New Book My Facebook Notes is Out

My latest book, My Facebook Notes, is finally published and is available at Smashwords, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. I expect it to appear soon in other online bookstores that Smashwords distributes to. So, what's it about?

When I first joined Facebook back in 2009, I immediately noticed the Notes feature. My friends were using it to post inspirational articles but I wanted to be different. I decided to use it to write about my experiences about my travels. Those series of posts later became my first book, Funny Stories from My Travels (now retitled, Travel Mashups and Mishaps).

Then, I began writing smaller stories, funny anecdotes, inspirational notes, and various other things. I had dozens of those notes and might have gone on and on if not for a change in Facebook.

Around September 2020, Facebook announced that they were discontinuing the Notes feature. People could no longer make new notes but the old notes would still be available for viewing.

I was saddened by the loss of an outlet for my creative juices. I immediately began copying the notes to MS Word files and kept them in my computer in case Facebook decided to delete them. One day, a little more than two years later, I got the idea to compile these notes and put them into a book. That's how My Facebook Notes came to be.

I pasted them into a single Word file and arranged them as to topics. There were my speeches, my tips on public speaking, memories, tips on writing and publishing books, and other notes and stories. There are 150 of those notes in the book.

After the book was finished, I uploaded them to Smashwords and soon got the message that it had been accepted and was now being distributed to other ebook distributors.

I chose the title My Facebook Notes because, first of all, it is a compilation of my Facebook Notes. Second, I thought it was unique, that other people might not think of sharing their own notes. I later learned, I was wrong.

While searching for the book by Googling it, I discovered that there were other books with the same title and, they too, were about notes that the authors converted into books. It was not an original idea after all.

No worries though. Titles cannot be copyrighted so it's common to find books that have the same titles. There are even movies that have the same title. I can change the title but I'm not going to do that just yet.