The Story Behind Jesse’s Girl by Gary Morgenstein

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There’s nothing more difficult than being a parent. Please indulge my hubris in quoting my own words. The main character in Jesse’s Girl, Teddy Mentor, explains that we think marriage is ‘til death do us part, but that’s not true. Not when about half the marriages in America end in divorce. It’s parenting which is until death do us part. The good and the bad.

I wanted to write about being a father, in this case, a widowed father dealing with a teenage son, Jesse Mentor, gone off the rails, suffering from the awful illness of addiction. Throw in that the kid’s adopted, struggling to find his roots, plus Teddy and Jesse don’t exactly have a Ward and Beaver Cleaver relationship, and let the ride begin. Many times my heart ached for Teddy and Jesse because loving your child so badly you will do anything to help them, only to be roadblocked by their own resistance, creates an overwhelming anger, frustration and pain.

You parents know what I’m talking about. And if you’re not a parent, you’ve been a child and you understand from that window. But most novels about parenting are done from the perspective of a mother, few from the Dad. Without banging my tambourine for Male Liberation, guys hurt, too. We cry over our children and lie awake nights and get stressed. Perhaps, because of society and the way we’ve all been raised, both genders, we don’t show it or are afraid to show it. But it’s there.

As an adoptive father, I also wanted to explore the theme of adoption. The process is wonderful and we all celebrate the gift of a new child into the family. Yet what that masks is the trauma of the adoptee torn from his/her biological mother. The underlying sense of rejection lingers, sometimes maliciously so. Then comes puberty, the doubts about one’s origins inflame, may become infected, add to that the turmoil of teen years in the best of circumstances and you’re confronting a highly combustible situation.

I wanted to look at the difficulty of adoption from parent and adoptee, instead of just whisking issues under the rug. So the search of Jesse in the novel for his biological sister as he reaches for something to hold onto following the breakup of his parents’ marriage, exacerbated by the death of his mother, his descent into addiction, his fear of being 16 and confronting a dangerous world with no rules.

What’s it like when you don’t know what your own parents look like?

Fatherhood. Addiction. Adoption. Above all else, the book is about regular people. Teddy struggles to hold onto his job, 50 plus and being phased out at a PR firm. Jesse, a scared teenager with the courage to find his sister, Theresa. She in turn, looking for her own past, for love not shadowed by domestic abuse like an alien mother ship. On and on. Regular folks like all the regular folks who make up this great country, day by day, getting by, trying to do the right thing, often succeeding, but not always, and living with the consequences of both.

In addition to Jesse’s Girl, Gary Morgenstein’s most recent novels, both available exclusively on Amazon.com, are the political baseball thriller Take Me Out to the Ballgame and the romantic triangle Loving Rabbi Thalia Kleinman. His chillingly prophetic  play Ponzi Man played to sell-out crowds at a recent New York Fringe Festival. A PR consultant for Syfy Channel, he lives in Brooklyn, New York, with lots of books and rock and roll CDs. You can visit him at www.facebook.com/people/Gary-Morgenstein/1011217889 or at http://redroom.com/member/garymorg.

COMING FOR MONEY by F.W. vom Scheidt

Coming for Money by F.W. vom Scheidt

In summary, Coming For Money is a novel about the world of global finance and a human quest for success, understanding and love.

How I came to write it is much like a montage of photographs, all taken of the same subject, but all taken from several perspectives.

I have always written.

Following the adage of write from what you know best, I wrote from my first hand-hand experience accumulated as a director of an international investment firm. I wrote as truthfully as possible of the world of international finance — not with the over dramatization so common in film and television, but with an intimate telling through a first-person narrative … of what it can be like to labour in the world of money spinning … of how the money’s immense leverage for triumph or disaster doesn’t so much corrupt people as corrupt the way they treat each other … of how the relentless demands of the money so often deprive you of sufficient time and energy to live through the events of your emotional and interior life.

In addition to this witnessing of the world of international finance, Coming For Money is also a provocative literary novel.

That flows, I think, from the fact that, throughout my life, I have always sought to maintain my integrity in a struggle with questions that have no answers.

So the novel flows from some of the questions I continually ask about life. The plot advances along questions arising from how we relate to our careers: How much money is too much? And how fast is too fast in life? And the central character advances along deeper questions in his own life: How do we cope with love and loss?

