Here’s an interesting email that landed in some Lulu’ers box last night.  If you were having trouble finding your book in Lulu’s Search Option, apparently they were under attack by Gremlins but have now got it all sorted out.  I have no idea what the 25% off at the top means, when they later say they’ll be sending you a 15% off special in a few days.  Oh, and is it just me or does Lulu suggest you forward the special email to a bunch of people who drink.  Why not nurse maids, dog groomers, and trash collectors? Just saying.

(Your Book’s Title)

Take 25% off

You recently published (title of book) and made it available to the world in the Lulu Marketplace. Thank you. We’re thrilled to have such a remarkable work in our catalog!

Unfortunately, the world didn’t get to see it as quickly as they should have. A hiccup in our system kept your book from showing up in search results immediately after you published.

The short of it is the gremlins got us. Fortunately, we found them – big, hairy devils with beady red eyes and the complexion of toad – and dispensed with them. (We’ll spare you the details). Our systems are back to the Lulu standard and all books in our catalog now appear in our search results.

We want to give you a new start on your sales. In the next few days, you’ll receive a custom e-mail from us that will display your book’s cover and a 15% discount on the list price. We’ll design the e-mail so that you can easily forward it to friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, coffee shop baristas, waiters, bartenders and anyone else you meet. It’ll be a handy way to encourage them to buy your book. And don’t worry – that 15% discount will come out of our profit, not yours. We just want to make things right.

Thank you again for choosing Lulu.

Sincerely,

Your Friends at Lulu

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Worth a look!

Great taster at the beginning to spur the reader into turning the page. Such mastery of words, painting glorious pictures. Observant too – with such lines as (about death) ‘…is a clumsy thing of the darkness…discovered in the dawn.’ Terrific. Mystery from the onset, this is a story of action and surprise. ________________________________________________________________________________________

Realm of the Dead by James Stewart

Intriguing from the first, providing a dark tale.

Great atmosphere…can really feel Isa’ terror in a strange and violent world.

Good command of language.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Rise of the Queen by Katie Jones

“A Good Start”

Some good description, e.g. ‘…the ageless sky, twinkling with far off diamonds…’ and some great names.

An interesting beginning to a promising story.

I’d love a portal of my own!

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Buy Julie’s Books!

Visit Julie on the web!

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Wonderful!

What a fabulous analogy for the range of emotions that drive us humans.  Loved the easy to follow style and the relationships to which we can all relate, this in addition to the realistic characters, it can only be a success.

I loved the lines, ‘…a blank canvas on which to build her dreams…’ and ‘…he was a tattoo on her heart that could not be removed…’ from Seeing Red, the first story, and ‘…leaving a hole the size of a watermelon in Sally’s soul…’ from, Envy (story four), where irony is particularly relevant.

All the stories draw you in and I, for one, couldn’t wait to see what happened.  There were many twists and turns and certainly unexpected events where the themes of responsibility, the ups and downs of relationships, and parental dilemmas are unmistakeable.

I would have to say that Mystic Purple was my favourite story, where I thoroughly enjoyed the comedy of small talk between Jen and Amy – the whole story bringing a smile though leaving a question as to whether we make our own fate.

This is not the first book by Maria Savva, and Pieces of a Rainbow is not a disappointment…I really enjoyed it…and I can honestly recommend that all are worth a look.

Clever, interesting and extremely good…great writing.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Padric by Jean Carver

A great tale!

Again I have been bowled over by such wonderful storytelling. Padric, a character born within another story (Lily, The Fair One), is the centrepiece of a fantastic tale from the very beginning, compelling the reader to turn every page as fast as possible.

The recollections of the prologue captures the imagination and spurs the story forward in a successful and truly fabulous way. The observations of nature and myth bring together a story full of mystery and magic, to

include fairies, gnomes and pixies – to mention only a few fantastical ingredients.

Buy Julie’s Books!

Visit Julie on the web!

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With no preview and a descriptive blurb consisting of only two sentences on Lulu, I took a chance on reading and reviewing Stephan Zimmermann and Bill House’s very short published work, The Dogwood Murders.  It’s definitely a chance I’m glad I took as this is a very nice short story, and being that is probably it’s only drawback.  It’s so good that it’s a shame that it is so short.  This could definitely be developed into a  novella or longer piece of work.  I see it working great in a collection of similar short stories, that had I read, this particular story would have shined with me.

