Double Whoopee! Just 10 Days!

Last week I announced that Prayer Wasn’t Enough, my convent memoir, will be available from Amazon on Wednesday, March 21. That date was seventeen days away last Sunday. Today, it’s just ten! O ye jigs and julips! I’m both excited and a wee bit apprehensive.

Excited to share with readers a time in my life when I was so immature—both emotionally and spiritually—that I made perfection my goal. The failure to achieve it became my Waterloo.

Apprehensive because reaching an audience interested in this coming-of-age memoir is no easy task. Why? Because I’m self-publishing it. So no big New York publisher will be pushing the book via ads and reps in the field.

Today I’d like to share with you some things I’ve learned about self-publishing. Some of you will publish in the future, and you may choose this same route. If I can make self-publishing easier for you, I want to do so.  

Let’s begin: A number of companies now do print-on-demand publishing. That is, you simply submit your manuscript, and when someone wants to read it, the company prints it.

The most well-known of these sites is CreateSpace, a subsidiary of Amazon. The company provides a range of services, all of which are listed quite clearly on its website. Because I am technologically so inept, I asked my oldest niece to use the site to publish Prayer Wasn’t Enough.

Because we wanted to keep the project within my financial means, my niece decided not to use all the options offered by CreateSpace—from formatting to the application of an ISBN. What she then needed from me was the following:

·      the line-edited and copy-edited manuscript

·      a book cover—front and back

·      any advance praise—from first readers and published writers—that I had for the memoir

·      the credits for anything I quoted within the book

·      the dedication

·      the epigraph

·      the table of contents

·      the list of other books I’ve had published

·      a brief bio

·      the acknowledgments

·      my social media outlets

·      a self-photograph

My niece and I both read three books that proved helpful in understanding the self-publishing tasks. She became responsible for the actual publication of the memoir; I took on the responsibility of promoting it. The three books that helped us understand our roles were the following:

1.     CreateSpace & Kindle Self-Publishing Masterclass (latest edition) by Rick Smith.

2.     How to Publish Your Book by Jane Friedman, who also has a fine website about all this.

3.     How to Market a Book (third edition) by Joanna Penn.

Of course, many other fine books on writing and self-publishing are available. These just happen to be the three we used. In addition, my niece goggled many subjects necessary to self-publishing. For example: the cost of an ISBN for the copyright page for both a paper and an ebook; the cost of barcodes; how to copyright the memoir; how to get a Library of Congress listing for the ISBN page; how to lay out the book in the right order of contents.

All this seemed formidable to me. That’s why I asked my niece to partner with me on this. She is technologically savvy, has a younger brain than I, and has mastered the vocabulary of technology.

Once the paper book is formatted on CreateSpace—the company we used—the book is then ready to be uploaded on Kindle, which is another subsidiary of Amazon. Thus, the paper book becomes an ebook available on Amazon.

I can see that I need another posting to finish explaining all this. Would you like me to continue next week? Or is there something else about all this you’d like me to share?

Peace.

Just 17 Days! Whoopee!

The countdown has begun. Just 17—seventeen—XVII more days until Amazon publishes the paper and the e-book version of Prayer Wasn’t Enough. My stomach flutters with excitement. The pinball machine of my brain races round and round, bumping into ideas from when A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story was published then skittering to today and its social media.

“So what’s the big deal?” you ask. “When was prayer not enough?”

Fifty-two years ago that’s when!

That’s when I left the convent. I left mute, unable to engage in conversation. I left gaunt, having gone from 118 to 103 pounds. I left with my deep desire to be a nun and to pray shrouded in ice.  

I felt nothing fifty-two years ago.

Yet sixty years ago, I was excited, eager, enthusiastic about entering the convent, sure that I was going to become a saint. All I had to do was become perfect. Easy-peasy!

And that of course is the arc of Prayer Wasn’t Enough—the story of an emotionally and spiritually immature young woman who thought that if she became perfect everyone would love her; no one would desert her. She entered feeling all was possible; she left feeling she was a failure.

Today and next Sunday, I’d like to share with you how this convent memoir came to be.

Following the publication in 1992 of A Cat’s Life, I wrote daily, completing several manuscripts. Despite repeatedly sending out query letters to New York agents, none of these manuscripts attracted any attention.

Someone, not sure who, once said, “Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.” So I continued to write. Then in 2014, a long-time friend offered a suggestion: “Dee, if you want to get published, write a memoir.”

 “Why? . . . My life’s so ordinary.”

 “My life’s ordinary,” she countered. “Yours is interesting.” Stunning moment.

We talked then about memoirs and the thread that could hold one together. My friend suggested that I write about the convent years. “Readers of your blog have found convent postings interesting,” she said. “Why not tell the whole story?”

Within days, I began to write of my eight-and-a-half years in a Benedictine convent. That was July of 2014. Then in August, health issues arose. They claimed most of my attention for a year.

However, by November 2015, I had a draft that was ready for first readers. Several bloggers and friends from Minnesota read it and encouraged me to continue. But once again ill health intervened. All of 2016 and several months of 2017 passed without my being able to write.

But by the summer of 2017, I was able to resume writing. I polished the earlier draft, added scenes, sewed the story together by embroidering the main theme. Two friends read the final manuscript and considered it ready for publication.

I had tried the agent route and experienced no success. I found no one who believed in the memoir enough to want to represent it. Another friend entered the picture. “Go with the self-publishing route,” she said. “That way, at least, you’ll get the story out there.”

“But how will I market it? How will people learn it’s available?”

“There are books on that! Research! You’ll find a way.”

Next week’s posting will be about the process of self-publishing. The following Sunday, I hope to share with you my marketing plans.

And then . . . then . . . on March 21 . . . Prayer Wasn’t Enough will be available through Amazon. Seventeen days! Whoopee!

Peace.

Photograph from Wikipedia