Anne K. Edwards’
two new children’s books were just published on Amazon Kindle. They are titled
Dominick and the Dragon which is the first of a series and Changing Places is based
on actual characters. The books are self-published and available only on Amazon
Kindle or PDF from the author.
Questionnaire:
Q. Thanks for letting
us interrogate you! Can you give us a
go-for-the-gut answer as to why you wanted to be an author?
A. Reading from very
early childhood fed a hunger based in loneliness. It made me want to write like
the authors I admired. My first efforts came about in the third grade. At that
time I was reading books ahead of my age and the horse stories by Walter Farley
and books like My Friend Flicka started it all.
I was in love with horses and wanted one. That was something
that wasn’t going to happen so I gathered a herd of my own. Of course, they were all sticks and each had
a name. I had four stallions and four mares, two of each color. Black stallions
and mares were my favorites due to the excitement found in Mr. Farley’s Black
Stallion series. My horses were all wild
and I was the only one who could ride them. The sad part of my story about this
lovely band was that some days I’d come home from school and find my largest
horse standing on his head much reduced in status. My mother liked to cull my
herd of eight, claiming one to become her new clothesline prop whenever an old
one broke from being out in the weather and could no long bear the load of a
full line. So I would replace it (usually my favorite black stallion) with
another and go on as before. I rode the
stick horses until I finally outgrew living my adventures with my little
brother. But, oh, what lovely times we had until then.
It was during this period that I began to live my adventures
in my imagination and this led me to putting them down on paper, too. When my
herd had moved on to greener pastures and my mother became the happy owner of a
new clothes dryer, she lost her status as a horse thief. I can still remember
those times and can relive them if I just close my eyes and let time flow
backward.
Of course, internalizing my adventures brought change with
it, especially the urge to write and by age eleven I was trying my hand at
short horse stories and sending them off to the important magazines of the day.
And, no, you’d never have seen my name published in those days, but I loved the
dream and hope that came with it. Every budding author should know that
feeling. It feeds our souls.
Q. Tell us (we won’t
tell promise!) is it all it’s cracked up to be?
I mean what are the perks and what are the demands?
A. Absolutely, learning
to write and the search for publication is all it’s cracked up to be, both the
hard times and good times. It is an adventure in itself. The need for
self-expression can strike at any age and demands some sort of satisfaction.
Writing books in any genre grants me that.
I don’t know if there are really any perks for the average
writer of today unless it is that we are forced to learn by doing. We must do
most or all of our own promotion, try to fit the writing in with family, the
house and other demands we have gladly added to our lives. That said, if you
like hard work and the great pleasure of sending something you’ve written to a
publisher or doing the publishing yourself, then you have the best job in the
world and little compares to that perk. There is no other feeling in the world
like the one we experience when our work comes to fruition.
The demands of being an author are usually the same for
every writer. We must become almost hermit-like when writing, a life dedicated
to solitude and full focus on our work.
If we allow distractions of any sort while we struggle to write, we
become part-time writers or hobbyists. This means we must make choices and
perhaps divide our time into chunks, one for each part of our life. Added to
that is much of our time is spent fruitlessly in chasing our dream. We must
discipline ourselves to accept that fact and realize it is part of our
education as a writer. We must study and read, seek out like-minded people and
learn from their experiences. The biggest demand, and it is the one that hurts
the most, is when something we’ve put our heart and soul into is rejected over
and over, and we finally come to understand that what we’ve produced just
doesn’t work as an article or story. We may have rewritten it ten times or more
and still find it is flawed in some way, lacking something we just can’t see.
Thus, we must humble our pride of having written and learn acceptance. That is a huge part of a writer’s education.
A writer must be prepared to keep learning as long as they write.
Q. Which route did
you take –- traditional or self-published -– and can you give us the nitty
gritty low down on what’s that like?
A. I have taken both
routes and find I really prefer the traditional-—that means having the security
of a publisher to guide your work through the publishing process into ebook or
print. Self-publishing is something I still think has a ways to go before I can
find true success in it so I self-publish only that of my work that I know
doesn’t fit publishers’ guidelines for the genre or an agent’s preference. Too
often, I have submitted after receiving an email saying they’d be glad to read
my book only to learn I’ve wasted my time. The favorite reason for rejection in
those instances, I’ve found is, it doesn’t fit their guidelines, a statement
that covers everything.
My two children’s books are self-published because they are
too short for the standard children’s book and are basically meant to show
children after a certain age can think for themselves in many situations and,
hopefully, the stories also entertain. Knowing this, I don’t waste any time
seeking a publisher because their guidelines don’t fit my story.
I learned the hard way anyone seeking publication of their
work must be prepared to waste time. It can be that an author will be told by
an agent to rewrite their work and resubmit. If the author takes the time to do
this before they have a contract, they will find to their dismay that many
times that agent has already left her job for parts unknown and no other agent
working with her will add them to their own workload. Or the same agent may decide that the rewrite
isn’t what they want after all and drop the project. So one must consider well the use of time
spent in having an agent while said writer is new to the writing game. Trying to gain acceptance by established
agents usually comes to naught for various reasons and going to an agent no one
has heard of, but who advertises widely for new clients, will prove a waste of
time when one learns that same agent is only building a list of names of
wannabe writers whose work they rarely put time into promoting. The disappointments these agents cause
writers are that most of the time they don’t tell you, you are just one of too
many, they don’t inform their clients when they move on, or they never show the
clients’ work to a publisher. Those same agents often say don’t call and remain
incommunicado to authors and/or they may take as long as six months or more to
look at the author’s work, if they do. They don’t like to waste their own time
but have no compunction about wasting that of a writer. They can actually
discourage a budding author by this treatment.