It’s the story of Nancy Harrington who lives in the small Ozark town of Bear’s Ridge.  In Chapter 1, Nancy is attending the funeral of her mother.  The gossipy smalltown talk between Nancy and her sister is so good that it’s almost humorous.  Being from the south myself, I could definitely relate and it read like conversations I know I’ve overheard at funerals before.  What immediately stood out to me is the very specific and colorful descriptions used to introduce the other characters.  In a handful of words, the reader can immediately paint a picture of what type of character is being introduced and what their surroundings are like. It definitely helped give the book some Southern flare.  Here are just some of the scenes that I liked:

Despite being at their mother’s funeral, the two sisters discuss their dead Daddy’s “affair with a Memphis woman” and the inflation that ate up his pension.

They oogle over a handsome pallbearer whom neither of them can identify.

They snip at each other over how cultured and traveled they are.

Brother Bob Hopewell anxiously awaits graveside with a “worn, black, leather bound Bible clasped in hand.”

Seamus MacPherson, “the only man in Bear’s Ridge who had absolutely and painstakingly spent a small fortune to prove his direct lineage to the Scottish Black Watch battalion,” stands graveside with bagpipes in hand ready to play Amazing Grace, and who despite being in his seventies, flirts with all the women at the lodge.

Nancy encourages her sister to take “a doggy bag and a bottle of vodka” when leaving the wake.

There’s also a brilliant description of a Southern wake at the beginning of Chapter 4:

If a funeral in a small southern town is an event of solemn note, the after-funeral gathering, much like an Irish wake, is a ritual assemblage of friends and relatives of the deceased. Emotional reminiscences about the deceased’s good deeds abound, as do some tall tales of dubious authenticity. Unlike an Irish wake, however, where the priest is the first most likely celebrant of fine spirits, the presence of a Baptist minister sternly precludes such festivities until his timely departure.

Let’s not forget the Southern-drawl that laces the conversations and also helps to give the characters life.  The humor here, intentional or not, is reminiscent of the great Flannery O’Connor herself.

The comedy turns dark when Nancy is alone and sits down to reflect upon a puppy she had when she was a little girl, which she “accidentally” drowned when trying to teach it to stay away from the creek.  After spotting the pallbearer stranger in a photo from her father’s funeral, she begins to obsess over finding him again. As Nancy attempts to move forward with her life and put her mother’s affairs in order, other secrets about who Nancy really is are soon revealed.

A delicious argument over a man named Jerry Grant later ensues between the two sisters which culminates with an evil climax that only Alfred Hitchcock could have dreamed up. The scene with Nancy, lying in a hospital bed, still obsessing over Jerry and crying out over the unfortunate events that have taken place, is quite delicious.

As I said before, the book is just too short, so it’s paperback price will not be very appealing to readers because most full length books cost at least that much these days.  It seems that just as it is getting started, you are already half way through it and the book is not even one hundred pages long. It’s definitely worth an e-read though. This is the skeleton of what has the potential to be a really nice black comedy.  With a bit more substance, and more of an inner look into its central character, The Dogwood Murders could be even better.

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Review by guest reviewer and author Linda Welch.

Tightening the Knot by Amanda Hamm is all about relationships: Meredith’s relationship with her husband Greg, her sibling, her in-laws, her friends and to a lesser degree her co-workers and students. We know from the book’s blurb that Greg and Meredith go to a Tightening the Knot seminar but they don’t arrive there until Chapter 22. Until then, have fun getting to know Meredith and a whole cast of characters complete with their little quirks.

Meredith and Greg have been trying to have a baby for two years. When Meredith asks Greg to take a fertility test and he refuses, things start to go downhill. Meredith is at the point of signing papers to start divorce proceedings when she decides to give the marriage another chance. Being Meredith, she must be the instigator, the controlling force in the reconciliation, but she is so occupied with agonizing over Greg’s reaction to anything she might say she doesn’t get around to making that first move.

I remember one of those emails which went around years ago. After a date, a woman spends the rest of the night dissecting every aspect of the date and everything said. That woman surely is Meredith and being inside her mind and over-active imagination while she obsesses and agonizes is for me one of the best aspects of the story:

She spent the entire ride to work neurotically obsessing over this simple phrase. Did he realize he hadn’t given her so much as a “goodbye” in the morning for quite some time? Was that why he said it? Could there be even the slightest chance that he also wanted to prove they didn’t need his mother in the room to have a conversation? Then again, “Have a nice day” was hardly a conversation. It could have been a reflex. The odds of it having been a reflex actually seemed greater than the odds he had suffered over not saying anything the first time she left the house. How Meredith wished he had suffered over it. Not really suffered of course, but just agonized a little over it, like she would have.

