MAKING EXPRESSION LESS TAXING

It's hard to imagine that I've been retired going on two years now. Nonetheless, I guess it's true. When I retired, I worked on completing a tax book for freelancers. I thought it could be my ticket to getting published. I wanted to make it informative and entertaining. I had Lynne Truss's Eats Shoots and Leaves in mind.

I wanted to target the book at authors situated similar to me, who were on the cusp of making money from their writing --- at least hoped they were. So in those first few months I worked really hard getting a rough draft done and taking my work to critiquing group to get feedback. Everyone in the critiquing group seemed to like the book and when I went to my chapter of the League of Utah Writers with the idea, I got decent feedback about the idea. In fact, a friend there offered to send the proposal to his literary agent. She was enthused about trying to sell the idea to a publisher. However, shortly after all this transpired, the agent had a personal crisis and gave up her work as an agent. I continued to hone the book and began to pitch it myself to agents and at least one publisher, the group who does Writer's Digest books. I got some positive feedback but no takers. Eventually, I gave up on the notion of finding an agent or publisher. I decided it was the type of book I could publish and market best perhaps myself. Hence, I hired an editor, who went through the book and polished and cleaned it up. That took a long time because the editor gave me a good deal but put me on the back burner relative to higher paying customers.

Recently, the editor completed her work and I decided to proceed with publishing the book. In the past couple of days, I have made arrangements to have the book available on Amazon.com through createspace and Kindle books. It will take some time before it is available through create space, because I have to wait for them to send me an example of the printed document and review it before I finalize the deal. The book should be available as a Kindle book sooner, within the next three days.