Moreover, because our societies equate financial success with a successful life, we are often blind to the inner stories of countless people in all endeavors who, in their desperate search for inner happiness, endlessly repeat a formula for financial success even while remaining deeply unhappy due to unresolved emotional and psychological issues at their core. I wanted to bring one of these inner stories to life.

The result is a deeply felt narrative about the isolation of today’s society, the prices great and small paid for success and the damages resulting from the ruthless exercise of financial power.

I also wrote the Coming For Money to be a good story well told.

The story is event-driven. It follows Paris Smith. As he steps onto the top rungs of the corporate ladder, he is caught between his need for fulfillment and his need for understanding; between his drive for power and his inability to cope with his growing emptiness where there was once love. When his wife disappears from the core of his life, his loneliness and sense of disconnection threaten to overwhelm him. When he tries to compensate by losing himself in his work, he stumbles off the treadmill of his own success, and is entangled in the web of a fraudulent bond deal that threatens to derail his career and his life.

Forced to put his personal life on hold while he travels nonstop between Toronto, Singapore and Bangkok to salvage his career, he is deprived of the time and space to mourn the absence of his wife and regain his equilibrium.

In the heat and turmoil and fast money of Southeast Asia, half a world from home, and half a life from his last remembered smile, he finds duplicity, friendship and power — and a special woman who might heal his heart.

As much as I want to write a literary novel, I wanted to write a story that was fast-paced and highly readable.

And finally, I wrote Coming For Money because I had no other choice.

I sat down at the keyboard. Although I have always been a literary writer, I had no idea how I would capture my experiences in international finance in literary fiction. Without thinking, the first sentence came to me. I typed it. Then I looked at that sentence for a long time.

Instinct told me that the sentence had risen from something that was deeply absorbing me, and that it was something I had to tell. I knew I had to find some way to tell it truthfully. From that point, I knew there was no way out . . . except to construct the novel.

While Coming For Money is a story that advances from chapter to chapter along the corporate intrigue that beats at its heart, and continually mirrors the financial headlines of our daily newspapers, it is much more. It is an illustration of what happens to us as human beings when we lose emotional connectiveness, when we lose emotional logic.

And this was how Paris Smith came to me – because he is tragically, if admirably, flawed. He is not flawed in the classic Shakespearean sense of a noble man who is brought to ruin by his own avarice or rage. His weakness is not that he lusts after wealth or power or flesh. Rather, and far more important for us in these times, he is flawed in that he never learned the great lesson of his generation: don’t become emotionally involved. Paris Smith’s weakness is that he needs, and has always needed, emotional involvement in order to sustain his life. It is for him – as, ultimately, it is for us all – as necessary as breathing.

As Paris Smith refuses to relinquish his search for emotional connectiveness, he becomes a character we learn to appreciate and admire. In the sometimes stubborn, sometimes creative, battles he wages against other men in his corporation who are pitted against him, Paris Smith becomes ever more conscious of how he could stem his personal pain and loneliness by simply retreating emotionally and victimizing those around him. Or he might learn anew how to offer up his own emotional involvement. I’ll leave it for readers to see how this plays out in the end, and to decide what they may want to take away from his quest for human meaning in our contemporary world. But I hope readers will appreciate Paris Smith as much as I do.

In writing Coming For Money, I have tried to tell this story in a way that will let others in our increasingly isolated society know that they are not alone. I have also tried to say something about the value of not surrendering to the seduction of victimizing others as a defence against being victimized. In writing a narrative about not giving up, I attempted to capture something true and evocative about how all journeys toward the light begin in darkness. And I have offered readers some assurance that, of such journeys, they can become restored to wholeness.

F. W. vom Scheidt is a director of an international investment firm. He works and travels in the world’s capital markets, and makes his home in Toronto, Canada. He is also the author of a new book, Coming for Money (Blue Butterfly Book Publishing), a remarkable and provocative novel about the world of international finance and the human quests for success, understanding and love. You can find out more about his book at http://www.bluebutterflybooks.ca/titles/money.html.

MISS L’EAU by T. Katz

Working as a television Production Associate for hundreds of children’s animated TV shows does something to a person. Thousands of hours working on shows with cowboys in space, dinosaurs brought back to life in the modern world and a rubbery yellow man living in the walls of houses causes you to have moments in a day where you’re thinking like cartoon characters or privately hearing sound effects to accompany what you see (junky-clunky cars or shopping carts with wheels that wobble, etc.)