Meredith interacts with a pregnant friend who is a reminder of what Meredith herself wants but cannot have, another friend who wants nothing more than to get married and have babies and a mother-in-law who drops enormous hints about her desire for a grandchild. Add an escapee pet, annoying students and their cantankerous parents and other personalities to the mix and you have to admire Meredith’s outward appearance of cool while she inwardly deliberates ways to save her marriage.

When the right words won’t come, Meredith resorts to other methods of letting Greg know she wants to heal the wound:

When he noticed her brushing her teeth, he asked, “You’re going to bed now?”
She nodded.
They crawled under the covers facing opposite walls as usual. Then she moved an inch or two toward the middle and waited for him to notice.
She fell asleep waiting and woke up seriously annoyed.
A new box of cereal absorbed most of her wrath. It got a bit mangled as she opened it with significantly more vigor than was necessary, shooting Greg a few withering looks as though he might be responsible for making the box so uncooperative. He was accustomed to being more or less ignored over breakfast and the obvious hostility left him at a bit of a loss.
“Is there…” he started. “I mean, did I do something recently?”
Meredith was silent. She ate quickly and then finished getting ready for work. He tried one last quizzical look as she reached the door. She answered pointedly, “I went to bed early last night.”
He looked unsure, but also hopeful. “Oh, so you’re just tired?”

Meredith thinks Greg should automatically know what she wants him to do. Greg knows nothing of the sort.

Amanda Hamm manages to subtly infuse humor into even the most mundane situations: Meredith’s days at school where she teaches fourth grade students, lunches with girlfriends, entertaining her in-laws over the holiday season; even Greg and Meredith’s sudden foray into the mysteries of cleaning house and tidying up the yard. You won’t want to miss a single word.

Some scenes made me chuckle, one of which involved Katie, a dog Greg is pet-sitting for a friend, who eats everything she can get her mouth around, including batteries.

Meredith laughed. She was only slightly concerned for the dog and already had the feeling this was going to make a good story, one that she and Greg could tell together. It was not exactly a romantic story, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it would still be something they would share. She loved making new memories, but her reverie was short. It was rudely interrupted by a horrible gagging sound. She turned quickly away. “I’m not watching; just tell me when you see batteries.”
“Um… yeah, there they are. Wait, no! No, no, NO! I don’t believe this!”
“What?” Meredith spun around to see Katie licking the floor.
“She just ate them again.”
“Ewww… again? That’s so gross.”
“What do we do now?”
Meredith shook her head. She didn’t need to answer because it was obvious that Katie was about to give up the batteries a second time. Greg quickly put the leash on her and pulled her away as the mess hit the floor.
Meredith grabbed the leash. “Good idea. But this time I’ll hold her and you deal with that.” She pointed at the centerpiece of the less than delightful new memory.

And so Meredith picks up a church bulletin and sees an ad for Rejuvenate Your Marriage, a one-day marriage enrichment seminar. While she hesitates to show it to Greg and suggest they attend, Greg himself suggests it. They book into the hotel on New Year’s Eve and participate in the seminar’s somewhat absurd activities. Does Tightening the Knot bring Greg and Meredith back together again?

This is an entertaining read. If you like your humor a little dry, a little wry, a little droll, a little winsome with the occasional touch of pathos, you’ll enjoy Tightening the Knot.

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In a few weeks, all books will have the option to assign either a Lulu owned ISBN or your own ISBN to your Lulu books in the publishing wizard. This means you won’t have to create your book, wait for approval, and then create a new revision to add the ISBN information. Like the Published By Lulu (PBL) package we used to offer, if you assign a free Lulu owned ISBN, Lulu will act as the publisher on your behalf to retailers and wholesalers. If you assign your own ISBN, then the publisher listed with your ISBN will be used.

I personally think this is a step backwards for Lulu because having used their PBY option for my own book, I felt it was the best fit for me and the most economical and time efficient.  It made getting an ISBN registered through Lulu, paying for the ISBN through Lulu, and creating my book all through Lulu much easier.

So far, comments on the announcement are few, but mixed. Read the full announcement at the Lulu Blog.

