Friday, December 5, 2014

My Book

My sincere apologies to anyone who may have logged onto my blog in response to my announcement on Facebook about the digital launch of Tree Barking: A Memoir, only to find nothing! But know I am posting this just a few short hours after the announcement on Facebook - so hopefully some people will have returned to the blog.
The book was first published by Heyday Books in Berkeley - a wonderful non profit publishing company. The book came out in April 2008 at the beginning of the great recession - not an auspicious time! Heyday does not have a publicist, and I am abysmal at any kind of promotion, especially when it comes to self promotion! Suffice to say, in 2013 the book went out of print, and the copyright reverted to me. At the same time as that happened, I was not officially laid off, but I was taken off salary - all very unnerving events. At the very time it went out of print a middle school planned to use my book as a set reading over the summer! They received my very last copies, and there weren't enough copies  so the school made copies of the book. The irony was that on Amazon the book was going for $800 or more (??????????????) supply and demand, or something. I knew that the parents of the kids in the middle school were not going to shell out 100's of dollars for a book of any kind. Of course I would not be receiving any of that money! Sort of like a painting sold for billions by a long dead artist who died penniless!
One of the 'advantages' of being taken off salary was that I had more time to devote to writing, and also to converting the book - hence the 'new' launching digitally more than a year later!
I hope some of you will read it, or at least download it because the issues I wrote about have only become worse. I am writing about the children now, but if you do read my blog you will see from the entry "Endgame" that I have reached burnout.