My Book Release – and Other Ultra-belated Updates
I released my book in 2024 but never got around to writing a blog about it, so here it is— (better late than never, right?)
In a nutshell, the book explains my story of traveling around the world for the past 15 or so years with little money (and it also criticizes our society every now and again).
I decided to write it when I got fed up with people saying things like, “Sasha, I wish I could live like you, but I don’t have enough money!” I wanted to explain that I barely ever had much money and that traveling around the world doesn’t require a lot of money. It does, however, require a different kind of lifestyle and world view. I wanted to explain what this lifestyle and world view were all about, so I started writing.
I wrote a couple of chapters in 2017, put it down for all of 2018, wrote a bit more in 2019, put it down again, then spent 2020-2024 mostly agonizing over it. The book was a much more difficult task than I had expected. At first, I couldn’t even make an accurate timeline of where I’d lived over the years, so I needed time to work through it. I looked at photo albums, read through notes, journals, and emails that I’ve kept over the years, consulted several people, and dug into my memory. Little by little the memories came back to me and the book started to come together.
Around this time, I fell in love with Tio and decided to stay with him in northern Spain while I worked on my book. We lived in a little town by the Mediterranean Sea. It sounds nice, but it wasn’t always easy for me. Before Spain, I had been traveling freely, moving countries every few months or so, limited only by the money game and my visa situation. But once I overstayed my Spanish visa, I couldn’t leave the country. I was afraid I could get deported if I left on a whim without any documents… And getting those “documents” was complicated and took a lot of time (4 years it turned out!). So, I stayed in one place and forced myself to work. To finish my book, no matter how hard it was.
I got writer’s block, I had breakdowns, I took breaks, I got better, I got worse again. I finished it (or so I thought), I hiked across the Pyrenees, I re-read it, I started editing again.
One thing I didn’t realize when I started is that writing the first draft is easy (and often fun), but editing is not. I spent years editing the damn book. Editing, editing, editing, then learning about creative writing and editing, editing more, learning more, editing again. Oh and then proofreading! Of course, I also had to pay attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, and a lot more. And don’t forget, I was in Spain this whole time as an illegal immigrant basically, and I had no working rights, almost no money, and no legal means of making money, so there was no way I could afford to pay someone to help me edit or proofread my book. And since the first draft was 160,000 words, I felt bad to even ask my friends to proofread it (though my stepsister did give it a go, thank you, Melissa!).
Wait, how did I afford to do this in the first place? To live for years without a job? What about food, rent… living expenses? At first I had a bit of savings (and got an extra $1,000 during covid), then I made a campaign, which helped a bit. Thank you very much to all those who contributed! (And special thanks to Roma, as he really saved me!)
But eventually Tio and I couldn’t afford to live in our own place, so we moved in with his family, who also helped us a lot. I didn’t want to be a complete freeloader though, so I did what I could to contribute. Since I didn’t have a working permit, let’s just say I “volunteered” for a dive center and this helped me get food and contribute to rent, somehow.
So, I spent the summers “volunteering” as a divemaster (guiding people underwater), and in November or so, I was able to get back to work on my book.
^This is my work uniform :D
Once I finished editing and proofreading, I had to learn about formatting and design. I didn’t think much about formatting before I actually had to do it, but it turns out there’s a lot to it! Font (some fonts are free, some are not), font size, headings, the spaces between the headings and text, the page numbers (adding page numbers was surprisingly difficult!), the outside margins, the inside margins (a bit complicated because you don’t know exactly how much space the glue/binding will take up), the spaces above and below the text, justifying the text and then splitting up words to make it look neat (that took a lot of time!), choosing the physical book size, and much more. All of this was way more difficult than I had anticipated, but eventually I managed it using LibreOffice- a wonderful open source program similar to Microsoft Word.
So once the formatting was done and I chose the trim size, I could figure out how many pages my book would be- and then I would be ready to create the cover, spine, and back cover. This was a whole other adventure. I thought this would be as easy as choosing a nice photo (and I have so many!) and just slapping on some text. As always, I was wrong. Very wrong.