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If Tim LeHaye and Michael Crichton had ever gotten together to write a book, it would probably end up being something like Anthony Policastro’s Absence of Faith.  It’s part medical mystery and part religious thriller all rolled up in a plot of Christianity, Unexplained Phenomenon, New Age Beliefs, and Satanic Occults. It’s a white-knuckle read that would probably drive a Baptist preacher to an early death, and probably have Stephen King saying, “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

Dr. Carson Hyll and his wife are just settling down to a new life in Ocean Village. But Dr. Hyll falls asleep, a mysterious black out,  at the wheel and drives his car off a bridge and into the river. His near death experience is so horrible that he believes he has actually gone to hell and back and lived to tell about it.  But his bare skin ends up telling the story instead.  It suddenly becomes covered in first degree burns.  But the doctor isn’t alone.  Other residents of Ocean Village start have the same experiences, blisters and all.

Officials are baffled by what’s happening to the townspeople of Ocean Village.  Is it an unexplained outbreak?  Is it a sign from God?  Panic breaks out as those suffering from the mysterious burns start to believe that it’s a sign of Satan and that God has abandoned them. Satanists decide to take advantage of the situation and prey on the fears of the suffering, moving into Ocean Village and spreading their word. Their leader, Kyle Mabus, takes center stage and insists he is the Anti-Christ.  The vivid and chilling descriptions of Kyle’s blood-lust habits will make your stomach churn!

I myself was raised in the pews of a Baptist Church. The preacher had to give us permission to clap after someone sang a solo because we sat there in silence most of the time.  Once, I was scared practically to death just attending a school friend’s Non-Denominational church and hearing people speak in tongues while running up and down the aisles.  And while I don’t practice a certain religion or attend a church today, I do marvel at the beliefs that can shape our lives and culture.  Whether it  be Jesus on a potato chip or visions of Mother Mary on a hilltop in Kentucky, our faith is personal and yet complex, and certainly intriguing to a writer and reader like me which is why I think I enjoyed this book so much.

And Policastro has done a superb job of presenting the theories that baffle both scientists and christians. Absence of Faith is the deep struggle between good and evil, science and religion, believers and non. It asks what happens when our faith is tested, or even lost, and what happens to humankind with and without it.

Being coined a “thriller,” Policastro moves his book along at a magnificent pace that makes for a nice page-turner.  There are numerous underdeveloped characters, but the central ones more key to the plot are given the right amount of focus.  The book does suffer from being a bit “preachy” at times though; Policastro is determined to have the reader literally find the message (or be brow beaten by it) in scripture and sermon, but overall it didn’t distract too much from the main point of the book. If it had, I would have certainly stopped reading after about 50 pages. And if anything, there is a message there at how sometimes one’s beliefs can be forced upon us when we don’t always agree.

Those strong in their faith may want to avoid this one unless you do have an open mind and can appreciate a good read that will explore and challenge the complicated outer limits of religion. Part Crichton’s Outbreak, part LeHaye’s Left Behind, and even some of King’s smalltown Salem’s Lot thrown in, be prepared to stay up late at night reading this one, and being haunted by it long after the last page.

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I was excited to get my copy of Altered Life, a detective thriller from Keith Dixon. He was nice enough to send me a copy all the way across the pond and I dove into it the same day it arrived. The description on the Lulu page hooked me: ‘Altered Life transplants the attitude and pace of the American private eye story into a contemporary English setting.’

This book features Sam Dyke, a hard edged private eye with a past. His niche tends more towards stakeouts and connecting the dots than the intricacies of corporate espionage. However, the murder of Rory Brand, consultant and computer tycoon, sends him lurching off on a case he didn’t want trying to find one killer out of a dozen likely suspects.

Each chapter seems to start with a paragraph or two which give you a glimpse at the English locations where Altered Life is set. Here is an example from Chapter 46: “The next morning I drove down to north Birmingham, to one of the suburbs that were built as wealthy Victorian merchants began to distance themselves from the dark heart of their steel foundries and sought the green pastures of what was then open country. The wide roads and spacious architecture of mansion and church had since been overrun by the mini-community of Chinese takeaway, Laundromat and video store but if you half-shut your eyes you could still see the outlines of the Palladian refuges that the bearded philanthropists had created for themselves and the families.”

There are strong female characters sprinkled throughout Altered Life as well. Laura Marshall is the up and coming executive at Brand’s firm that hires Sam to solve Brand’s murder. Tara Brand is Rory’s current wife who shares a connection to Sam Dyke as well. Of course, there is a police detective with a bad attitude about Private Eyes who end up in the middle of his case.

