Mostly popular history.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechli...

Everything so far has only been published in Czech, though.

I started writing a popular history book a few years ago and found it really tough once I actually dug into it! Kudos on publishing so many and with such good reviews. Can I ask if you have an academic background in history?

I do not. It is just my passion since I learnt to read.

Around the age of 35 I realized that there was a lot of interesting and weird stories to share with others and I started narrating them in an online magazine published by my friend. For example, life and death of Hernando de Soto, the unsuccessful conquistador. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto).

People liked the format and actually started to send micropayments. It still took several years before I actually tried to put together a book. I started a crowd-sourcing attempt which, to my (pleasant) surprise gathered over 300 per cent of the target sum.

Now I am hooked to the lifestyle :-)

I’m surprised that you can live off of history books! Very cool.

Believe me, I was surprised too. Very surprised. The stereotype of a famished author is pretty strong here :)

Thing is, without middle-men (distributors, bookshops), most of the revenue accrues to you directly. Long live e-commerce.

I can imagine that you have built some sort of strong followers community to promote your books? I mean how do readers find your books?

I write quite a lot of (commentary) articles on my blog and some other Czech portals reprint them. This helped me build up a community of readers.