Everyone Has A Story

The book world is changing. When I wrote my first proposal for a book back in the turn of the century (That sounds way too old!) I hunted likely publishers, drove myself crazy writing the perfectly compelling proposal, and in the end received countless rejections and no means of putting the book to paper. It was depressing and discouraging.

Then through a funny sequence of events I made a transcript of my father and his two brothers talking about their lives. At the time, I also had contact with a distant cousin and offered to help him put his life into written words. To have it printed simply and inexpensively, I used the website Lulu.com and with manageable effort published “My Cousin Mickey”.

On and off through this whole period I worked on a fictional story about the Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto’s wife. It was a tough go- lots of starts and stops- and always the fear that after all of this effort, what was the point if there was so little possibility of being able to find a publisher?

At the beginning of this year, with one rejection for the story in hand and the experience of publishing “My Cousin Mikey” under my belt, I decided that it was important to simply let the Rabbi’s wife see the light of day. To do that I would self-publish. I already had some experience so how hard could it be?

It was challenging, one set of lots of rules for mass distribution and another totally different set for an eBook but once I started, I was determined and so finally “Tent of Protection” is available on Amazon in paper and on a Kindle.

In the middle of all of this, a distant relative of my father’s contacted me this week. She had found the taped interviews I had done with my father and wanted to figure out the family connections.

Being in communication with her and other family members plus now more confident in my self-publishing knowledge, it took me one day to resurrect the transcript of the interview with my father and his brothers and publish “Brothers Sam Howard and Jason Shapiro”, a great story of a Jewish immigrant family.

It was so easy and so much fun, I’m eager to figure out what topic I will explore for my next self-publishing project. Any ideas?