Just a Stay At Home Mom with a story to tell...

Four days ago, thanks to the technical genius of my husband, I launched the first official campaign to announce my forth-coming book to the world. On Friday morning, Andrew and I sent out an email announcement to about 200 family members, friends, co-workers, colleagues and acquaintances sharing the news of A Dozen Invisible Pieces and providing a link to the website (www.adozeninvisiblepieces.com) and asking folks to pass the announcement on to their own friends/family who might be interested in knowing about an up-coming book regarding the wonders and trials of pregnancy, parenthood, womanhood and more.

As of today, we have had people in seven different countries, and eighteen U.S. states view the website, many of whom have signed up for future notification of the book's official release next month.

Choosing the self publishing route has become increasingly mainstream over the past few years, but it is still a bit of leap over all. The traditional publishing industry is now comprised of several trade publishers who have now swallowed up smaller publishers...creating publishing houses within publishing houses. I suppose it's slightly similar to what has happened within the radio industry: a couple of enormous organizations control the large percentage of what is now available on our airwaves. Likewise in the publishing industry, the millions of titles flooding the book market pass through a relatively small number of gates...until self publishing came along, that is. Pick up an Writer's Digest magazine, and you will see ad after ad for Print On Demand publishers touting impressive author royalties, author copyright control, quick turn around times, etc. But the one service lacking, which traditional trade publishers can still offer, is wide-reaching book promotion campaigns. The print on demand and boutique self publishers offer a tremendous amount of benefit to the author who lacks the time, courage, patience, or even financial means to engage an agent and run the gauntlet that exists within the trade publishing industry. But if an author's goal is to publish a book for the general publics' consumption, they must be willing to do the leg work when it comes to promotion.

And so, while working in conjunction with my publisher, Cold Tree Press (www.coldtreepress.org) on the cover image design, interior formatting and the like, Andrew and I launched into the work of creating the website, this blog, a database of people and places we felt most likely to take interest in the book's contents, and then with a great deal of optimism and a leap of faith--we put it out there.

In four short days, I've received wonderful feedback from the folks who've taken the time to read my on-line excerpts and listen to the audio files of sample chapters of the book. I've received invites and requests for book signing events in Bozeman and Red Lodge, Montana, Richmond, Virginia and San Diego. All in four days.

I can't help but feel like this is all a crazy dream...after all, I'm just a stay-at-home mom with a story to tell! A story that so many people will read, and say to themselves: Wow, I'm really not alone in this Motherhood thing.