Eric Hammel

S.F. Bay Area

http://www.EricHammelBooks.com

I am a reasonably well-known military historian with forty books to my credit. I started out at age fifteen and have been at it for nearly fifty years. I ran my own advertising agency until the early 1980s, when I was finally able to support myself solely as a writer. I used technical, promotional, marketing, and business skills learned during my advertising career to make the leap into self-publishing in 1985, when the only way to bring back a book caught in a publisher bankruptcy was to do it myself. That started a dual career as a published and self-published author until I got fed up with the “mainstream” publishing world in 1992 and went into my own publishing business full time. I ran that business successfully until 2001, when I cashed out and went to work for a few years as an in-house acquisitions and line editor. Since 2004, I have had ten pictorials published by another house, but I have since rekindled my imprint (Pacifica Military History) and placed every narrative I can–29–in print via POD or, in a few cases, eBook only. I also help a few author buddies keep their out-of-print books in print and have reissued, as PODs, a few books for authors I published when I was running everything offset. I recently self-publishing my first novel, Love and Grace, which is both a coming-of-age and midlife-crisis story. It’s up on Kindle and Sony and available in a POD trade paper edition. What I hope will be my last military book, a pictorial entitled Islands of Hell, came out in March 2010. From here on out, I hope, it’ll all be fiction, if I can muster the ambition.

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A little update as of October 2010. I lied . . . to myself. I have another military pictorial in production with a publisher I never heretofore did work for. I’ve gotten very active selling magazine articles excerpted from my books. I keep adding other people’s titles to my two active imprints, both as ebooks and PODs. I have more non-fiction books planned (because I achieved terminal boredom in my official week-long retirement), but I’m not going at them like the crazed two-book-a-year lunatic I used to be until last year. I’m easing into photography after a long lapse. I spend as much time as I can with my new granddaughter. And my wife drags me out of the house every once in awhile. So, I guess this is the future I spent all those years trying to reach. Have hope!