However, one show in particular about a young alien sent to earth to protect its’ creatures touched my heart and I haven’t seen another show like it since in went of the air a decade ago. Feeling that kids could still use colorful characters to keep the message of “Save the Earth” alive I decided to write the book Miss L’eau to help kids learn more about the planet’s seashores and the inhabitants who could use our assistance and care.

I grew up in Northern California not far from the ocean and all that salt air and fog instilled a deep love of the sea it has never been far from my thoughts, even after I moved to sunny, bone-dry Southern California’s high desert … saltwater still ran in my veins. Every chance I had, I would turn my car in the direction of the nearest beach and spend as much time as I could, but seeing the ocean slurp up and spit back so much litter made me weep. I didn’t remember seeing all that trash as a young person, so I decided to write Miss L’eau, in an effort to make kids aware of the help our shores needed and that anyone could help, no matter how small their hands. If one page of Miss L’eau makes a reader want to investigate more about helping the waters surrounding us, then a good deed was done.

Miss L’eau tells the tales of two kids in a coastal town who discover a secret about their elementary school teacher, Miss L’eau, which changes their lives forever. The kids had always known there was something unusual about her, but they could never quite put their finger on it. Even though they’ve have always lived near the ocean, they never thought about its importance, power and certainly never its vulnerability. Through Miss L’eau, and her unexpected relationship to the sea, they develop a love and understanding for the great body of water covering nearly 75% of the earth’s surface. With their teacher’s help, they become involved with a nearby aquarium and organize an annual clean-up event in their community and hope to inspire others to do the same.

T. Katz, a resident of Southern California has been involved in the children’s entertainment industry since the early 80’s working on hundreds of episodes of animated television and as a music instructor to hundreds of very animated children. She is also the honorary conductor of a four-part harmony household, consisting of her two children (three if you count the spouse on a bad day) and Alice the cat. The people that surround her help her to continue seeing the world with all its magic, beauty and potential. She lives by the motto “a good book, a cup of tea and somehow all is right with the world.” Her adventures in life are adding welcome lines of character to her face and scattered optimistic silver linings all over her head. You can visit her website at www.tkatz.com.

THE TARGET by J.R. Hauptman

I got the inspiration for writing my book from my life experiences as a professional pilot. I enlisted in the Army immediately after high school graduation and during basic training, I took the test for Officer Candidate School and scored quite well. With good recommendations from my commanding officers, I was selected for the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant later that year, barely one month after my twentieth birthday.

In the following years I won my wings as an Army Aviator and while flying multi-engine cargo and reconnaissance airplanes, I took part in the Army Air Mobility tests and ultimately, I flew combat missions for two years in the Viet Nam War. Leaving the Army after eight years of service, I went to work for a major airline based on the west coast and settled into California suburban life with my family. After a few more years, we moved to Colorado and made our home there as I flew from my airline’s Denver base. During these times, the airline industry was tightly regulated and although advancement was slow, we were fairly well assured of a steady job.

I served on the Boeing 727 as Second officer and as First Officer but I was with the airline for over eleven years before I checked out as jet Captain. While I never made the top pay levels with the passenger carriers, the pay was still quite good and we enjoyed the many outdoor activities of life in Colorado.

In the late nineteen-seventies, disturbing rumors of plans to deregulate the airlines began to circulate among airline employees. More disturbing were the rumors of how it might affect all of us. Deregulation was intended to increase service and competition and ultimately benefit the American public by lowering fares and using seating capacity on the airplanes more efficiently. The new law hit the industry like a fast moving storm and the airlines and their managements had never experienced anything like this in their careers. One famous carrier entered an aggressive expansion program, buying and leasing dozens of airplanes and hiring pilots faster than their uniforms could be tailored. Unfortunately, this airline had chosen to expand in the face of the recession of the early nineteen-eighties and soon went bankrupt.

Other carriers, some made vulnerable by under capitalization, were circled by corporate raiders, waiting for the opportunity to attack like hungry sharks. My own airline became a target when the stock price suffered during labor strife. The takeover was consummated through the use of “Greenmail” financed by “Junk Bonds”, low quality, unsecured corporate debt securities. Sound familiar? It should because this is where the shoddy securities practices of today began in earnest.

