Drum roll, please, as it’s time for the big announcement!

As of this week, I have two books available on Amazon:

101 Travel Bits: The Alaska Highway

101 Travel Bits: The Overseas Highway

Back when I started this blog, there were two main themes: travel and Choppy (usually together). Over the years, the blog has sort of evolved away from the travel, but I’ve always retained my love for it. Since beginning the blog, I’ve also written a few books, including one on traveling with Choppy, none of which have been published despite years of looking for an agent or publisher.

While working on getting those books published, I started working on some books about travel. These weren’t really guidebooks, but books of facts about various locations. Here’s how I describe the books on Amazon:

Travel Bits™ are not your typical guidebooks. In fact, they aren’t guidebooks at all!

Each collection of Travel Bits consists of 101 “bits” of information about one of the great places to visit in the world. This could be a “bit” of history, a “bit” of information on a tourist attraction, or a “bit” of something else interesting about the location.

A Travel Bits collection is not intended to be a guidebook to any particular location. You will not find the maps or pictures you would expect in a guidebook in any Travel Bits collection. No Travel Bits collection contains any pictures. Instead, each book gives you information a typical guidebook ignores: history, fun facts and interesting sights along the way.

This isn’t to say that there are no pictures involved in a Travel Bits collection. Each Travel Bits collection is optimized for reading as an e-book. This format makes each Travel Bit interactive, with links to official websites and other information where it is appropriate. Thus, instead of raising the cost of the book to include pictures, we take advantage of the Internet’s enormous wealth of information to take you to where the pictures already exist.

In case it isn’t obvious, because of the interactive nature of e-books, we highly recommend reading the Travel Bits collections using an e-book reader, as the print versions do not have these interactive features.

Thank you, and please enjoy this entry in the Travel Bits series!

That’s the basic summary of the books in this series. Right now, there are just the two books on the Alaska Highway and the Overseas Highway, but there are several more being planned. Next up will be Key West in about two or three months. After that, I have several ideas but have yet to choose the specific location.

Right now, the book is solely available on Kindle, because I’ve enrolled in Kindle Select. This means if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read the book for free right now. Unfortunately for some of you, this also means that it won’t be available on other e-book platforms until June.

If you don’t use an e-reader, there will be paperback editions coming in the next week or so (the book is optimized for e-reading, so it requires a few changes before it can get published that way – one of my weekend plans is to get the book in paperback format). For both the paperback and other e-reader editions, I will make announcements when the books are available.

If you choose to read one (or both!) of the books, I thank you in advance (with extra special thanks for anyone who leaves a review!). Over the coming weeks, I’ll periodically post some excerpts from the books here on the blog so you can see if it’s something that interests you.

There’s also a website for the series, www.101travelbits.com, where you can poke around and learn a little more about the books.

Below are links excerpts from each of the two books – I hope you enjoy them enough to go out and buy one or both. If you aren’t sure yet, stay tuned to the blog for more excerpts to help you decide that you should definitely buy them!