Tag: self-publishing

New Beaver Creek Novel Almost Here

Beaver Creek Road. Photo shows a gravel road leading into trees that hang over the road like a canopy. There's a long narrow shadow from a signpost.

PD is walking up Beaver Creek Road with her dog Rocky when he runs off into the trees. She splashes over the mud and across the creek calling for him, but the big, dopey golden retriever doesn’t come. She has never been in this part of the forest before and worries about getting lost. Then she hears singing. Singing out here? She follows the sound and finds her dog making friends with a woman people call The Witch.

Thus begins Between the Bridges, the newest book in my Up Beaver Creek series featuring the adventures of PD Soares and her friends. They went through so much in the last two books. What else could possibly happen? Well, it’s early 2020, the beginning of a year none of us will soon forget.

After a fun year of writing, many (!) revisions, and a good going-over by my wonderful Beta readers, Between the Bridges is close to publication. On New Year’s Eve, I finished the final rewrite. Now, I’m in what I call “formatting hell,” worrying over spacing, page numbers, copyright notices, and such. My cover designer is working on the cover. I’m hoping to release the ebook on Feb. 1 and the paperback soon after. You will be able to order it not only from Amazon but from all your favorite booksellers through Ingram, the distributor used by most bookstores.

It has been 11 years since I started the first book, Up Beaver Creek, which I fully intended to be just one book, not a series. I spent years on that book, writing, rewriting, and trying to sell it to an agent or traditional publisher. Finally, I decided that since nonfiction was my main career focus, I would self-publish my fiction as the fun thing I did for myself. Readers liked the first book so much I published a sequel, Seal Rock Sound, in 2022.

Self-publishing these days does not mean paying a printer and storing hundreds of books at your house. Print-on-demand technology means we can write and format the books online and have copies printed when orders come in. We can use the power of social media, Goodreads, Amazon and many other online venues to sell our books.

Anyone can self-publish a book these days. Doing it through Amazon’s KDP program is free, and the royalties are higher than most traditional publishers offer. The trick is to publish a book that is just as good as those put out by traditional publishers. Books that are poorly written, edited, and designed make self-publishing look bad for all of us. Books that we don’t promote like crazy go nowhere.

Doing it yourself is not easy, but it does have advantages. You can write the book you want to write without worrying about whether it will sell. You can release the book on your own schedule. The average traditionally published book takes two years from acceptance to publication.

The publisher has the final say on editing and cover design. By self-publishing, you make all the creative decisions. You’re also responsible for the creative mistakes. That’s why revising, having other people edit and proofread, and hiring a skilled cover designer are so important. I have a whole talk I could give on that subject, but let’s move on.

PD and her friends are as real to me as anyone reading this blog. I have to keep reminding myself that I cannot drive up Beaver Creek Road (shown in the photo) and see the Rainbow House and Donovan’s cabin on the right because they aren’t really there. I realized with a shock last night that I’m older than every character in the book and would not fit into their world, not in reality. But in my imagination, I’m 43, just like PD, singing harmony with her and Janey.

I don’t know if I can let them go after this book. PD’s stories have been well-received, and I already have ideas for another sequel. It might be different, perhaps from another’s character’s point of view, but there will be troubles, there will be love, and there will be laughs.

As soon as Between the Bridges becomes available, I will share the cover and links for purchase. Stay tuned for news about launch events and readings. Meanwhile, I have to check the page numbers and margins again.

Thank you to Pat, Samantha, Bonnie, Nancy, Stacy, and Kathryn for your eagle-eyed examination of the Between the Bridges manuscript. I’d be lost without you.

Happy New Year! May God bless us all in 2024.

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Up Beaver Creek has been published

Up_Beaver_Creek_Cover_for_Kindle (1)My new novel is available now at Amazon.com. It’s not fully fledged yet. My official launch party is not until July 8. But you can buy it now. (I’ll excuse you for a minute if you want to go do that.) No, it’s not in the bookstores yet. Or the library. I don’t have copies to sell you. They’ve been shipped but haven’t arrived. But all that will happen within the next month.

I’ll be honest. I have published this through my own Blue Hydrangea Productions company via Amazon’s KDP publishing program. I didn’t want to publish my own books anymore. It’s a lot of work. But the book needed to come out. Plenty of famous authors have self-published (Stephen King, Mark Twain, Margaret Atwood, e.e. cummings). Besides, people need to read about the imaginary tsunami before the real one happens.

Tsunami? Yes, in Up Beaver Creek, the long-awaited tidal wave hits the Oregon coast. Read the book to see what happens and hope your neighbors are as well prepared as P.D.’s are.

This book is fiction. The people are invented, but the setting is real. As everyone living on the Oregon coast knows, the big earthquake and tsunami are coming.

Up Beaver Creek is P.D.’s story. She’ll never tell you what the initials stand for. Nor does she want to be called Cissy, her old nickname before her husband Tom died, before she launched herself at 42 into a new life with a new name, a new look, and a new determination to realize her dream of being a professional musician. Am I writing about myself? No. I’m a widow and a musician, but I am not P.D. I wish I were that bad-ass. I would never do the things that P.D. does.

“P.D.” is a state of mind, a tougher, wiser, upbeat attitude that makes the former Cissy work out at the gym, cuss, and try things she would have been afraid to do before. She will not whine or give up.

For a long time, I called the book “Being P.D.,” but the general reaction was “huh?” So I changed the title.

