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!

The Tears and Triumphs of a New Author - Chapter 13

The Tears and Triumphs of a New Author

Chapter 13

Having determined that we were going to publish with Authorhouse and negotiated a price, we decided to give the book a test run before we spent the big bucks.
We printed the manuscript and took it to OfficeMax and had ten copies printed and spiral bound. We distributed the copies to friends and family and held our breath.
Mixed reviews.
One copy went to my 46 year old son who was a 22 year police veteran. He immediately pointed out that police departments in the real world don’t operate like depicted in my story. DUH! I reminded him that this was not a “true crime” drama, but a comedy/mystery. It doesn’t have to be real! Naturally, I was disappointed, but then they gave the manuscript to my daughter-in-law’s eighty-something grandmother who LOVED IT. Right On!
We gave a copy to another published writer in our small town. Her book was an autobiography of her life growing up and published by a Christian based publisher. She liked the book but couldn’t give us a review at that time because of off-color language. OOPS!
We gave a copy to some “senior” friends of ours who are avid readers and own an orchard on the highway to Branson, Mo. When they read the chapter where Walt and Maggie take a trip to Branson, they wondered why they didn’t stop at the orchard, so I re-wrote the chapter to include the orchard. They loved it!
We gave a copy to Peg’s 87 year old mother who lives in a retirement village and reads a novel every two days. She has read hundreds of books and knows every author. She was the one who needed to love it because she was our target audience. She absolutely ate it up and passed it around the complex for her other senior friends to read. She said one lady laughed so hard she almost peed her pants. BINGO!
We soon discovered you can’t please everyone, but we pleased our target audience and you can’t beat that.
FULL SPEED AHEAD!