For those that never noticed and those who don’t remember, I have a book out. It’s called All We Need: The Thanksgiving That Almost Wasn’t. It came out last November. Being a Thanksgiving book, that seems appropriate, but it didn’t give me much of an opportunity to push it very hard. Still, we sold some copies, and I was pretty pleased.
This year, I have plenty of time to market the book. Self-promotion is hard for me, but I’m going to try my darndest to see if we can surpass last year’s numbers. I thought I’d start with a little history of how the book came to be.
Five years ago, I did a challenge, 12 short stories in 12 months. The way the challenge worked was every month, we were given a prompt and a word count. For November, the prompt was “All we need” and the word count was 500. I decided to write a children’s story about Thanksgiving. You can read that first draft here: All We Need – Nutmegger Daily
The story was well received, and a bunch of people suggested I turn it into a picture book. I thought that could be a fun project. So, I edited, expanded, rewrote, and rewrote some more. Then, I edited, deleted, rewrote, and rewrote some more. I asked for help. My mom did some editing and proofreading. Then I edited, rewrote, and rewrote some more. When I had done all the writing and rewriting and editing I could do, I decided I really wanted to do things right. So, I hired an editor, the great Rachel Hall.
Rachel edited the heck out of the manuscript. Then, based on her edits, I rewrote again and again. Then, she edited some more. We went back and forth several times until the manuscript seemed. . . done. Well, as done as it was going to get. I’m not made of money.
The next step was to find an illustrator. I put out a call on social media and didn’t get any hits. I tried a couple of picture book forums. I did get hits from professional illustrators who wanted $10,000 or more up front and a cut of the royalties. Like I said, I’m not made of money, so those were not feasible. Then, a friend pointed me in the direction of a great local artist named Marci Bohn.
I liked the idea of using a local artist. Marci said she had always wanted to do a picture book. She showed me a bunch of her work and I liked it, a lot. I gave her the manuscript. We came to an agreement, and she got started. I gave her a lot of freedom. I’m not a visual artist, so who am I to tell a visual artist how to visual art? But she did show me preliminary sketches to make sure it was what I was looking for. It was, so I let her go nuts.
When Marci was finished, I couldn’t have been happier with her illustrations. The next step was putting the book together, so it looked like a real book. I had to scan the images. It was surprisingly hard to find someone who could scan pieces that big and promise not to damage them in the process, but I finally did. Then, I sent the scans and final manuscript back to Rachel, who also does layout and design. We went back and forth again until I was happy with it.
Next, I got an ISBN for the book. The final step was to choose a publisher. Amazon would have been the easiest. But, with Amazon, it’s only available on Amazon. I didn’t want that. So, I went with Ingram Spark. That way it’s available everywhere.
And that’s the story. I hope you’ll buy my book or ask to get it at your local library. I also hope very much that you like it. And I hope you’ll rate and review it wherever you happen to get it from. It would mean an awful lot to me.
When I said it was available anywhere, I meant it. You can go with a local bookstore, my preference, like The Curious Cat Bookshop in Winsted, CT – All We Need: The Thanksgiving That Almost Wasn’t | The Curious Cat Bookshop
Or you can go with Bookshop.org – All We Need: The Thanksgiving That Almost Wasn’t a book by Gene Glotzer and Marci Bohn (bookshop.org)
Or even the big boys like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books-a-Million have it. Wherever you like to get your books, you can get it there.
Please get your hands on a copy. Four years and a lot of effort went into bringing it to you. If it’s successful, I have more I’d like to get out there.
