A bit of good news arrived yesterday from my agent: The original publisher has reverted all rights to my 1997 book Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet.
This means I'm now free to convert it into an ebook and publish it myself. I'll begin the job this summer and complete it by fall.
Gin Fizz, for those unfamiliar with it, tells how I learned to fly, obtained a pilot's certificate, and had a literary adventure with it. This was retracing the pioneering 1911 coast-to-coast flight of Calbraith Perry Rodgers in a flimsy Wright Brothers-built biplane called the Vin Fiz. (I used a little two-seater Cessna 150 dubbed Gin Fizz for the re-enactment.)
The reviews were encouraging, especially that in the New York Times Book Review, but sales were dismal, primarily because of a bottom-line upheaval at HarperCollins just before the book was published, a tempest that resulted in the departure of my editor. The book was "orphaned," as they say in the trade, without anyone to push its promotion.
Maybe the ebook will find a bigger audience.
That should be a great story. Having been a toy pilot - and having learned to fly in a C152 the experience of doing a cross country in one of those itty bitty flying machines should be a great read.
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