Well, my work is being pushed out to the public, but to be honest, I would rather be writing. Stolen Innocence is now available in paperback, which came with its own set of lessons. The primary lesson was just understanding how big that project was. After it was up on Kindle, and looking at what some of the other authors here have done, I decided to check out CreateSpace and look into making SI available in print form as well. Reading through their “how to” section seemed pretty straight forward, so I figured, why not?

First thing was to pick a trim size, so I grabbed a couple of paperbacks off of my shelf and measured them. Most were around the 5x7 area so I downloaded the 5x7 Word template, did a memory hogging cut/paste, then checked out the results.

Holy Tree Killer, Batman, 993 pages! By the time I enlarged the gutter for a two and a half inch thick book, we moved into the 1000 page range. Moving the template up to a 6x9 brought the tree toll down to 630 pages. I surrendered and moved to a 7x10 template, tightened the margins as much as allowed, dropped the print font down one size, and was able to bring it to 413 pages. Note to self, think smaller.

The experience with getting SI into print gave me cause for pause on my plans for the two Princess stories. I was planning to merge them into a single book, but based on lessons learned, it would be the size of a phone book. Since I already have the third installment of the Dan McNeil story started, I decided I am going to present them as a series, and I am calling that series “Trail of Tears”. Those that have read the stories know that is the name of the organization that Dan ultimately worked for. As such, the first book, “Trail of Tears: Princess of the Desert” has been released on Kindle and paperback. The second book, “Trail of Tears: Tears of the Princess” is a couple of weeks out. The third book, yet to be titled, is probably a number of months away from even being posted to this site.

For those that are interested, Princess of the Desert will be on promotion at Amazon for the next few days. My goal is to give away about a thousand copies. I would truly appreciate anyone that has read the story to post a review. I could use some more reviews for Stolen Innocence as well, and I thank those of you who took the time, it is appreciated. SI has been picking up some activity, but slowly. Lack of name recognition is probably the primary cause, but the reviews help. I know they help me when I am looking at someone else’s work. It has all been an interesting experience, but I want to get back to the fun part, writing.

Princess of the Desert

As always, thank you -- MT