The Perils of Publishing

For many years John has been writing about the people and events of his life.  In January 2016 he joined a class here in Arizona about writing your life story.  The class helped him focus on putting the stories together so they can be published.  What that took was writing a few segments linking the various periods of his life into a coherent story.  Coleen, who mentors the class recommends a self-publishing web site, Create Space, a product of Amazon, as a place to publish life story books.  Over the past 5 days or so, we have been working at uploading the material so it can be published.

            Perhaps the biggest hurdle in that process is the perfectly awful Verizon internet we have here in Gold Canyon.  At times from late morning to late evening, it can take 3 to 5 five minutes for a web site to open.  I rarely have the patience to wait for that happen.  But we have uploaded a PDF file of the book, received feedback from Create Space, fixed the problems and uploaded again—for a total of three times.

            Then there is the book cover.  We worked on it, uploaded content, looked at it, changed it on our end and uploaded it again.  Then we decided we didn’t like that layout.  Today we contacted the web site, someone called us back, we learned we needed another template to do what we wanted, and finally got that uploaded! 

            The next stage is for people at the web site to review the contents and give us feedback.  When we say everything is the way we want it, they will print a proof copy and send it to us.  It everything is OK, we can move forward.  Or we can make changes again.

            I have been blogging for 11 years and publishing a blog is simple compared to this.  Each year I even get a hard cover book of my blogs for the past 12 months.  But publishing a book or stories this way is more complicated, especially when the internet is s-l-o-w to non-existent.  But we are almost done!

            This isn’t going to be on the open market for sale to anyone interested.  We will have copies printed for family, only.  Hopefully John’s brother and sisters, our children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews will be interested in the content, at least sometime in the future.  The people in the class who have put together family histories say their children will read the chapter about them but often not the rest of the book.  But we know from our own experience that these topics aren’t of much interest until we get into at least the last half of our life.  Hopefully, it will be of interest either when we die or even later.

            Oh yes, now I am working on my life story, as well. The title of John’s book is It’s All About People, Dead and Alive. I may call mine I Was There, Too.