The ultimate vulnerability for airline employees, particularly for those in the unions was the fact that companies undergoing Chapter Eleven Bankruptcy Reorganization were at that time allowed to unilaterally abrogate their labor contracts. For more than a year after the takeover, our union, the Airline Pilots Association, (ALPA) held its collective breath awaiting the inevitable move. We were aware of how the surviving airline had restructured into a maze of separate holding companies but few knew the details of how so much of the debt of the parent company was thrust onto our own airline to the extent that it would be impossible to service that debt. In short, my airline was deliberately put into the position where bankruptcy and reorganization were the only course.

Just as certainly, as the bankruptcy occurred, the labor contracts were abrogated. Union employees were allowed to return to work if they would agree to take fifty percent pay cuts and agree to company dictated work rules and schedules. It was an offer the unions had to refuse or lose all credibility. In protest, the leadership of the unions called for a strike and the memberships voted to do so. The airline continued to fly using management pilots and the few union members who decided to cross picket line and fly as strike breakers. The battle began in earnest when outside strike breakers were hired
There followed a bitter two year struggle that ended with the defeat of the unions. Some of the striking union members went back to work under company imposed rules and others decided not to, citing their inability to work for a ruthless and unethical employer. Some pilots caught on with other airlines and others left the industry entirely, ending their lifelong careers.

For some, it was a matter of life and death as there were several suicides, one of whom was the former CEO of our airline. The CEO of the surviving carrier was called “The Most Hated Man in the Airlines” by more than one pundit. Unsurprisingly, he faced death threats on his person but it seemed that he relished the attention and swaggered about surrounded by security toughs, at least one of whom was known to be an international assassin.

At this time, most of us are repelled by the horrible incidence of mass killings and the fact is that rational people don’t set out to kill their boss or to massacre the innocent. I wrote my book as a study on how a normally rational person can find himself driven to carry that out, as well as to serve as a cathartic in maintaining my own rationality.

In view of current events, most notably the greedy awarding of billions in bonuses to Wall Street bankers and brokers, and the populist outcry in response to this abuse, raises much darker issues. Airline deregulation was the first act in what has become the unconscionable abuse in the banking, securities and utilities industries that resulted from the general deregulation.

The pundits may joke of the “mob of people with the pitchforks and torches,” but what we may be facing are the opening acts of bloody and chaotic revolution. We have to hope not, but hope is not enough; we must act.

J.R. Hauptman is the author of  the murder mystery novel, The Target: Love, Death and Airline Deregulation (Caddis Publishing).  You can visit J.R. on the web to find out more about his exciting new book at www.caddispublishing.com.

THEY PLOTTED REVENGE AGAINST AMERICA by Abe F. March

Where did I get the inspiration to write the book?

The unresolved dilemma in the Middle East constantly bothered me. Why wasn’t something done to resolve the situation? America has the power to insist and enforce UN Resolutions but refused to act in that manner. They coached, expecting the two sides to sort things out and come to an agreement. That sounded reasonable, but it didn’t work and the violence continued. Who is retaliating against whom was referenced in my first book, “To Beirut and Back.”

The invasion of Iraq was the catalyst. Although historians are now writing about what was in fact known before the invasion, that information was ignored. The real reason for the invasion was for Iraq’s large oil reserves. Israel was in favor of the invasion supported the claim of “harboring terrorists” as well as possessing WDM’s. It tended to deflect criticism of their actions against the Palestinians and the fact that they had their own arsenal of WDM’s.

I began to write and then placed the manuscript aside on several occasions asking myself why I would want to get involved in this mess. I’m retired. I don’t need the hassle or the criticism that would be forthcoming, so why bother? It’s not my problem. The realization that no politician would place his neck on the line to do the right thing by enforcement meant that the pressure would only come from the American people. And for that to happen, they must somehow feel some pain or the possibility of it. The assault on the twin towers on 9/11 placed the blame squarely on Al Quaida, however the root of the problem was again ignored. If the body suffers pain, does one just take a pain killer for relief or try to find out what caused the pain? The cause of the problem has its roots in the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma and the wounds continue to fester.

I decided to finish the book and seek publication. If it can open the eyes of some people and make a difference that will affect change, then it will have been worth the effort.

How did I get it published?

I sent query letters to publishers and agents and got the normal rejections, “Not suitable for us,” etc. I then sent an inquiry to a small publisher, All Things That Matter Press, and they asked to see the manuscript. After review, they agreed to publish it.

