By Jesse Bertel

Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the U.S. and author Nate Nelson recently published a new humorous gift book for all the pickleball players out there. The book, “The Steps to Pickleball Recovery,” which is self-published, looks at the stages of the love and addiction for the game, framed as addiction recovery. It uses stories with matching cartoons to depict the key elements of the game that pickleball players all experience.

This 49-page, quick-read gift book is appropriate for all ages, from beginners to experts. Nelson spoke with Across the Street about his book a few weeks after publication. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

How did you come up with the idea to write this book?

I had never played pickleball before I retired and moved here to Granville. I started playing pickleball here and I played all over and played at Espire and saw how many people were playing and I saw the ins and outs of it. So, I just got this idea to write this book about pickleball, about starting pickleball and the frustrations of it and going through from the beginning to having too much equipment and getting hurt and frustrations and cheating. That’s what it’s about.

Every page has a cartoon and then it has a rhyming stanza that goes with it. It’s starting pickleball and going through all the steps, leaving pickleball and then coming back to pickleball. The reason I wrote the book is because it’s like an obsession. Most people who play, they play five days a week and many people play two times a day. It’s something that’s really addicting.

What was involved in self-publishing it?

I found out through some friends that Amazon will now publish any book that they find viable that’s not vulgar. If you write a book and you want to publish it and you present it to Amazon and there’s nothing wrong with it, they will publish it.

My wife and I collaborated on it, but I wrote it all myself. She had a friend who was a cartoonist up in Seattle, and he did the cartoons, but he didn’t color them in. So, then I hired a graphic artist and she colored where we wanted it colored in, like on the cover and some of the cartoons inside. And then she formatted it to meet the standards of Amazon. So, it was a collaboration between me, my wife, the cartoonist and then the graphic artist that we hired to completely finish it off. She did the last six or eight pages of the book, not with elaborate cartoons, but simple drawings in order to finish them off.

The “The Steps to Pickleball Recovery,” is now available for purchase in paperback on Amazon.com.