The action comes fast and furious as Sam starts stepping on toes and asking uncomfortable questions. The important aspects of detective stories are here, the ubiquitous car chase that ends up with Sam in the ditch and Laura in the hospital… the excusable breaking an entering to dig up valuable clues, and the switcheroo at the end which you don’t quite see coming even though you should. The writing is sound, the story flows well, and the frequent dialogue between characters is expertly handled. Perhaps surprising for a book like this is the time spent fleshing out the characters and examining what makes them tick.  Even Sam seems more like you and I trying to solve this case than a super-detective.

If you like private eye stories, you owe it to yourself to check out Keith Dixon’s Altered Life. I had a hard time putting it down and I bet you will too. With this book you’ll be in on the ground floor of what is sure to be a successful series of ‘Sam Dyke’ mysteries.

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I liked the way the title rolled off my tongue.  It reminded me of Frankenstein. Its pale gold color, white letters, and raised laced scrim on the cover caught my attention.  For being a hardcover book, it’s 7 x 5 size also appealed to me.  The book felt good in my large hands.  After reading the inside flap, I went to a nearby computer terminal to see why the book was being returned.  It turned out it had been released in paperback in December 1999 and since no one had purchased the last hardcover copy, the home office flagged it to be returned for credit.  I read the first page of the book and decided to buy it despite the higher cost of hardcover copies.

Although I have depleted most of the books on my shelves overtime, selling them on Amazon, donating them to community centers, shipping them to readers on BookMooch, this one copy of Allan Stein has been with me ever since I bought it back in 2001.  Sadly, I have never read Allan Stein…until a few nights ago when I came across it on a shelf.  I debated if I should finally part with the book.  Instead, I sat down and decided to read it.  I’m glad I did because I’m enjoying Stadler’s writing very much.  But this article is not a review of Matthew Stadler.

Like many books I read, thanks to the internet I like to research the book, or what it’s about, or learn about the author themselves.  Googling Matthew Stadler led me to a Wikipedia page where I found the following text and quote:

In a 2008 lecture in Vitoria, Spain, Stadler described publication as “the creation of a public … There is no preexisting public,” he went on. “The public is created through deliberate, willful acts: the circulation of texts, discussions and gatherings in physical space, and the maintenance of a related digital commons. These construct a common space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being. This is publication in its fullest sense.”

This paragraph sparked me to write this article, asking myself, and wanting to ask you the writer, why do we publish? First, here are some of Stadler’s thoughts from the same seminar in Spain, which you can listen to here if you wish.

“In English, publication includes the word ‘public’…publication is the creation of a public. Publication is a political strategy.  It is not an attempt to make beautiful objects.  It is not an attempt to make an accurate record that can be stored and archived…  There is no pre-existing public.  The public that we hear about, which we think about often to our own discouragement, is itself a fiction created by political actors to lend moral authority to their choices. I am interested in publication because I want to create a public. I live in a culture, in a country, that uses the fiction of a main stream public in many ways that I find discouraging, negative, and disempowering but I don’t believe the notion of and the experience of a public needs to be that way… It is imperative that we publish not only as a means to counter the influence of a hegemonic public, but also to reclaim the space in which we imagine ourselves and our collectivity. We feel lonely and powerless when we accept the myth of ‘the main stream public.’ When we accept that fiction we relinquish our ability to form our own collectivities and draw hope from them.”

For me, Stadler’s “public” can be translated as being a writer’s audience. And your audience can be made up of a handful of friends and family, or encompass thousands of people across the country.  Your success should not be measured by how many physical copies of a book you sell, but by how many people make up your audience, your public.  If readers outside your circle of friends and family members are attracted to what you’ve written, your audience grows.  You capture the attention of more and more readers, and the public you have created can thrive with one thing in common:  they have read your words.

It is quite possible that some of those readers will tell others about your book, other people that you do not know and have yet to reach out to.  A new public of readers soon grows outside your personal public, as more and more people pick up your book and read it and tell others.  It’s a chain reaction that depends completely upon two things: the power of your words to speak to the reader, and second, for those words to be powerful enough to make the reader speak to someone else about them.