Thankfully, Tio came to my rescue. And I cannot thank him enough for this! Thank you, thank you, Tio! He helped me a ton (with the whole process of writing my book actually, but especially with the cover). We went through a ton of different photos and designs, lots of different ideas, and eventually we landed on this one:
I love the picture and how it goes around the entire book. I love the spine and how Tio added a “little me” to it :) I love the back cover design with a few additional photos, and for the most part, I like the front cover. Once it was mostly done, I went crazy going over perhaps thousands of different fonts for the title and rest of the text on the front cover. And in all honesty, I’m still not 100% satisfied with that text but at one point I had to just let it go (else I probably would have ended up in a mental hospital :D ).
Actually, at one point I even paid someone on Fiverr to see what they could come up with, and this was what I got:
I probably should have put a comma in the title (“Big World, Small Sasha”), but I’m not sure this designer would have understood the idea either way. I also wanted a more humble cover, not one that screamed “BIG WORLD SMALL” and “15 YEARS.” Anyway, I only paid $20 so I couldn’t have expected much. I couldn’t afford any more than that so I looked no further.
Here are a few other attempts Tio and I made along the way (there were many many many more than this):
Then, after the cover was mostly done, I had to write the text for the back cover. This was also much harder than I expected (and I’m also still not 100% satisfied with it, but couldn’t torture myself any longer).
Then I had to buy an ISBN ($100) and write some other bits of text.
And then I had to figure out how to print the damn thing.
At this point, I was 100% sure that I was going to self-publish and that I would not even submit my book to any publishing companies. My main reasons were:
- I wanted to make my book available for free online, and no publisher would allow you to do that. (They could even sue you for that, as they would be the “owner” of your book.)
- If my book were accepted by a publisher, I would have to spend many many more years editing my book with their editors.
- The publisher would own the book and would have the final word about the content, the cover, the title, the price, and basically everything else.
- They pay pennies for the books sold and may not even provide advertising, so it just didn’t seem worth it.
So, self-publishing it was! Unfortunately, the easiest way seemed to be through Amazon (KDP). It was also the cheapest way to get printed proof copies of my book. You make an account, upload a PDF, upload a cover, and (as long as you have all the dimensions right), you can order a physical proof copy of your book before you publish it. I ordered my first proof copy about a year before I actually published it. It came from Amazon Germany and cost $15 (including delivery).
I was really happy with the first proof copy. To my surprise, the formatting looked pretty good and the quality of the book was great. It looked almost like any book you’d find in a shop (if you ignored the huge “Not for Resale” label on the cover).
Of course, I read through it again, fixed a bunch of mistakes, changed the cover text, then ordered another proof copy (another $15).
This time I got a bad surprise. The quality of the second book was awful. The cover looked cheap, the spine was poorly glued, and on the inside of the book there were black and white lines running down some of the pages! This time, the book was printed by Amazon Italy.
I contacted Amazon, sent them pictures and complained about this Italian printer. They sent me back my $15 and said that this was a one-time printer problem and will never happen again.
I ordered another copy straight away (and each time I ordered one, I had to wait 1-2 weeks to receive it)… and this third copy was even worse! There were more lines down the pages, the spine cracked in about a week, and for some reason, the front cover had an erection…
After this, we (Tio and I) decided to change a couple of things: we changed the paper from white to cream and the cover from matte to glossy.
The next proof copy was better. It still came from that Italian printer, but the quality of the paper looked better, there were no more lines, and the cover behaved a bit better too. It still didn’t look nearly as good as that first proof copy from Germany, but it was more or less okay. (And btw I never again received a copy that looked the same as that first proof copy, even after I published my book and ordered it to a friend’s house in Germany. My conspiracy is that Amazon prints your first proof copy from a better quality printer, then the rest of your books come from a cheaper source…)
Next, I needed to find an alternative to Amazon. I didn’t want Amazon to be the only option, and I also wanted some more reliable, better quality books. I found a company called IngramSpark that also did print on demand. The quality of their books was much better, but the problem was that they were much more expensive. IngramSpark has printers in the US and the UK, but not in Europe, so I had to order books from the UK and pay for expensive shipping and import tax. (And they also have fees for uploading new drafts, etc.)
So I paid about $25 for one copy of my own book. Yes, things were getting expensive, especially since each time I ordered a proof copy, I was not quite happy with something, and I didn’t want to publish it until I was satisfied.. so I ordered many, many proof copies (mostly the cheaper Amazon ones though).
