I’m an author! 3 books and counting and it has been so easy!

Oh, how I wish that last part were true, but let me tell you, it’s been a process with a huge learning curve!

At some point in my career as an English teacher, I started feeling like a hypocrite. Here I was, every day, teaching kids how to write, but I was never doing any writing myself. It just didn’t sit right with me so, when I saw an ad for a reporter at my local, small town newspaper, I applied. I don’t know if anyone else did, but I got the job and began attending village board meetings and writing articles about what was discussed. I lasted a few months because I absolutely hated every minute of it! The meetings were boring, some of the spectators were obnoxious beyond belief, and I felt a ton of pressure to be perfect because most of the readers knew I was an English teacher.

I never did quite get over my feeling of hypocrisy so I moved on. For a long stretch, I taught seniors and saw where they were unprepared to go out into the world. Over the course of months, I created a list of 40 different activities that every senior should do before they graduate. I designed the whole project as a set of cards, set up so a student could pick one every week (school years are typically 40 weeks long). I listed them on Etsy and…crickets. It’s one thing to create a product and whole other to market it. I shared the digital copy with my seniors so I felt good about that even if it wasn’t selling.

Time went on and I started hearing about Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). I watched a bunch of YouTube videos about it and completely rewrote the entire thing to fit Amazon’s requirements. I struggled. The formatting just wouldn’t work right. I finally had to accept that it couldn’t look exactly like I had first created. That opened up options and I finally got it to work. Therefore, my first book, The Senior Challenge: 40 things every high school senior should do before graduation, was born. It was quickly followed with The College Freshman Challenge: 50 things every college freshman should do in their first year and The Baseball Lover’s Bucket List.

Writing the books and designing them in the appropriate format was the easier part. Marketing, getting the word out that they exist, is the hard part. A few supportive friends bought the first one but that’s been about it. Amazon is saturated, people are more and more immune to ads, especially from small businesses with no track record. Pair that with my desire to live under the radar most of the time and it’s so hard to promote the books!

I know that many books come from blogs. I’m thinking of doing the reverse here. I’m going to take one aspect at a time from the two school-related books and go in depth on them. Tell the stories about how each suggestion came about. Maybe I can get my messages to kids out that way.

No matter what happens, I can finally say to my students that I have three books on Amazon. It gives me some credibility when it comes to writing and has taken away the feeling of being a hypocrite.