I’m participating in Smashwords’ “Read an Ebook Week Sale,” from March 3 to March 9, 2019. During that time, Files that Last and Yesterday’s Songs Transformed will both be available for 50% off! These are very different books, but I’m dealing with change and preservation in both of them. This is your chance to get them at an especially good price.
Here are a couple of discounts for your holiday shopping.
Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek is available at 60% off with the coupon code WZ63B. It’s aimed at any computer-literate readers who want to keep their data usable for many years.
You can get Yesterday’s Songs Transformed: A Historical Tour of Song Rewriting at 30% off with the coupon code LS92Y.
Please share this information with your friends. My book sales help to support this blog. The coupons expire December 26, 2018.
Update: I should have mentioned how you can give Smashwords books as gifts. Recipients do have to register with Smashwords to accept the gift, and there’s not much I can do about that. But if you want to buy a copy (very important!) and give the recipient the PDF, I won’t object to that. Just don’t share a single purchase, please. We writers gotta eat.
The permalink for Yesterday’s Songs Transformed on this site is now https://www.garymcgath.com/YST. Feel free to post it where people might be interested.
I’ve uploaded an update to Yesterday’s Songs Transformed to fix some formatting issues. If you’ve already bought the book, you can downloaded the new version for free. The Epub version looks much better now, with properly single-spaced verses.
If you haven’t bought it yet, what are you waiting for? Don’t forget the coupon code QV69U, which gets you a 30% discount through August 20.
Finally! Yesterday’s Songs Transformed is available on Smashwords!
Did you know that “Charlie on the M.T.A.” started out as a song about a ship that never returned? That the “Streets of Laredo” follow a path from St. James’ Hospital in London? That “Yankee Doodle” originally was a song mocking the colonists?
This book follows the ways songs have changed and evolved over the years. It starts from the Middle Ages and conducts a tour that leads to Mad magazine, the Smothers Brothers, and Weird Al. It looks at where protest songs came from and how they changed with the times.
YST makes no pretense of being a scholarly book. It’s simply a look, with lots of quotations, at changing song lyrics and what lies behind them. You may learn a few bits of history you hadn’t known, and hopefully you’ll enjoy the ride.
The list price on Smashwords is $4.99, but I’m thanking readers of this blog by offering it at just $3.49 with the coupon code QV69U till August 20.
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Yesterday’s Songs Transformed is getting close to completion. I’m working on the introduction, which traditionally is one of the last things you write. It deals with the relationship of the book to Tomorrow’s Songs Today. TST is about filk music. YST grows out of my interest in filk. It puts the rewriting of song lyrics into a bigger context. I expect a large part of my audience to be people interested in filk, people who love the idea of replacing old lyrics with new ones. I also hope that other music lovers will get enjoyment out of it.
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This weekend I made a big step forward on my book, Yesterday’s Songs Transformed. I took some of the accumulated material and started building chapters out of it. Here’s what I have so far:
