My second book (written solo, not as a cowriter) appeared on Amazon this morning. The cover still hasn’t appeared on the site, but hopefully it will soon along with “search within this book” capability.
From the back cover: “There are things that happen in the world that are difficult and sometimes impossible to explain. At times, we are confronted with circumstances or situations over which we have no control. How we deal with those situations reveals much about our strongest beliefs, our dreams, and our fears. This collection of short stories explores specific instances of involvement with or belief in the supernatural in one North African country. The tales, all claiming to be true, were collected over several years while the author was living in Morocco.”
Readers will discover stories about fortune tellers, sorcery, jinn (genies) and more.
If you are interested, take a look here: http://www.amazon.com/Nowhere-Else-Turn-Matthew-Helmke/dp/0615264190/
Ubuntu and Open Office get shout outs in the acknowledgements, since I did all the writing and layout using them exclusively.
Barnes & Noble has listed the book, and already has the cover on their site at
You have such a cool-looking website, but you seriously did the formating of a BOOK with openoffice?
Doesn’t it look like ass? Why didn’t you use LaTeX or something?
I was considering LaTeX, but really, Open Office did a great job. I spent some time making a quality template for the book, with pre-set formatting for titles, headings, etc., and it worked well.
I’ve also used Open Office to co-write a book for Prentice Hall on Ubuntu, several magazine articles, and am using it on another computer book for a major publisher (still top secret) that is slated for release later in the year.
But OpenOffice fails at basic jobs, e.g. the size of spaces to get justification.
I have not had any trouble with it. I have used it since version 1.
More complete information is available here: http://matthewhelmke.com/node/310
The image is up on Amazon.