Singalong
songbooks
now online

Price slashed on
easy sheet music
for 365 favorites

$24.95*

Plus electronic templates
for singalong lyrics sheets

Finally, a singalong songbook of sheet music with easy-to-follow melody lines, chords and lyrics for 365 oldtime favorites. Ideal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences – and we're finding that a lot of folks want them for their own use at home.songbook(A great help for beginning piano students.)

(To see a sample song page, click here, then right-click (twice, if necessary) and ask to 'view image.')

We now market and distribute our songbook, Sing Along with Ease, exclusively online: You order online with a credit card and we send you the book online via email for you to print out at home. While that requires a little work on your part, it eliminates the delay in mail delivery (often a week or more) and cuts the price by about half.

And we continue to offer a 100 percent money-back guarantee as well as unlimited technical support via email. If you're not completely satisfied with what we've sent you or how we help you via email, we refund all your money promptly.

The songs have been collected and transcribed over the past 20 years by the Hat Band, a family foursome of string players and singers who for those two decades have held singalongs at area nursing homes and senior residences as volunteers.

Marketed for years in printed and bound form, the songbook is the same one that has been used by the Hat Band in its volunteer singalongs. Any additional songs the band adds to its collection – it does so slowly – are sent out free to those who already have the songbook.

We also send out electronic templates of words to more than 240 songs that can be formatted into lyrics sheets. For volunteer singalong leaders, it's a great way to get audiences involved. For home use, it's a great way to help your guests sing along as you sit at a piano or with a guitar playing an old favorite.

To order Sing Along with Ease, use the PayPal button below. As soon as we are notified of the order (usually within 24 hours), we'll email you the songbook and lyrics templates.

Our money-back guarantee is based on the same sales philosophy we used when we marketed the songbooks by regular mail. Please see our entry entitled We trust you. (And please note that our attitude toward online financial transactions has evolved. We've found that PayPal has a gold-edge reputation for security.)

For any questions or assistance, email our site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com.

* The old price of the songbook that we printed and shipped by regular mail was $39.95, and the shipping, because the book weighed about three pounds, was an additional $5.79 in the continental U.S., pushing the total price to $45.74.

(To Canada, limited to air mail only, shipping was $12.85, plus a $10 bank fee for processing international checks. That's a total of $62.80.)

The new price of $24.95 is complete, no extra charges.

Free books
still offered

from frustrated writers
to adventurous readers

This site offers a library of original text works – nonfiction, fiction or poetry of all lengths, published and unpublished – that have been submitted free by their authors. To find these, please visit the 'Works' section in the upper righthand column of this page. This site does not claim copyright to any of these works, and no modification of any work has been done except for style formatting. No work may be reused commercially, and any noncommercial reuse must give credit to the author.

To upload...

Sorry, we're not accepting any new works right now.

To comment...

Readers are free to download any listing from the 'Works' section, subject to the aforementioned restrictions, and to provide comments to the site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com for publication in the 'Comments on works' listing. To comment on any excerpt or other post shown in the center column, simply do so directly beneath the post by clicking on the '(No) Comments' link. Unless otherwise specified, all comments will be published, subject to libel guidelines.

About us...

This blog was started as a nonprofit website giving writers a place to publish their work at no cost and readers a chance to read that work and, if they chose, to comment on it. Now we are concentrating on a singalong songbook, also an idealistic project that promotes volunteer music programs at nursing homes and senior residences as well as family singing at home, all through easy, low-cost sheet music. Although we no longer accept new works from authors, all previous submissions are still available in our 'Works' section. We also maintain a blogroll of diverse sites, all well-written, for readers to explore, although at present, no new sites are being accepted for listing. The site's founder and administrator is its first nonfiction contributor, Sid Leavitt, a retired newspaper editor who lives in Lake Katrine, N.Y.

This site is owned by Readersandwritersblog LLC, which is solely responsible for its content.