There are some fine agents but the writer must be very lucky
to get an appointment with them or a recommendation by one of their clients. They
are an overworked bunch when one considers the number of them to the multitude
of us who want to be writers. The lesson I learned here was to ignore the
disappointment and keep on writing. Luckily,
I found I didn’t need an agent as the Internet made it possible to find a publisher
and I have been very satisfied there.
There are some parts of chasing success that can devour one’s whole life
so a writer must decide how much time they want to devote to searching for an
agent and success with a print publisher or saving that time to contact the
small presses and find an opportunity for publication. Once published that way, many authors go on
to realize their dream of acceptance by a large press. We must ask ourselves if the Internet is a
step to the latter goal or will we be happy with it as our resting place.
Q. Tell us for real
what your family feels about you spending so much time getting your book
written, polished, edited, formatted, published, what have you?
A. My husband doesn’t
mind my filling my time with writing as he considers it a productive hobby, but
my furry children (no, not werewolves) known as cats show me as strongly as
they can that they object. They sleep on the keyboard to show me it’s in use.
They delete or add letters to a manuscript at the same time. Many times I’ve
found added or deleted pages. They feel they have to teach me how to do things
right also. If I get up from the typing table and take a break, one cat will
hit the ‘off’ button. So I have learned
to save my work. They think writing takes my attention from them, something
they dislike intensely and I think they blame the machine. Sleeping on the
keyboard, using it a scratching post, knocking the router and mouse about are
some of their steps to revenge.
Q. This is for pet
lovers. If you don’t own a pet, skip
this question, but do your pets actually get their food on time or do they have
to wait until you type just one more word?
A. I have several
pets and they do not wait for me to stop and tend their wants. To get my attention, they start fights, pick
on the littler ones, yowl for no reason, claw my clothes, jump in my lap and
make sure one foot comes down on the keyboard. And that is only some of their
tricks. It is better to feed them and
then continue. It is also a useful survival
technique.
Q. In writing your
book, how did you deal with the phone ringing, your family needing dinner or
your boss calling you saying you’re late?
A. This is an easy
one to answer. I keep the phone turned
off. My family members are adults who eat at different times and we make our
own meals. I am retired and the cats are
my bosses as I said in the previous answer.
Q. What was the
craziest or insane thing that happened to you in the book publishing process?
A. The US Mail losing
two manuscripts in a month is about as close as I can come to an answer
here. This was in the days when things
were typed on a manual or electric typewriter and lost manuscripts had to be
retyped if lost. You could not send
carbon copies to an agent or a publisher. I usually produce a book of about 300
pages so one might say they helped fill my time and kept me from doing anything
new. When the email was made available,
I was only too happy to sign on to use it.
Of course, there were the times when our server would cut off in the
middle of sending and it had to be resent, but that is only a few minutes lost
at most. This is one of the things that will drive a writer over the wall so it
only proves one has to be slightly crazy anyhow to be a writer.
Q. How about the
social networks? Which ones do you
believe help and which ones do you wish you could avoid?
A. To be honest, I find
the social networks are not much use.
I’ve tried several of them and was left wondering why I bothered. I
didn’t try to sell books on those I did sign onto, but I got a huge increase in
junk email and now have to spend too much time deleting.
Q. Book sales. Don’t you just love them (or lack of?)? How are you making the sales happen for you?
A. Book sales and
book fairs are a mixed bag. They charge fees for a spot at one of their tables
which one might consider fair. However, often they have well known authors in
attendance who they put at the front tables, and the lesser or unknowns in the
rear and the tables are often set up so the visitors can’t reach them. I came
to the conclusion this was a way to funnel visitors where they’d spend the most
money and less time. Some events call themselves book sales and invite all
authors to be part of it. But their purpose is to sell used books from
libraries or other such sources and the authors are merely an additional draw
to get a larger turnout. Here too, visitors are funneled in specific directions
and the visiting authors are ignored.
I’ve been fortunate to be invited to meet readers at some Brick and Mortar
stores and found them to be the most productive. The best one I attended was
where I sold several copies of a book and spoke to a group in a mix of
questions and answers. This gave me the chance to as questions as well as
provide answers to others. Readers can
teach an author. Out in the world there must be other types of book sales, and
someday I hope to find them. Face-to-face meetings with the readers are a lot
of fun if you can talk. One other
comment, I’ve found the giveaways like bookmarks, information sheets about
books are mostly thrown away or ignored.
Since most of us are not wealthy, we must decide with care to spend our
promotion funds.
Q. What is one thing
you’d like to jump on the rooftop and scream about?
A. Joy in the
adventure of becoming a writer. I’ve been learning for decades and find there
is always something new coming my way. I often need to push myself to do that
learning, but if it is necessary, I will eventually get to it. It’s a wonderful way to stay in touch with
one’s inner person. And I love to tell
silly tales about my muse. Evreybody
should have one, writer or not. Those
stories provide me a way to laugh at my writing problems. So give your muse a pat for me and keep it
busy. Never know what ideas they will come up with.
Q. Okay, too much
sugar for you today! Here’s a nice cup
of Chamomile tea and come on over and sit under the cabana and watch the waves
roll in. Now…can you tell us what you
love about being a published author and how all those things above doesn’t
matter because it’s all part of the whole scheme of things and you wouldn’t
have it any other way?
A. I think I’ve said
it all above. Personal satisfaction.
There are so many people I meet who have no hobby or interest after
retirement. I think this is what makes
them age mentally which is too sad for words.
Writing keeps me interested in the world, its problems, talking and
listening to new acquaintances, and what goes on around me. I can turn things I
think were fun or silly incidents into a book. And creating new worlds in words
is a wonderful way to keep depression at bay. It is to laugh.
