Those links no longer work. I think they reached their freshness dates.
No, I don't make much on book sales. Even if I had sold the nearly 600 books that people have now gotten for free, I would have made less than two dollars per book. Right now while the book is free, neither Amazon nor I make one red cent. I haven't made more than a couple hundred dollars on the book since I self-published it three months ago, and that's ok, really. Any pocket change I make from the book is just icing on the cake. Right now, I choose to share what I wrote with all of you and my fellow running brothers and sisters around the world who choose to accept this gift. Crazy? Only if I were motivated by insignificant amounts of money.
Choose what you want to believe, but I never wrote Running: A Long Distance Love Affair hoping to make much money from it. It was truly a labor of love for the sport of running. Read the preface of the book, and you'll see why I first started writing it. I had a great college professor who actually let students write a "multi-genre" paper about something they loved, so I chose running. That little (about 35 pages) paper then grew over the past two decades to the approximately 182 pages it is now. My own running story isn't over yet because I still run and I still experience many things physically, mentally, and even spiritually while running. But I had to finally decide when to pull the trigger on the final copy, and that came this past year when I reached the age of 52.
My book was never intended to be the next great American novel, and I frankly don't have that ability. My sister does, though, having published 5-6 novels herself. But I think I tell a good story from the heart. Yes, it leaves a writer vulnerable to criticism and even derision to write about your most personal feelings and experiences, but that's what honest writers do. That's what greater writers such as Dr. George Sheehan did, and that's what inferior writers like myself do. Running: A Long Distance Love Affair simply tells one man's running story. It's no better or worse than the stories many of you could tell if you really wanted to and could write at least at my level.
Anyway, love me, hate me, or be indifferent, but I think real runners, at all levels, will find something valuable and at least thought-provoking in my book. We all share a larger running story. Please enjoy my chapter of our story. Thanks.