They're back!

Earlier this year, something bad (or maybe good?) happened to my daughter and I: Our contracts with GMTA Publishing were terminated. For this reason, our books with this publishing company were taken off the market and listed as out of print. These books were: Dogs Forever! Poems for the Dog Person (co-written with my daughter, and this book was her debut title as an author and illustrator); Follow That Dream; A Million Doughnuts; and Jennifer’s book, Sarah’s Special Angel. We were also under contract for my children’s book, Hunter’s Upcycling Adventures, as well as another poetry book we co-wrote titled Satyrs Are Cool. Contracts for these titles were also terminated.

After some serious soul-searching and a powwow with some authors/publishers who are also my friends, I decided to self-publish these books through Createspace. Thanks to an article I read by Angela Hoy of WritersWeekly, I knew I had to label these books as a “second edition.” Even so, I included the original publication date of all titles when I self-pubbed them.

Another thing I did to avoid any future problems with GMTA was to slap on a new cover for the books. The covers on the original books were either created by Kitty Bullard or Amber Rendon, so I figured it would be best to give the new books new covers. I did not, however, change anything else with these books – though I was tempted to, especially with Follow That Dream. In the end, however, I left all the books exactly the same as they had been when first published, except for removing their old ISBNs and GMTA’s info on the copyright page.

It has taken me three months but I have finally gotten all four books back up on Amazon. Yay! I am very excited to get it all done.

Here are the books, with their new covers. The buy links for these books are on my website.

Thank you so much to all of my friends and family who supported this decision and offered help: Lee-Ann Graff-Vinson, Kate Tenbeth, Charlotte Holley, Charli Ann Hartman, Brian Shell, Jenn Greenleaf, Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Denise Bartlett and, of course, Jennifer, for all the discussions and the production work. We all make a great team! Thank you to other friends and family – Tara Chevrestt, Jeanette Dodd, Millie Colclasure, Allison Warner and my cousins – for all of your support and encouragement. You all have helped me to build up my confidence in being able to self-publish and now I am excited to move forward in the publishing industry with more books written by some talented writers!

This blog post marks the end of all of that business. I am glad I got all of the books back in print. Now it's time for new books and new things. It's time to move forward on this new journey. Onward and upward!