For the handful of readers of this blog I can make the formal announcement that I am officially about to become an author. The book will be available on August 14th. It can be pre-ordered on Amazon and a few other online places (Google Books, Books-A-Million, Good Reads, Deseret Book among them). But the most exciting thing to me is that the book will be at my favorite store in the universe (after IKEA) namely, Barnes & Noble! Okay, so perhaps only a few Barnes & Noble stores will actually carry hard copies, and the initial print run of my book is very small, and I never expected it to be widely circulated, but in some Barnes and Noble stores there will be copies available!
Here is a little information about it:
“Growing up in the 21st century is not exactly the Calvin and Hobbes childhood I so adore. The boy in the tree house wearing the newspaper hat and on the nature trail pondering life’s mysteries, where is he? Have his parents sedated him with hours and hours of screen time instead of making him shovel snow off the drive-way ‘to build his character’ as his dad used to put it? Is he no longer making duplicators and transmogrifiers out of card board boxes? Has his imagination atrophied and his cognitive development been arrested? Say it is not so!”
Raising Children in the 11th Hour provides an eye-opening look at aspects of life facing this generation of children in America, providing the kinds of illuminating facts and statistics that are sure to affect choices parents make for their children, for the better. Timely topics covered include kids, money and advertising, the prevalence and effects of video games, facebook and young users, the current state of children’s nutrition, the decline in children’s reading levels and what we can do about it, the importance of sleep, the need for outdoor play, the sexualization and objectification of women and girls in media, and many others."
If you click on any of the above links you may notice that not all of them display the same cover, and many have the wrong blurb ("In our modern nonstop world..." is a blurb someone at the publishing house wrote before the book was completed and it does not represent well what the book is actually about. Amazon has a blurb that describes the actual book). The publisher is supposedly in the process of updating all of that so by the time August 14th rolls around everything will be uniform and correct on the web.
People have asked how this came about. I was approached by a relatively small publisher (publishes some 100 books per year) to write a book back in October 2011. They were looking for someone to write a parenting book for them, as they usually have a parenting book in their line-up of books every year, and my name came up through a friend of mine (I guess it is true that it is who you know, just as much as what you know). I did not like their idea, and did a counter proposal of a parenting book I could see myself writing. (I could never write a "how to" book advising parents on day-to-day discipline, for example, and let's face it - who would ever read such a book, written by me?).
I submitted four sample chapters late October and they liked what they read because the book was contracted on my birthday, November 9th. My deadline was January 11th!! And I had the most intense month of school left. I took my last final and turned in my final projects for school on December 14th. I slept very little in December between the book, hosting Christmas and Christmas in general, but I did make by deadline. Lucky for me, these were all topics I have thought a lot about since becoming a mom, and I have researched it some in the past and therefore it was a less daunting task than had I not been so familiar with the subject matter. The book has been updated and edited since the initial draft was turned in and this week it went to press. I know I will not make very much money (authors hardly ever do, and with the non-existent marketing budget my book has I am under no illusion about its prospects). And compared to the time I have put into this, my hourly wage will be pitiful. But despite all of that, I am just happy for the accomplishment! :)
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