For aspiring authors

It is helpful if you write about something where you have some special knowledge. A subject that excites you will be reflected in your writing. Once you have written the story, have someone review it for content and editing. I would suggest that you don’t use friends or relatives. You require a disinterested person who will be brutally honest.

Abe F. March is an international business consultant and author, living near Landau, Germany with his wife Gisela. An active retiree, he enjoys hiking and exploring the local vineyards and can also be heard singing with a regional men’s choir. Mr. March’s career has taken him around the world to work in many areas from his birthplace in the USA to Canada, Europe and the Middle East.

His first book, To Beirut and Back – An American in the Middle East, was published in 2006 and is a memoir of his adventures that took him to Lebanon in the 1970s. Mr. March grew up in York County, Pennsylvania on the family farm, and he served in the USAF from 1957-61. His business career got underway with the computing sciences division of IBM’s service bureau where he held positions as manager of administration and operations analyst. He later joined an international cosmetic company where he rapidly achieved top distributor status and was promoted to Vice President of Sales Development and Product Marketing Management, an opportunity which took him throughout the USA and into Canada, Greece, and Germany.

With international experience and an entrepreneurial spirit, Mr. March started his own importing business headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon, for the distribution of cosmetics and toiletries to the Middle East markets. With an ease about him and a talent for developing business relationships, he also functioned as a locator of goods and services sought by Mid-Eastern clients before the civil war in Lebanon destroyed his successful business enterprise. Mr. March returned to the United States to start over, and was soon working on an international level once again. His subsequent work involved Swan Technologies, Inc., a personal computer manufacturer in West Germany, and back to the US to work with Stork NV, supporting a fleet of 1200 Foker Aircraft. He officially retired in 2001.

For more information please visit http://www.freewebs.com/abemarch

MARIPOSA by Candis C. Coffee: “I wanted to write a book that would transform the reader’s inner state…”

I wanted to write a book that would transform the reader’s inner state. To literally remove the reader from this reality and deliver them to a parallel world, inhabited by humans and animals and plants, but different, too. Magical, romantic, and mysterious.

My wish is for the reader to lose sight of their mundane surroundings, their problems and needs. To enter the world of Mariposa, to walk beside Annarose in the 1920s and 1930s, and meet her family, friends, and lovers. To feel the white heat of a Texas summer, to gaze in wonder at a lunar festival in Chinatown, and to thrill in the company of Frida Kahlo and the brilliant, complicated Crisanto.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote guided me in my efforts to place words on paper. The romantic mystery of Rebecca and the surreal childhood experienced by Capote’s main character lent themselves to my own story because these two books spoke to me. I felt something truthful in them and wanted to convey this truth in Mariposa. My work has also been influenced by John Fowles’ The Magus. The exotic locale of this book, the erotic mystery, and the almost unfathomable ideas presented in the story made an impression on me that lingered with me for years.

My summers and holidays were spent at my grandparent’s home in San Angelo, Texas, on a bluff overlooking the Concho River. The home was isolated, with no telephone, miles from town or any neighbors. Rooms were heated by fireplaces, even in the 1960s. A bullet hole next to the name, Roy, carved by a knife, decorated the mantle of one fireplace. Legend had it that the home had once been a way station for the Butterfield Stage Route and Pony Express, almost 200 years ago. This home became the setting for my main character, Annarose’s, childhood. It was a haunted place, not by ghosts, but by more elemental entities — the spirit of the wind, the river, and the land. As a child I knew that one day I would write about my experiences on that wild, beautiful landscape.

Years later, after I grew up, I spent more than a decade living in Los Angeles. I traveled to Mexico in 1987, looking for magic, just almost desperate for it. I found it, I thought, in a man. I still believed that all the good things in life existed outside myself, that something could be given to me, instilled into me, and that from then on, my life would be beautiful. This is the theme of Mariposa. Transformation only occurs on the inside. The gift is within.

While I understand that a good book or a magical romance can transform a person’s inner state, they cannot provide lasting change. However, they can give you a taste of the difference, and once you have had that taste, you can learn to create this way of being on your own. Devotion to permanent transformation is necessary. Years may be needed to accomplish this desire. Or not. The principles subtly interspersed throughout Mariposa can offer direction.