After about a year of fixing spelling/formatting/design problems and spending lots of money on more and more proof copies, eventually, in spring of 2024, I just had to let it go. To release it, to free it, and to free myself from it. That was how I felt at that point. Like I had been eaten alive by my own book, my own work, so much that it felt weird to let it go. Almost like a victim of an abusive relationship letting go of the abuser. Weird that I felt that way about my own work, I know, but that’s kind of how I felt.
So once I released it, I didn’t even feel like I wanted to celebrate or even talk about it anymore. I just wanted to let it go and move on with my life. But of course, I had to at least make an announcement on social media. I mean, I had been talking about this book since 2017, how could I not tell people that it was finally and actually finished and published?!
So I made a post and to my surprise, got a big response. Many “likes”, over 100 comments, many congrats, wow, it felt great. Finally.
I even got some money thanks to donations. I made the book available for free as a PDF, and made it possible for people to make donations if they wanted to. I was surprised at how many people responded and even donated. A big thank you to everyone! In total, in donations, I made $798, which is way more than I expected, and way more than I received from selling books.
Special thanks to Jocelyn Maheux, Joseph Edes, Andre Videla, and Vasilii Leitman for your very generous donations! And of course to Roma and everyone else for any donation, purchase, feedback, or nice review!
If you’re curious about how much I made by selling books, I did the calculations:
As of November 2025, I have sold 43 books through Amazon, and made $174.43. Though some sales (2 that I know of from Amazon India, for example), were not reported and I never received compensation for them. How many more have never been reported by Amazon? How could I know?…
Meanwhile, I spent about $125 on Amazon proof and author copies.
Through IngramSpark, I sold 5 books and got a total of $22.17.
I spent over $370 on IngramSpark. Though that was mostly for the books I printed to give to friends and family. Oh and btw, I also made a “slightly censored” version for my parents and brother, hoping they wouldn’t even read it, and in the end, my mother had Siri read the uncensored PDF out loud, while my father translated the uncensored PDF from English to Russian and read it like that! Oh well.
So if it weren’t for donations, I would have made negative $298 by publishing my book. Thanks to donations, I am up by about $500. Still not much for over five years of work, but money wasn’t the reason I wrote this book, so that’s fine :).
Once my book was released, Tio and his family threw me a little surprise party and made me a cake with a picture of my book. Very sweet. Multso-mesk familia!
And around this time, I got even more good news- my Spanish residency was approved! Finally!
So. Great. I published my book, I got Spanish residency. And now Tio and I also had a plan: buy a motorhome, live in it, travel, maybe do something more important. Of course we didn’t have enough money to buy a motorhome, so I went straight back to work at the dive center.
I worked at Calypso from April to November last year, Tio and I saved every penny we could (and also borrowed some money), and somehow, by the end of 2024, we actually managed to buy a 20-year-old Fiat Ducato motorhome. Long story short, we moved into it last December and have spent several months fixing it up and traveling around Spain in it. (See our videos on PeerTube or YouTube.)
Unfortunately, all of this busyness (and my complete burnout), meant that I did not promote my book whatsoever (aside from the initial announcements). And once the 2025 summer season came along and we were out of money again, I got back to the job game. Well, in all honesty working in scuba diving is a lot more fun than the “job game” I wrote about in my book, but it’s still very intense and exhausting during high season (June-Sept). On the plus side, I lived rent-free in a super nice apartment with two great friends, I dove a lot, saved money, and had a lot of good times with our team. So thanks to everyone from Calypso! Now that the season’s over, Tio and I are back in our motorhome. We plan to head south soon to escape the cold weather (our moto is not all that prepared for winter), and then we will see where the road takes us next.
As for the book, I’m just happy that once and for all, I can say that I published it. That’s all.
If you enjoy my book, please feel free to share it or write a nice review! Or contact me- I’d be happy to hear from you!
Hi there, I just came about this blog post on Mastodon and really would like to read your book, but sadly it’s not available as an ebook? I just read ebooks since normal books are to cumbersome to use for me. Why didn’t you publish it as a Kindle book too? Or at least as ePub via your blog or so?
Greets
Hendrik
Hey Hendrik, thanks for your interest! There is an ebook available as a PDF (just click on the picture of my book at https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/book/). I initially wanted to make a Kindle/ePub version but was too busy and burned out by the time I published the book. And later on people seemed quite happy with the PDF so I didn’t think it was necessary or worth it to re-format for ePub. I thought I’d only do it if people requested and you are actually the first person who requested it :D So I will see, if I have some time I can try to do that in the future :)