Publishing itself is a very large public, and as Stadler stated, it’s political.  Think about it.  Go to Amazon.com’s home page and what do you see?  Who do you see?  Walk into any chain bookstore and take a look around.  What books, whose books, do you see up front and center?  Chances are it’s a Dan Brown, a JK Rowling, or a Stephenie Meyer.  It’s not the authors we’ve reviewed on this site.  It’s not the books we have published ourselves.  What gives those books a right to be there?  Politics. So, why do we publish?  Like Stadler said, it is our responsibility to publish to counter influence that public we know as the “traditional publishing industry.”

As self-published authors, we have already disassociated ourselves from the “main stream publishing public.”  And as long as somehow, we arrange and form a public of our own along the way, we are destined to succeed.  As self-published authors, we are already “saving the earth”  by not wasting trees to make paper for huge print runs of books that may or may not sell.  We are not eating up valuable sale space on chain bookstore shelves where our books must be checked monthly for proper shelving or possibly pulled off the shelf, packed,  and returned to a publisher for credit as I mentioned before.  Our books are not eating up warehouse space, destined to become a clearance book and resold to B&N buying groups for people perusing the bargain aisle and buying us for half price while sipping an expensive latte. We are not wasting ink, paper, or payroll.

And yet, self-published books are frowned upon because of their price, their nonreturnable status, and often their poor editing.   POD is practically a Star of David a writer may or may not wear proudly. It can be the most discouraging, most expensive, most time consuming project to ever eat up a writer’s time, in the end preventing them from devoting time to their real craft which led them down this path to begin with.  And yet, more and more writers are turning to self publishing each year, snubbing their noses back at that “elite” traditional main stream public.

Print on Demand publishing is, in fact, like many art forms and is not bound to traditional rules and formats deemed necessary by well paid editors, publicists, and traditional publishing models who are out to appease their public in a certain way whether through wizards, vampires, or religious thrillers, or whatever else everyone thinks they need to read because everyone else around them is reading it too.  A traditional author may sit down and tell the story they wanted to tell, but it may not end up being the story their readers finally purchase in the end.  The essence of their story is whittled away like pieces of wood at a carver’s knife or like film strips on a director’s cutting room floor.

Though a certain level of formatting and consistency is expected in POD, isn’t it interesting that blogs and how-to guides everywhere teach us how to make our book look like everyone else’s?  We try to fool the main stream market into thinking our book is one of theirs.  And yet, self-publishing is the perfect way for a writer to publish when he doesn’t want to follow the norm, he wants to be experimental, and he wants to stand out from the rest.  And yet, the traditional public ridicules him for doing that.

Even Stadler was disappointed with the narrow interests of the big time New York publishers that published his books and the main stream magazines and journals (like the New York Times) which he wrote for.  He decided to go his own way and he started his own journals to focus on the writing he wanted to bring to a public. He co-founded Clear Cut Press as a part of that movement.  Suddenly.org, another of Stadler’s projects, developed out of his Using Global Media workshop.  This workshop focused on what he calls “the ecology of publication” (that is, the combination of printed texts with public gatherings and an associated digital commons).

Stadler self-published an annotated reader for Suddenly.org, and guess who he used to do it?  Lulu.com!  It’s called Where We Live Now. Here’s a quote from that Wikipedia page that states the beauty of self-publishing quite nicely for you:

Suddenly distributes the book by programming public conversations in many cities around the world, so that rather than having a large reservoir of printed copies that must be stored until they are pushed out through market pipelines, suddenly cultivates conversations that then draw the books out one-by-one from the printer, like sponges drawing water.

So, why do we publish? For me, it stopped being about the money a long time ago.  Actually, it never was about the money.  I never set myself up for disappointment by thinking that my self-published book with Xlibris back in 2003 would put me on the New York Times Bestseller list.  I said from the very beginning if I could walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book on the shelf, I accomplished what I’d set out to do.  And I’ve done it twice now.

For me, it’s a review on Amazon from a complete stranger.  It’s an email from a reader in another state I’ve never met before.  It’s being befriended on MySpace or Facebook by someone telling me they enjoyed my work.  It’s a book review by another author who offers me a serious critique.  It’s someone asking me when my next book is coming out, or what am I writing now. It’s that feeling of elation when someone tells me, “I’m reading your book.”  You’re reading me?  You could be reading Harry Potter or Twilight or The Da Vinci Code or anything else that any of us has heard of or read before, but you are reading me!?  It’s quite simply talking about my book with someone who has read it and learning how it made them feel.  It’s having the chance to learn what emotions my words evoked.

