My Book

Most people view books like I view chocolate: I pick it up in the store, buy it, and enjoy it, but I have very little idea of how it ever got mixed and made and into that pretty package and onto the shelf.

In the same way, the publishing world is a big mystery to most people. I have been known to yammer for five minutes on how I self-published my first book and then I found a royalty publisher who is working on revising and publishing it, and my audience looks at me in complete confusion and asks something like, "So, is that your first book or your second?" and I know I lost them long ago.

My explanations are complicated by the fact that I did sort of have a publisher even when I self-published, since I worked with Pleasant Word, who designed several covers and let me choose (great job IMHO) and insisted on editing it (terrible job IMHO) and put it into the book-buying loop so people could order it through their bookstores.

Now I am working with Good Books. It is a relief to have someone else deciding which chapters go where and doing all the marketing.

On the other hand, it’s a bit scary to have someone else making all these decisions about my "baby." They decided on a different title (Ordinary Days—Family Life in a Farmhouse), and also decided to pull five chapters from the original book and replace them with columns I’ve written more recently.

The latest step was designing the cover. The main editor, Merle Good, made the decision to have an artist paint a cover illustration rather than use an actual photo of our house. The good news about this is that they hired Wendell Minor who is a well-respected artist who, among 2000 other book covers, did the cover art for "1776" which happens to be on the bestseller list. (I am downright vain about this connection.)

I received a copy of my cover yesterday, and it is beautiful and warm and professional-looking. Merle Good believes it will greatly increase the sales of the book. The only trouble is, the farm in the illustration doesn’t look a bit like Oregon. The house looks somewhat like ours, but the rest of it had us all giggling. Emily said, "How would they ever get a combine through all those fences?" and Paul said, "It looks like Ohio."

Emily then started listing all the people who are going to take one look at the book and say, "Hey! That doesn’t look like your place!"

Hopefully people will understand that this was simply a Connecticut artist’s concept of a Willamette Valley grass seed farm and most people in Tennessee or Arizona don’t really care if the picture is authentic.

But I still don’t quite know what to tell people who ask if this is my first book or my second.

Quote of the Day:
"Mom, you’re as bad as Mrs. Virtueson!"
--one of my children, when I called Paul "Mr. Smucker," which I do on occasion because I get his attention a lot quicker than if I call him Paul or Honey or anything else. Both Paul and the children have been steeped in ACE curriculum for years