Candis C. Coffee is the author of MARIPOSA.  You can visit her website at www.candiscoffee.com.

THE PINK FOREST: A WOMAN’S INTIMATE CONFESSIONS by Dana Dorfman: “..I wanted to write a book that reinvigorates thinking.”

The Pink Forest was written with a certain sort of emotional bravery. The actuality of it is this is not the way most books are written. But the visionary in me said I had to do it. So, writing in the first person, I took some fascinating glimpses of life, merged my writing with my feelings and landed in The Pink Forest.

It was important to write The Pink Forest because I wanted to write a book that reinvigorates thinking. I felt this would be a very freeing experience for my readers and provide them with news ways to look at themselves and life. To introduce thoughts that we might have otherwise not considered helps resolve unresolved personal issues and create a better night’s sleep!

The Pink Forest unloosens the ties of life and allows us to walk through the dimension of fear. For this reason alone, this book had to be written.

Dana Dorfman is the author of THE PINK FOREST: A WOMAN’S INTIMATE CONFESSIONS. You can visit her website at www.danadorfman.com.

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MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL by Phyllis Zimbler Miller: “I felt this was a story worth telling…”

MRS LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL has a two-part “story behind the book.” The first part took place 38 years ago when I was a new Mrs. Lieutenant at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, learning how to be a proper army officer’s wife.

The young women who were part of the same experience had secrets even at our young ages of 21 and 22. And they came from backgrounds much different than mine. Plus the unpopular Vietnam War “played” in the background of our experience as we worried about our husbands being sent to fight in that faraway war. I felt this was a story worth telling.

Skip ahead about 18 years to Los Angeles and a meeting of the LA Chapter of Sisters in Crime, which I had founded. I told two female producers the story of my experience as a new Mrs. Lieutenant. They quickly optioned the story’s film rights.

Then they came back to me and said I had to write the book first Hollywood because people didn’t understand the story when it was pitched. I wrote the first draft of the book – but by that time the producers, as often happens in Hollywood, had moved on to their next project.

Then I took classes to learn how to go from being a journalist to a novelist, read book after book bought from Writer’s Digest Books, rewrote and rewrote the story. Friends who read the book really liked it, but everyone said “something is missing.” I hired an editorial consultant who put his finger on the main “something missing” – a clear timeline. And I rewrote again.

Meanwhile I got rejected by agent after agent and publisher after publisher. One New York editor said there was no more prejudice in the U.S. so the book was no longer relevant. Another said that the women couldn’t meet through their husbands. They had to meet through their own job, like at a law firm. (What part of Mrs. Lieutenant did the New York editor not get?)

Then in December of 2007 a friend forwarded to me an email she got about a writer not waiting for someone to say yes to her. This writer was self-publishing. I had an epiphany. That’s it! I said to myself. I’m going to be 60 in March. My business partner has been bugging me to have the book published through a print on demand company. I’m saying yes to myself. And that’s what I did, using Amazon’s POD unit BookSurge.

In the meantime I entered the book in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and MRS. LIEUTENANT was named a semi-finalist. This gave the book a page on Amazon, and by accident I noticed another author’s AmazonConnect blog. I was off and running on my own quest to learn internet marketing to promote my book.

BookSurge’s marketing guy suggested PumpUpYourBookPromotion.com for a virtual book tour. I said yes to this, too, because I already knew what a virtual book tour was. And here I am today – almost at the end of a very exciting month of guest posts and reviews on several book blogs.

I hope you read MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL. It’s been a long time in coming.

(And check out original 1970 army documents on www.mrslieutenant.com along with book group discussion guidelines, information on organizations that support military families today, and the first four chapters of the novel.)

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of the women’s fiction novel, MRS. LIEUTENANT: A SHARON GOLD NOVEL.  You can visit her website at www.mrslieutenant.com.

THE WELL-FED SELF-PUBLISHER by Peter Bowerman: “…I hoped to raise the bar on self-publishing by giving authors a doable game plan…”

With a pretty cool track record of profitable self-publishing under my belt (52,000 copies in print and a full-time income for five-plus years) with my first two books, The Well-Fed Writer and TWFW: Back For Seconds (www.wellfedwriter.com), I saw a juicy opportunity with my third title, The Well-Fed Self-Publisher: How to Turn One Book into a Full-Time Living (www.wellfedsp.com)…

I won’t kid you. With a full-time publishing income from the first two books, along with a pretty strong following, I saw a few dollar signs – the chance for Lucrative Self-Publishing: The Sequel. If I stuck to my formula for “well-fed self-publishing,” no reason TWFSP couldn’t pay the bills for a few more years.

