I have published over thirty books. They’re not all live anymore. Several I’ve since unpublished.
Each book has a story. I’m not talking about the story the book tells, but the story behind why the book was written in the first place.
Recently I asked some of my fellow authors why they wrote the first book they ever published. Their answers were varied. Some authors were inspired to write because of an event or dream. Others saw it as a challenge or culmination of a long-held goal. One thing I learned, we don’t all write for the same reason. In fact, authors don’t necessarily write all their books for the same reason. I know I don’t.
I’ve decided to do a series of blogposts called Each book has a story. In each post I will be featuring one of my books. I won’t necessarily focus on the story the book tells, as much as why I wrote the book in the first place.
The first book I’m featuring is Motherhood, a book of poetry.
In 1982 my husband and I moved to the mountain village of Wrightwood, California. At the time we had a three-month-old daughter and a three-year-old son. We lived fulltime in Wrightwood for the next nine years. It was during those years I wrote most of the poems contained in my book, Motherhood.
The reason for writing the poems was fairly simple. I wanted to express my experiences as a mother—capture what I felt. As the years went by, I would jot down the poems that came to me.
I shared the collection with family members—my sister, mother, mother-in-law. The first books were pages reproduced on a copy machine and bound in a homemade quilted cover.
Years later, when my daughter Elizabeth attended the Art Institute, majoring in Graphic Design, she needed an idea for her senior project. We discussed various ideas, and she eventually decided to format my book of poems and design its cover and create graphics to accompany the poems. When she was finished, she self-published the book at Lulu for her class.
The project was a personal one and never intended as a commercial endeavor. Yet, I eventually created the eBook version and sold it, along with the paperback, online.
In Amazon its description reads: Motherhood a book of poems is a collection of whimsical prose, featuring the assortment of poignant experiences unique to women who have loved and nurtured sons and daughters. The range is broad, capturing the swiftness of time, moments of quiet, times of chaos, frantic fear, yet most of all, unconditional love.
Today, my daughter, Elizabeth, is a professional freelance graphic designer, and her specialty is book covers. She designs my book covers and covers for many well-known New York Times Bestselling authors. You can see her work here.
Motherhood was her first book cover.
On Friday I watched as Twitter exploded with something that has since come to be known as #cockygate. I suspect by now most serious indi-authors already know about it. In fact, one popular writer’s group with over 21K members closed its virtual doors by putting up a Taking a Break sign and informing members that they were shutting off all postings for the rest of the weekend and suggesting its members all write, edit and spend time with their families. While all those are good suggestions, #cockygate was still a thing when Monday arrived. Maybe even more so.