The Living Rock hard copies sold out

Well, it's happened -- the last box of printed copies of The Living Rock has gone out the door and appropriately, to one of my strongest supporters: Emily and AJ at Pinnacle Sports, West End. Apart from copies I gave to each participant in the project, the first sale in 2015 was to Brisbane climber Alex Mougenot. It's been quite a journey during which I have met so many wonderful people making the experience as rewarding as compiling the book itself. Of the 1100 copies I hauled home from the docks in Brisbane -- ably assisted by my great nephew Trystan and a heavily overloaded car and trailer -- I estimate that around two-thirds have been sold to people I have met face-to-face. In our current frenzied online age, that's quite an achievement, I reckon. 

But there have been so many supporters of this project along the way: Greg Nunn and Mountain Designs, who hosted the 2015 launch and on-sold many, many copies for me over several years until the company's sad demise; Teresa Cause from the Boonah-based Far Outdoors -- always an enthusiastic supporter and friend; Glenn Tempest from Open Spaces in Natimuk who has managed to convince Victorian climbers to read about the exploits of their Queensland colleagues; Binna Burra Lodge, with its connections to the high-achieving members of the Groom family, embraced the book from the start and still has copies for sale following the devastating bushfires of 2019; K2-Basecamp in Brisbane has been one of the key Brisbane-based distributors; and there are the many others -- local libraries, small family-run bookshops (like Petrarch's in Launceston and The Hobart Bookshop), tourist information centres at the Glass House Mountain, Canungra, Rathdowney and even one in the northern NSW village of Tyalgum. Thank you one and all!

I've decided not to have another print run of the book, mainly because of the extraordinary effort required and to enable me to include additional digital material. And so the next version will be an Apple Books production and hopefully, I will have completed it before the end of the year. It will include additional photographs (including aerials of southeast Queensland mountain areas), some new climbing stories, corrections (thank you to all those who have contacted me about the inevitable errors and inaccuracies), and some early climbing videos -- silent 8mm film converted to digital format of climbing activities in Queensland from the late 1960s. 

Hopefully you'll find this e-version as engaging as the print copies. I apologise to all of you whom will be unable to access this without an Apple device but at present, alternative online publishing formats do not allow me the project file size I need to present all of the visual material. Here's a preview of the e-book cover...talk to you when I'm closer to going live.