of them went to fight the Philistines alone. It's one of my favorite Old Testament stories.

Obviously I like to mix things up a bit. The first book was science fiction, this one's a Bible story, and the next one (which is already written but the illustrations are taking a while) is a Japanese legend. I'm writing lots of different types of action-adventure books!

Anyway, the book is already available at Amazon for the Kindle and BN.com for the Nook, and will soon be at Smashwords in a variety of formats, all priced at $2.99. (I'll update the Smashwords link once I have it.) And, as I do with my other books, since the Smashwords-generated PDF won't be particularly attractive to a young reader, I have a special PDF version available here on site. The PDF will be available on the World Lit page at my Mick's Place blog.

Well, It's Not Golf But...

I'm really proud of this. I'm now a children's book writer!

Several months ago our local children's librarian convinced me to try writing some easy reader-type adventure books that would appeal particularly to boys. What I came up with is a sort of halfway point between easy readers and chapter books. I'm particularly happy because they sound more like adult books -- no "See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!"

The first book is a science-fiction story called The Krilt's Secret Weapon. It stars Captain Nexus and his first mate, Scopes, as they go on a mission to destroy a new secret weapon that threatens the Border Space Worlds. However, they're in for a surprise...

Most publishers say that kids don't read science fiction until around the 4th or 5th grade. My friend at the public library would disagree. Star Wars is incredibly popular with those young guys. I wanted to blend the idea of old movie serials with more modern serious SF (which can be written for this age group btw), so Captain Nexus is a blend of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, while I patterned Scopes after Doc Savage.

My "first grade novels" have a mostly first-grade vocabulary with two or three "advanced" words that the kids would know if they heard them. The books are between 2000 and 2500 words long -- longer than an easy reader, but nowhere near as long as a chapter book -- with chapters that are no more than 400 words long. (That's about the length of a short story for that age group.) And the books have a few full-color illustrations to ease the transition from picture-heavy books to text-heavy ones.

According to the librarian, I "nailed" the reading level. And they still sound "adult enough" that she said they might even work as hi-lo books, which are what adult literacy classes use.

The Krilt's Secret Weapon is available at Amazon for the Kindle, BN.com for the Nook, and at Smashwords in a variety of formats, all priced at $2.99. I'm writing my kids' books under the pen name Mick Michaels to keep them separate from my golf books, and I plan to have a special PDF version available at the Mick Michaels site as soon as I finish the site. (I'll have a link to it in this blog's sidebar once the site's up and running.) It's not available in paper yet simply because the color pictures would make it too expensive, but the librarian said that the kids were more eager to read on a computer anyway. What a surprise, huh?

So that's my newest project. See, I don't expect you to live and breathe golf... and I don't either.

Stop Coming Over-the-Top

Although I have other Quick Guides planned, Stop Coming Over-the-Top finishes a golf trilogy of sorts.

More Golf Swing Speed focused on getting more distance out of your downswing.

Accurate Iron Play focused on getting more accuracy out of your downswing.

And Stop Coming Over-the-Top focuses on the backswing and change of direction that makes both of those downswings not only possible but effective. Obviously this is the book that goes into detail about one-piece takeaways... but it covers material that goes into far more detail than I could ever hope to cover on this blog. I'm particularly proud of this one.

I specifically dealt with the causes and fixes for an over-the-top swing because that's the most common problem weekend golfers have -- and I came up with a very unusual but effective way to explain the mechanics of an over-the-top swing, if I do say so myself. But the book just generally covers the mechanics of a good takeaway and a good change of direction at the top of the backswing, so it will help any golfer trying to improve his or her swing.

This Quick Guide includes several drills and 35 diagrams (!) and it covers a variety of topics like:

• What really causes an over-the-top swing
• How to create a good shoulder coil with a big swing arc
• A simple way to get your swing on plane
• Why your lower body always starts your downswing… but not always correctly
• How to start your downswing correctly every time
• Why you have trouble "holding" your wrist cock until late in your downswing
• How to stop "chicken-winging"

It even includes a series of diagrams -- both left- and right-handed -- that can be used like a flipbook to identify where changes happen at various points during the swing. (Yes, you can even do it with the PDF.)

Stop Coming Over-the-Top is $4.99 (just like Accurate Iron Play, although SCOTT is noticeably longer). The PDF and EPUB versions are already available direct from me, and the Kindle version is well into the publishing process at Amazon. (BN.com is processing their EPUB version as well. The Smashwords versions will be along in a few days.)

I feel that with these three books I've done a pretty good job of making the basics of a good swing easy enough that a weekend player can build a solid game with a minimum of practice... and without spending a fortune to do it. I hope you guys like them.