Book Review – 17th Century Tottenville History Comes Alive by Angie Mangino

This short account seems to be aimed primarily at the people who inhabit this part of Staten Island in the USA, but I found it a fascinating read which means that it has a much wider reach.  My knowledge of the history of this area is sketchy at best as it barely touches on the accounts of British colonial history I was taught in English schools.  I am therefore grateful to this book for extending my knowledge in this area.  It is obviously well researched as is evident from the extensive bibliography.

Some facts were repeated more often than was needed and a little more detail, some photographs and perhaps a map would strengthen the writing.  But that said I was very impressed by the writer’s style.  The book looks like it was first composed as a blog and the author has indicated that there are more books/blogs to follow.  But it has more potential than that and I suspect that if the author wrote another book as a more in depth study (Check out my review of Tim Hannigan’s Brief History of Indonesia) then I for one would buy it.

Keith Jahans

Available on Amazon as an Ebook

The Enhanced Ebook

In the early years of this millennium, I produced my first novel, Cogrill’s Mill, as an ebook in pdf and took it to the London Book Fair on a CD.  But the publishers or agents I spoke to there did not want to know.  A few years later someone contacted me to ask if I had any ebooks for sale, but I had already set up my own publishing company and was busy producing my first books in print on demand to spare the time to revisit the market for ebooks.  Then just a short time later a number of large companies entered the arena offering a variety of different ebook formats and the digital publishing revolution began.

Around this time I met someone at a book publishing conference in London who said that the way to go was to publish in Epub format.  He told me about the success of Apple’s enhanced ebook publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  I was immediately interested and went about producing enhanced Epub editions of a few of my own books.  Unfortunately, my marketing strategy at the time was not very good and the books languished on the Apple iBook store without selling.  Instead, I concentrated selling my ebooks on Amazon using their marketing strategy, but I could find no way to produce a multimedia ebook in the Amazon Kindle format in the same way I could for Epub.

Now, as a reward for my readers, I have made the enhanced Epub edition of my first collection of short stories, Crime and Passion written under my pennames of Luke Johnson and Jack Lindsey, available as a free download from Apple Books for portable devices and from Kobo.com.  If you like the stories you are welcome to seek out my other books at http://peatmore.com.  Please leave an honest review for any Peatmore Press book you read as this will help promote my writing.

Keith Jahans

The Free enhanced ebook is available for download at
https://books.apple.com/us/book/id879916042 and at
https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/crime-and-passion-3