I first noticed Leigh Tate's 5 Acres & A Dream The Book when it popped up in the top 100 Sustainable Living books list on Amazon (where many of my books reside on their good days). Once I realized the book was a self-published paperback, I became even more intrigued because, while self-published non-fiction ebooks are relatively easy to get into Amazon's top 100 lists, paperbacks tend to be trickier. In case you're curious about reproducing Leigh's success, I suspect it boils down to:

• An excellent title and cover.
• Choosing a black-and-white interior, which allowed her to include lots of great photos but to still price the book very reasonably.
• Quite a bit of promotion at launch (podcasts, a well-established blog with lots of fans, etc.)
  
• And, of course, an excellent book.

Okay, self-publishing tips aside, I'm sure many of you are simply interested in the book itself. If you enjoy our blog, chances are that 5 Acres & A Dream The Book will be right up your alley. Leigh explains that her book isn't a how to or a why to; it's simply the story of how she and her husband found their farm and spent four years bringing the land to life.

Perhaps the most powerful part of the book is the way Leigh records changes in the couple's thought processes as they began to homestead, transitions that I suspect are near-universal since Mark and I worked our way across many of the same hurdles during our early years here. That's why I particularly recommend Leigh's book to folks who are still in the dreaming stage or who have recently moved to a homestead. Chances are, her book will help lower your own hurdles, in the process making the obstacles look more familiar when the time comes for you to leap across.

As a more established homesteader, I mostly read Leigh's book as a fun farm memoir, but I definitely pored over the chapter on feeding animals with homegrown products. The Tates experimented with planting field corn (a heavy nitrogen feeder, but easy to grow and process), wheat (very tough to process, but chickens will eat the grains out of the head), Ozark Razorback cowpeas (can be fed to goats in the pod), and sunflowers (can be fed in shells to goats). Since we're just getting started with goats, Leigh's tips were very timely, especially since she's very realistic about homestead-scale processing and storage.

Want to enjoy 5 Acres & a Dream The Book? You're in luck because one reader will win a copy just by entering the giveaway below! If you don't win and want a free sampling of Leigh's writing, head on over to her blog for cute pig photos and much more. Leigh is also branching out into ebooks, and her first two offerings, How to Preserve Eggs and How to Make a Buck Rag are now available on Amazon for 99 cents each. I hope you enjoy the ebooks and paperback as much as I did!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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