Thursday 19 July 2012

Happy 100th Birthday Beaty

Well folks
Its been a while since I posted, so I better give you an update but first.

Today is my Grandmother Beatrice's 100th birthday and to say the least she is the personification of persistence. Life has never been easy for grandma with her fair share of tragedy, comedy and romance but as she celebrates another birthday it reminds me that she has always given me a great example of that "never give up, never die spirit.'

So, on the subject of never give up, I have been plugging away at my little booky, which is now actually two books with a third one in conception.

The past few months I have been silent on my progress as it was actually getting a bit depressing as I searched for another illustrator for the cover of my book.  About a month ago, I got word from a friend who is an animator who was super keen to start drawing and voila, I have now seen the first sketches of my very first book cover.

As I have detailed in the past, I am going to Indie self publish and I have been mulling over whether that would be a print on demand or an ebook.  Well after much research and many twitterings, I have decided to do a print on demand via create space.  It is an affiliate of Amazon so we will be able to see a real paper back in the not too distant future.

However, I haven't given up the dream of traditional publishing and really with an example like Beatrice, how could I.  I would also love one day to show my little Gigi what believing in yourself and being persistent and hard work can bring. 

So I have been working on what the literary world calls a Query letter.   I am basically sending a short synopsis with the hook of my book to as many literary agents that fit my genre as possible and of course the inevitable rejections have been rolling in.  LOL

However, I recently entered a Query competition on twitter through a couple of gals who have had success with their query's and are now holding publishing deals in their hands.  I wasn't successful in the contest but just reading the query letter that got through has given me new and renewed vigour for my query.  I realised I wasn't putting enough in my query to hook the inevitable agent's attention.

So, there you have it, I am back in the game and am going to keep submitting whist I continue to journey along the path to self publishing.

One wonderful benefit of self publishing is that you can chose your own cover and I am pee pants excited to see the next round of drafts from my illustrator.

Ill be sure to keep you all posted, WATCH THIS SPACE, book cover coming soon........

See you in cyberspace

Jambo