My book launch party is scheduled for Sunday, July 8 at 2 p.m. at the Newport Public Library. There will be readings, discussion, books to buy, and a big cake. I might even give some books away. So come join us.

I welcome opportunities to read and talk about this book and all of my books. For a full list, visit my book page at suelick.com. We can discuss starting over as a widow, living on your own, what to do and not to do when the tsunami hits, how to get books published, and other topics. If you would like a guest post for your blog, I’m interested.

For information about any of this, email me at suelick.bluehydrangea@gmail.com, click on my web page at suelick.com, or visit my Facebook page, www.facebook.com/suelick. You can also find lots of information at my Amazon author page.

As always, I welcome your comments here.

Unleashed in Oregon blog book is born

Unleashed PB coverWell, I did it. Soon I’ll be holding a paperback book copy of Unleashed from Oregon: Best from the Blog. It will have tangible form, unlike these weekly blog posts in cyberspace, which could disappear if something happened to WordPress, Wi-Fi or the Internet. It will also put together related posts from various times and places to create a new story.

What’s in it? You’ll find the answers to these questions and more. What is a Californigonian? What was waiting by the door that night? What possessed us to adopt two puppies at once? How is playing the piano like ice skating? Why stay in Oregon when it rains all the time and the family is still back in California? Chapters will look at the glamorous life of a writer and the equally glamorous life of a musician, true stories from a whiny traveler, being the sole human occupant of a house in the woods, and dogs, so much about dogs.

With over 500 posts published over the last 10 years, I had to leave a lot out. Frankly, many of those posts deserved to be left out. They made sense at the time, but now not so much. The photos in the book are black and white because the cost of color photos was prohibitive and this isn’t a coffee table book. I refuse to charge people $40 a copy. I wanted it to be fun and inexpensive. And it is.

Putting Unleashed the book together has been a challenge. The cover I loved for the e-book didn’t work for the paperback, so they’re different. Choosing the posts, finding the files, and finding the original photos (I need a better system!) took time. Remind me not to try formatting another book with pictures. Also remind me to use a real camera instead of my phone. Getting photos, page numbers, and headers to line up, yikes, but I think you’ll like the result.

Portuguese grandma book lives on and on

Stories_Grandma_Neve_Cover_for_KindleStories Grandma Never Told was conceived one day more than 25 years ago when I was hiding out in my parents’ vacation trailer making random notes in the wake of publishing my first book, The Iberian Americans. That book was an overview of the experiences of immigrants from Portugal, Spain and the Basque Country. My roots lead back to all of those places.

What about the Portuguese women, I asked myself. What has been passed down from my great grandmother to my grandmother to my mother to me that makes me who I am? The eyes, the nose, the body, yes, but what else? Who were these women? The few books about Portuguese immigrants that I had found focused on the men, as if the women didn’t come at all. There were stories to be shared.

The result was my next published book, Stories Grandma Never Told: Portuguese Women in California. The title is slightly misleading because the book does not include my grandmother’s stories. I never heard them. Instead, I looked up “Portuguese” in the phone book (pre-Google) and started interviewing women: family, friends, people who were active in the Portuguese community and the people they insisted I speak to. I had never been exposed to much of the Portuguese culture. A few words, a few foods, but not much more. My parents’ generation insisted on being as American as possible. Forget the old country. But I got involved, I learned, and I wrote.

It took almost a decade to get this book published. We had already moved to Oregon when I finally got the letter (pre-email!) from Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Books offering to publish Stories Grandma Never Told. It was released at The Dia de Portugal celebration in San Jose in June 1998. That was one of the best days of my life. My family was there, and the books sold like crazy.

Eighteen years later, the book is still selling, but not in the same way. After nine years doing a fantastic job with my book through three printings, the people at Heyday decided it wasn’t selling enough to be worth doing another printing. But it was still selling, and I wasn’t ready to let it go, so I started my own publishing company, Blue Hydrangea Productions, hooked up with a local printshop, Lazerquick in Newport, and produced my own edition with a gorgeous new cover photo of my grandmother, Anne Avina, on her wedding day.Stories Grandma Never Told_justified text.pmd

That first Blue Hydrangea edition kept selling. I went through three printings, and I’m still getting orders. I’m out of envelopes and almost out of books, but Stories Grandma Never Told lives on. I am releasing a new edition this month through Amazon’s CreateSpace print-on-demand program. You can order it online right now. Again, we have a new cover. This one features my great grandmother, Anna Souza. Why go through Amazon this time? Cost and efficiency. It costs me nothing, saving me a big printing bill and allowing me to charge less for the book. I can also offer it as a Kindle ebook for the first time ever. Plus, since most of my orders come from Amazon, they won’t have to get the books from me, meaning readers can get copies more quickly. I will still get paid and should make more money than before.

Why self-publish? These days, it’s a big question in publishing. It’s so hard to get accepted by traditional publishers, although I have done it several times and expect to do it again. Some self-published books are poorly written and badly edited, but many respected authors are taking control of their own careers by publishing their own books. We have the technology now sitting on our desks. Why depend on someone else?

“Grandma” was originally edited and formatted by the best at Heyday Books. I’m just keeping their work going. Why? Because the readers still want the book, and they don’t care how it came to be. I marvel at this, that I wrote something people want to buy and share with their mothers, daughters and friends. How could I let it die?

Grandma Souza, who died in 1954, would be shocked to find her face on the front of a book. She never learned to read in either Portuguese or English. But here she is, digitized in 2016 and being written about in a “blog.” As she might have said, “Ay, Jesus.”