That proven formula was the key to the second reason for writing TWFSP: I had devised a successful blueprint for profitable self-publishing, and I knew there were tons of authors out there banging their heads against the wall trying to get in the doors of conventional publishing houses – to no avail.

Not to mention countless others who had been admitted to The Publishing Kingdom only to discover that the emperor truly had no clothes. We’re talking anemic royalties, 18-24 months to publication, loss of creative control, surrendered book rights and the unpleasant realization that even after giving up all that, authors are still expected to shoulder the lion’s share of the book promotion burden themselves! All to earn – in most cases – far less than a buck a book.

As I saw it, for most authors (especially those in the non-fiction and non-fiction how-to genres), there were precious few reasons to go the conventional publishing route. Add to that all the authors who’d self-published – how can I put this delicately…oh the heck with it – like sloppy, clueless amateurs. It was frustrating to see good books tank because their authors stopped short of taking the relatively simple steps necessary to dramatically enhance the competitiveness, marketability and profitability of their titles.

As I saw it – and had empirically proved – it just didn’t take that much to do a book right. And through TWFSP, I hoped to raise the bar on self-publishing by giving authors a doable game plan for crafting their own self-publishing success story.

But, weren’t there a lot of books on self-publishing already on the market? Yes, there were some classic well-established titles, no question, but I believed there was room for one more, especially since mine had several key points of difference: a focus on painlessly developing a sales and marketing mindset; a real-world “case study” approach vs. a more theoretical approach; a radically different book promotion strategy vs. the increasingly ineffective reliance on mainstream media; and of course, a fun, lively, irreverent tone that’s been the hallmark of my books.

No, there are no guarantees of success, and yes, these steps involve some investments of time and money. But, in my experience, any money invested in a half-assed self-publishing effort will likely yield closer to zero results, and hence zero ROI. Invest more money and more of yourself (Remember: no one will ever care about your book as much as you), and your return could potentially dwarf those investments.

Self-publishing isn’t easy, but thanks to the Internet, a bit of creative thinking AND, I’d like to think, books like TWFSP (www.wellfedsp.com), it’s more feasible that ever before. Good luck!

Peter Bowerman is the author of THE WELL-FED SELF-PUBLISHER: HOW TO TURN ONE BOOK INTO A FULL-TIME LIVING. You can visit his website at www.wellfedsp.com.

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A SPECIAL SUMMER by Victoria Wells: “…I wanted to create something with a bit of a twist.”

I love romance! When did my love affair begin with the genre? I would like to say during my teenage years when I picked up my first Harlequin novel. Suddenly the adventures of Nancy Drew were no longer holding my interest. However, if one believes that we as fetuses interact and have awareness of our outside environment, I’m inclined to believe my affair started, as I lay nestled in the safety of my mother’s womb. You see, my mom an avid reader read during her entire pregnancy. One of her all time favorites she read aloud to me was the historical romance Gone With The Wind.

Having read so many wonderful romance novels I wanted to create something with a bit of a twist. In A Special Summer you’re not going to witness Summer Jackson and Nick Stiles falling in love in two weeks and riding off into the sunset. I wrote a story that I wanted readers to get an understanding of what it truly means to go through the fire for that special person you love. It was important for me to get the point across that we as humans all have flaws no matter how perfect we may appear on the outside. Readers will get a glimpse of a hero that is hurled into a world of uncertainties and doubts, as the heroine is the object of his insecurities. Oftentimes the hero isn’t portrayed as having to show just how vulnerable and jaded love has made him. It’s always the heroine having to deal with trust issues because of a past-failed relationship.

The beauty of this story is that it not only addresses the intimate dynamics of the couple, but that of their tight knit community of family and friends as well. These relationships are woven and intertwined to tell a story of passion, heartbreak, deception, and betrayal. As the story unfolds the reader will witness the redemptive spirit of this story as the power of forgiveness heals two wounded souls, making them one.

Victoria Wells is the author of the multicultural romance novel, A SPECIAL SUMMER. You can visit her website at www.victoria-wells.com or her blog at www.blog.victoria-wells.com.