The Tears And Triumphs Of A New Author Chapter 29

CHAPTER 29

In the first installment of the Rainbow Road series, Blake, the eight-year old boy was given the super power of X-Ray Vision.
Not wanting to be perceived as sexist, I decided that in the second book, Super Powers Of Rainbow Road, little six-year old Breonna would get Super Hearing.
While I banged away, one finger at a time, on the computer, Peg busied herself creating another beautiful cover for the book.
When both were finished and bound at OfficeMax, we presented the second installment to my grandson for his critique. Kids his age, after all, are my target audience.
He loved the second book as much as the first and encouraged me to keep pumping them out. I hoped he wasn't just saying that to make his poor old grandpa happy. How old do you have to be to learn to lie to people so that they feel good?
Then a thought occurred to us. We had been involved in craft fairs, art expos and book signings for almost a year with Lady Justice Takes A C.R.A.P.
Not everyone is interested in mysteries and we had just the one book on our big eight-foot table.
Maybe if we had a couple of kids books, it would attract more readers to our table.
The OfficeMax version was OK for the grandson critique, but we needed something better to sell.
We decided that since this was a kid's book, we needed some illustrations, so we went back to Dreamstime.com and purchased some really cute images that fit into the story line.
We were quite happy with the book that Authorhouse had produced, but there was no way we were going down that road with the little kids books.
We had met a young lady at the Lowry City, Mo. Library Author's Fair.
We love going to those events. We love meeting other authors and comparing notes.
This lady had written a novel and published it with an on-line service called Createspace which we discovered was a company affiliated with Amazon.
We logged on to the website and were amazed to see how easy it was to upload a PDF file and a front and back cover, and the cost, compared to all the other ways we had found to publish, was insignificant.
We realized, of course, that what we were doing was the bottom of the publishing barrel. Besides having a book to hold in your hand, all you got was the title available on Amazon.com., but we didn't care. All we were interested in was having the kids books on our table to attract a wider range of readers.
We submitted the two volumes of the Rainbow Road series, followed their on-line directions and within a week the books were in our hands.
Frankly, we were not expecting much for the price we paid, but when we opened the box, our little books looked every bit as good as the Random House and Penguin chapter books on the Barnes & Noble bookshelf.
I have to admit that I was excited about these little books and with my grandson's encouragement, I couldn't stop writing the darned things!