It’s lying awake at night in bed and envisioning the scenes I’m going to write in the morning.  It’s breathing so much life into a character on the page they make me laugh out loud, or even cry.  So much that I can talk about them like they are a real person.  It’s stressing over the perfect title for the book or for just one chapter.  It’s visiting a place or seeing a painting or reading about some event and being inspired so much by it I make a mental note to put it in a story.  It’s sitting down and creating a chapter or an entire story about whatever inspired me.  It’s so much more than this, but by now, you get it.  At least, I hope you do.  And for you, a writer, you know what it is that makes you want to write, what it is that makes you want to publish.  You’ve already started making a mental list of them while reading this.

Of course, in this technological age self-publishing has broken off into two formats: paper and digital.  For the sake of this article, I won’t discuss digital publishing right now. I still like the feel of that hardbound book of paper and ink and cardboard in my hand, no matter if it was the last one on the shelf or a copy printed on demand just for me or for my own public.  I think Matthew Stadler does too.  He says the internet lacks literary closure.  Like browsers in a bookstore, our internet browsers show us thousands of words everyday and we can never read all of them.

But a book, a published book, is much different.   It requires focus.  It requires attention.  It has a beginning and… it has an end.  Even now, that blue “Publish” button taunts me from the margin of this site’s administrative dashboard, eager for me to press it and publish these words for you, my public, to see.  Dare I press it?  Dare I publish these words, these political views of my own, for you the visitor, the reader, the public, to read?  I think I will.

After all, why do we publish?

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Frogs Boy Scout by Joshua Smith

Frog’s Boy Scout
and other books

Written and illustrated by Joshua Smith

Copyright 2008-2009

Paperback editions $9.95 and up
Artwork/Ebooks .99-$1.99

Here at the LL Book Review, we have reviewed a wide variety of books in a little over a year. Fiction, non-fiction, children’s and young adult, memoirs, and mysteries, to philosophical tomes that give us a new way of thinking. One thing all of the books reviewed have in common is they are all written by authors who believe in their work enough to pursue the hard road of self-publishing. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the path of traditional publishing is an easy one, because it is not, but it is different than the path of self-publishing. I’m not going to provide the battling viewpoints of the self-published vs. traditionally published debate at this time either. However, I am going to talk about one of the areas where self-publishing, using a POD service such as Lulu.com has traditional publishing houses beat. They publish anything. If you would like to publish a book, you can. There is an immediacy to the process that traditional publishing will never match, and there is a great deal of satisfaction that the authors feel from being able to hold a bound copy of their work in their hands.

I am sure this the case with author Joshua Smith. Joshua is an eight year old, who definitely works on his craft as a writer. He also illustrates all of his books. With the loving support of his parents, Joshua has written, illustrated, and published 24 children’s books via Lulu.com. That, in and of itself, is an amazing feat. It makes me feel like I may have started late in life because I only started writing my first, never to see the light of day, book at the age of nine. Some of the books are Joshua’s versions of existing tales such as Jack in the Beanstalk or Charlotte’s Web, and others are his own original work. In addition to the 24 books, Joshua has several art pieces which he has published as download files. He has a bold color sense and the happiness of the pieces leaps off the page.

Joshua, with the help of his father, requested a review of his books about Charlie Smart, the frog. Frogs just happen to be one of Joshua’s passions, so it is natural that one of his favorite characters to write about is a frog. I had the pleasure of sampling three of Joshua’s frog books, Frog Goes to the Circus, Frog Has a Super Hero, and Frog’s Boy Scout. In reading these books, it is clear that Joshua takes his muse from his own life experiences and then uses those experiences with the character of Charlie Smart. In Frog Has a Super Hero, the artwork is primarily pencil sketches, whereas, Frog Goes to the Circus and Frog’s Boy Scout are very colorful. Joshua’s work is improving as he gets older, and whether he stays with illustrated books or starts working on longer pieces, I think his dedication to writing is clear. My favorite piece of those I read was Frog’s Boy Scout, because I felt that Joshua’s artwork was becoming a little more detailed and complex and the story line had challenges that Charlie Smart had to overcome.

I would like to see Joshua progress from hand writing his stories in pencil to having them typed, and to work with his parents and teachers, both of whom it is clear support him in his endeavors, to do some editing. As he hones his skills as both a writer and an illustrator, I’m sure he will continue to write stories to entertain and delight his siblings, as well as those around him.

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