IngramSpark's #WhyIPublish — My Story

#IngramSpark #WhyIPublish

Some dream of writing a book someday. I was never one of them.

I sometimes think that the only reason I passed typing in high school was that the teacher was a relative. I can’t spell, and punctuation barely exists in my world. But because of modern technology and a good editor, I was able to overcome this.

I had never expected to write a fantasy book. My reading background is mostly in autobiographies and history. But then my oldest son, Sam, at age 7, read all the Harry Potter books, which soon led to me reading them. That led to reading The Lord of the Rings, and then the Eragon books. So I blended my limited knowledge of the genre with my own reading background to create my stories.

In the fall of 2017, my family and I had just signed on a house. Two days later, I was told that my job of 29 years, which had barely kept us afloat, would be ending. The next couple of months were a struggle as we fought to secure our home, worrying what was going to happen to us.

So during the search for a new job, I had decided to start woodturning toy wands to sell, to help us get by. One day, as I took compost out, I found an amazing stick lying on the ground. Taking it into the garage, I sanded the tip to a point — and the Piasa Wand came into being.

I decided that we needed to write a short description of the wand company to go with the display at the local shop. As my unemployment continued, I started to expand the story into what eventually became Zandra Voorhies and the Piasa Wand. I picked the name Voorhies because of an unusual old house in the area, which had been abandoned a lot of my life and was considered haunted. It has since been restored.

When we started to look into publishing, I knew I wanted to self-publish so I would have more control over the final product, and IngramSpark seemed like one of the best choices. I am currently working on book 2 in the series, The Knights of Columbia, and I plan to use the same method of publishing as before.

So that’s the long story about #WhyIPublish. Hopefully this will inspire others to do the same!