Elaine Faber

CREATING A SELF-PUBLISHED NOVEL

I just published my latest Black Cat cozy mystery/adventure, Black Cat and the Immigrant Child. In this novel, Grandmother has passed away, and Black Cat and his family return to Texas to settle her affairs. On the first day there, the body of a young immigrant, likely carrying drugs, is found murdered on the prairie. A little girl is found beside him. The family takes in the child and cooperates with the Border Patrol in an effort to locate her family. Of course, Black Cat overhears a stable hand confess to the murder with the intent to harm the child who may be able to identify him. Black Cat, Angel, and the huge Maine Coon barn cat, Murphy, join forces to protect the child and bring the killer to justice.

So, what went on behind the curtain, before the books were published?

I spent hundreds of hours writing and editing the final manuscript. With the help of 3-4 beta readers, an intensive editing process is done to identify typos, punctuation issues, storyline snags, expand certain scenes, and generally look for anything that needs to be changed.

(Other types of editors are available to the author at this point who can suggest changes or give advice.)

As I self-publish, further steps toward publication all become my responsibility. I’ll envision a general cover concept, and as I prefer photographs, I'll search Shutterstock, Fotolia, and other online photo sites for one or two photos to be used on the front cover. Once I’ve selected and purchased the rights to the images, they are sent to my mentor/editor/cover design genius to create an approved design.

Acknowledgments, back cover blurb, character description, and dedications are assembled. The manuscript is returned to my editor/mentor, who formats the manuscript for publication. She returns a printed copy to me, where, after reading it through again, often 40-50 further corrections or changes are made. My local publisher acquires an ISBN. Finally, the completed manuscript is sent to Amazon to be printed into a paperback.

A correctly formatted e-book version is sent to Amazon. where, if the moon and stars are in the correct alignment, they upload it correctly so folks can purchase the e-book for $3.99.

So, small wonder that a paperback novel costs $16. After many hours before publication, you now know what a self-published author must do to complete the process and provide a wonderful reading experience. I hope you'll enjoy all my books and look forward to presenting this latest novel filled with intrigue, a touch of romance, and plenty of laughs from Black Cat as he engages with the horses, the barn cats, and a rat named Cedric.

If this sounds intriguing, go to Amazon and plug in the title. You'll be glad you did.

I grew up in Sebastopol, CA, in the 1950s, the last remaining town in Northern California with a working railroad train going down Main Street.

With a lack of shopping establishments, we had to drive 7 miles to Santa Rosa to shop.

It's interesting how our perception of distance has evolved. What used to be a half-hour drive over bumpy country roads at 30 miles an hour in a stick shift Buick is now accomplished in 7 minutes on a blazing freeway in our air-conditioned hybrid Lexus.

We only went to town to shop for school clothes, Christmas presents, or Easter dresses and shoes. Finding a dress for Grandma often took most of the afternoon, going from shop to shop, trying on numerous dresses, and checking prices.

My favorite thing about shopping day was Penny’s Department Store. Penny’s had a modern pneumatic tube system used for payment.

The saleslady would ring up our merchandise at a cash register, but she had no cash drawer. She would write a receipt and place our money into a container, then put it into a pneumatic tube system. With a “shoosh,” the container would be sucked through the clear plastic tube system, and I could watch it move across the ceiling to a cashier with a cash drawer sitting behind a glass office on the second floor. She had a separate tube for each cash register below. She would take the money from the container, place our change and a copy of our receipt back into the tube, and send it whooshing back through the tube system. It would make its way back across the ceiling and “plunk” into the tray behind our saleslady. She would open the tube and return our change and receipt. This process took about 5 minutes to reach the cash office, to be processed, and returned to the customer.

No one had thought up a shopping mall yet, so the stores we wished to patronize were often a block or two apart. At noon, after walking from store to store, carrying our packages, we stopped at the Kress’s fountain for “a bite to eat,’ which usually meant hot turkey sandwiches. Finally, mid-afternoon, exhausted, each of us hauling big shopping bags filled with our day's purchases, we would hike back to the car.

Daddy would come in from a hard day’s work of building houses all day. His red-checked shirt, tan coveralls, and boots were usually covered with sawdust. I know how much he must have hated Mama’s inevitable words that followed. “We stopped at Kress’s today for a ‘bite to eat’, so we’re just going to have a light supper tonight!”

Daddy was a meat-and-potatoes man, but on shopping days, when we stopped for a ‘bite to eat’ at Kress’s, it meant Mama wouldn’t be fixing a big dinner. Daddy had to contend with soup and a sandwich. I don’t suppose he ever went to bed hungry, but he didn’t always get his meat and potatoes, especially on shopping days with Grandma.

In recent years, fixing a “light supper” because I stopped for a “bite to eat” at the mall is a memory I share with family. They have come to know the phrase from my all-day shopping adventures with Grandma and Mama; memories of long ago that I will never forget.