Meta

Songbook improves again: Free add-ons

March 28, 2010

betterOur singalong songbook is no longer just a musical experience for us in the Hat Band. Now that we’re marketing the book to others, it’s also an electronic experience that keeps showing us ways to improve it.

So we’re adding two new services to the book, Sing along with ease, that came out of requests from customers. And both add-ons are free:

1. Additional sheet music for songs that we add to the book in the future.

2. Electronic access to our lyrics templates.

The first add-on occurred to us when a customer suggested two songs that are not in the songbook’s repertoire. Now, the songbook is the same one we in the Hat Band (we all wear hats) use when we do singalongs at local nursing homes and senior residences. We get suggestions all the time about additional songs, but we add them only when they feel right to us. (The current list of oldtime favorites rose to 314 songs when we added ‘Umbrella Man,’ which, like many of the songs in the book, was suggested by an audience member.) Again, we add songs to our repertoire only occasionally, but when we do, we’ll add them as well to the songbook we market. And we’ll send them to anyone who already owns the songbook, as we did with ‘Umbrella Man.’

Now for the second add-on: Each songbook includes templates for lyrics sheets that are intended to be copied on a copying machine, then the copies cut up and reassembled into program sheets that can be copied and handed out to an audience (an ideal way to increase audience interest and participation). But for those who are a little more adventurous on their computers, we’ll provide, upon request, an electronic copy of the templates that can be reformatted, for example, to make the type larger than it already is (currently 14-point). Actually, those customers with moderate cyber-skills can reassemble their own lyrics sheets on their own computer and print them out without need of a copying machine.

Just in case you think we’re offering a lot with these add-ons …. well, we are, but it’s neither difficult nor expensive for us to do it. We make up the sheet music on a home computer, and we have an email list of all our customers, so it’s just a matter of sending out one mass email to all of them with one attachment for the new sheet music. And it’s just as easy to send out an electronic lyrics template to anyone who requests it.

In the end, we’re not trying to make a lot of money. (I’m about to turn 70, two of the other three band members are in their 80s, we’ve all lived frugal lives, and we intend to keep on doing so.) No, the songbook came out of a desire to get more people singing those songs that, like the rest of us, have weathered the years. We think it’s worth doing, and we think others do, too.

Besides, once you’ve paid for the instruments (or the songbook), it’s all free entertainment from then on.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The little guy with the magnifying glass in the image at top was found at Global Search Network, a website maintained by an executive management recruiting group.

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We test-fly our own planes

March 1, 2010

Well, not really — we don’t have any planes — but here’s the point:

Unlike many manufacturers, we regularly use our own product — a sheet music songbook of more than 300 old favorites that we take three times a week to singalongs at local nursing homes and senior residences. And we continue to improve it.

Because like our customers, we’re also new users of the songbook. The songs are the same ones that our little family band (we call ourselves the Hat Band because we all wear hats) has sung for the past two decades, but the book itself is new to us, too.

Our old songbook was a stiff-sided heavy binder that was stuffed haphazardly with hand-punched sheet music, much of it handwritten, and that always threatened to fall off the music stand. Our new songbook, Sing along with ease, is a collection of professional sheet music, done on a computer and arranged alphabetically, that sits in a sleek binder of soft-sided, durable vinyl.

It’s a great improvement, but that slick new binder has one annoying characteristic — the soft vinyl has an electrostatic attraction to the first and last pages in the book, trapping them in the binder rings when the book is closed and eventually causing those pages to tear. So we came up with a simple fix:

fly leafThe songbook now has front and back fly leaves of cardboard-like paper that is heavy enough to ignore the soft vinyl’s electrostatic attraction. The book now opens and closes just as slick as it looks, with all the pages under control.

The fly leaves are green, reflecting their recycled content, and we’ve mailed a set to all the customers who’ve bought the book so far.

So get your new and even more improved Sing along with ease songbook today, and get out there and start singing along (or stay inside with the family — or just by yourself — and do the same thing).

We may be a tiny company that can’t fly its own planes, but we’ve fly-leafed our own songbooks.

– Sid Leavitt

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