Where did I put my keys to this thing?

I'm back.  Hopefully somebody missed me.  I missed you, dear readers.  I was away not because I'm a slacker (although I felt like slacking many times) or because I had run out of things to say (this is a blog which, unfortunately, by it's very nature tends toward vapid discourse so why should that stop me?). 

I was away because I was too busy to be here which I know is a mortal sin in the blogosphere, however, please forgive me because I was working on the printed word in another form - I was bringing a printed book to life (that's it over there to your left designed in-house by our very talented Matt Washburn).

Now that sounds more interesting (and a bit more dramatic) than it was/is.  And, no, I didn't write the book. Our CEO, Chris Mercer, wrote the book and did it quite well - using his blog (www.merceronvalue.com), by the way, as a drafting tool.

The title of the book is Buy-Sell Agreements: Ticking Time Bombs or Reasonable Resolutions?. 

While that may not sound like a page-turner to some of you, it's a very readable and useful book (350+ pages) and of interest to many more people than an average reader of this blog might think. 

This is a self-published book that we have been working on for over a year.  Several folks here provided review and editing.  When I picked up the manuscript in November thinking that we were almost done, I discovered that it still needed quite a bit of editing.  We had to get it to market by the end of 2006 and if I didn't stop everything I was doing right before Thanksgiving and work almost exclusively on the book, it wouldn't have happened.  I won't go into all the details here.  I will share those with you in a future post.

I will say, however, that this book was our first experience with print-on-demand.  I'll share the advantages and disadvantages of this technology in a day or so.

In the meantime, if you want to purchase the book, it's only $79 - a steal!