Uncategorized

Welcome to the first day of the rest of this blog! Although this page may look almost unchanged to regular readers of the blog, this is actually now the Home page of the entire website. Launching this website two months ago coincided with the publication of the ebook Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences. For two months, then, faithful readers and visitors have seen the book announcement as the Home page. To readers expecting to see the book announcement, the change is obvious.

Beginning with this post, that announcement and all information about the book move to their own pages, tabbed The Book above, and the blog, dancingpastthedark,  moves its ever-changing self front and center to become the welcome page.

• If you are looking for information about the book, click on its photo at the left or on the Book tab above.
• If you are looking for information about near-death experiences, you can start with any of the tabs or blog posts accessible on this page or in the Archives.
• If it’s late at night (or too early in the morning) and you just need something good to read, take your pick.

Continuing thanks to Susan Pomeroy, the Website Geographer, for making this look easy!

And yes, work moves ahead on producing Dancing Past the Dark as a trade paperback book. It should be available by late summer.

Thanks to you all!

You may have noticed that something about the blog started looking just a bit different a few days ago. That’s because dancingpastthedark.com has moved from being simply a blog, to a new server and a new self as a full-fledged website.  Yes, it looks pretty much the same, but you are now on that website.

Now we have not only the blog posts but wonderful toys, like the map widget ‘way down in the footer, showing where in the world all visitors are from. Get a load of globalism in action, right here and now!  The auxiliary pages have been expanded (lots of new information about the author, for instance, and new articles, and a list of NDE resource organizations added). There’s even a link directly to Amazon, should you want to purchase the book for your Kindle. For any other e-reader, including the Nook, Kobo has the book in stock now, and we’ll get that link up soon. Barnes & Noble should have the book available later this week. I am looking for an international distributor; stay tuned.

Thank you all so much for your interest and support!

That luminous object to the left is the cover of Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences. Yes, it’s almost here.

The digital book will be available for Nook, Kindle, and other e-readers, almost certainly by early April. For readers outside of North America, I am looking for a distributor. And for everyone who wants a “real” book in paper, that’s my next project. Hopefully there will be a paperback by the end of 2012.

Multinational Discovery

Visitor stats are providing astonishing news about the blog. Here is the summary for yesterday, March 11:

Country	Views
United States	62
Austria	8
Argentina	4
United Kingdom	3
Germany	2
Brazil	2
Philippines	1
Ecuador	1
Iceland	1
France	1
Mexico	1

Someone sent me this the other day. Sorry not to be able to credit the designer.
It’s worth the squint.

I had told myself along about June that if the book did not have a traditional publisher by the end of the year, I would consider going with an ebook. My concern was, would it be respectable?

Then, in early fall, one of my advisors, a highly experienced book editor and retired university professor, himself an author many times over, returned from a summer of lecturing in Europe and told me that his books are doing well there as ebooks. It’s the way to go, he said.

Hearing that from someone of his stature was all it took. Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences will make its appearance as an ebook. What this means for you, as readers, is, first, that you will get it a good two years earlier than if it were coming out in paper. You will get it at half the cost. What it means to IANDS is that a portion of the purchase price will go to help support the Association. What this means for the book is that it will have to find its way to readers not by a publisher’s efforts but by word of mouth, blogs, and social media.

As I write this, it’s not quite four hours short of the New Year, and the project is right on schedule: I have just put the last touches on the PDF file that will go to the indexer the first business day of the New Year. Bruce Greyson is writing the foreword. By the end of January, the book will be ready for conversion to ebook language. By March or April, it should go public. So, fire up your Nook, your new Kindle, your iPad and other e-readers, or the app on your laptop, and start telling people. It’s coming!

If you know of a blog, an organization, or an online group that might want to know about the book or be interested in a guest blog post, please add a comment to let me know about them, or send them the blog URL (soon to be a website, also–www.dancingpastthedark.com). Who knew we would ever want to go viral!

I am so appreciative of your interest, your comments, your emails. You’ve made 2011 a good year, and my best wishes go to all of us for the year ahead. Just think what’s possible in 2012, whatever the Mayan calendar may mean!