During a recent subbing job, while assigning an article on environmentalism, I was reminded of one of several reasons I am writing books.

When our boys were little (if you know them, you'll find it hard to believe they were ever little!), my husband and I moved to northern Nevada--ranching country. I was fascinated with ranch and cowboy life, so different from my more urban background. I realized many kids have no idea where their food comes from or the importance agriculture plays in our lives. Food doesn't come from the store--it is produced by farmers and ranchers. Cowboys aren't just colorful characters in the Old West, movies, or rodeos, but play in important role in beef production.

Having been a bookworm all my life, I read piles of books to my little ones, hoping to instill in them the love of books. Many were engaging and well-written, but some made me wonder if I couldn't have written a better one myself! I began to toy with the thought of someday writing books for children.

Fast forward a few years. My boys are bringing home papers from school with a strong environmentalist slant, sometimes (as in the assignment I mentioned above) with a blatant anti-farming/ranching element. My pro-agriculture feelings were kindled even further.

By this time I was writing and selling stories and articles to magazines and felt ready to attempt a book. I had read that nonfiction was a good way for a new author to break into the publishing game. I fumbled around with a few fruitless endeavors before it occurred to me that I could probably appeal to more kids in a fiction format, weaving background information into my story.

Not only did this approach prove successful, but during author talks I can bring out the agriculture angle even more, as part of an entertaining slideshow. The curriculum unit, while primarily integrating elements of reading and writing, helps teachers use the agriculture focus as a science connection and the Nevada ranching focus as a social studies connection.

Unfortunately, there was no time the other day to take the time to talk with my class about environmentalism, its agenda, and how it is pushed in the classroom and elsewhere. But through my books, I am doing what I can to educate kids about agriculture and the unique ranching sub-culture of the West.

Well, it has actually happened--my second book, Starting the Colt, is out! It even arrived earlier than expected from the printer. Now it's time to take off my writer's hat and put on my marketer's hat--not my favorite hat. I'd much rather be spending more time with my cowboy hat, but that's not going to happen for awhile, what with winter cold and snow. So it's a good time of year to be selling books in my spare time.

I am an introvert--I don't enjoy publicity or the process of publicizing my books, but I am trying to balance the side of me that would prefer to remain invisible. Every time I take a load of books to the post office, the rewards of marketing outweigh the challenges. Starting the Colt is now at the library and available in over half a dozen stores across northern Nevada. I just barely got it in at the Western Folklife Center in Elko before the week of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

My hard-working publisher, Janet Muirhead Hill, at Raven Publishing, has Starting the Colt up on Amazon.com, both as a paperback and as a Kindle book. She has been so great to work with--promptly answering my many questions, always making good suggestions and guiding our projects in the right direction.

As I have been subbing, I have shared with students the progress of my book in its journey toward publication and had a few opportunities to give mini-author talks or short readings. I love talking to students about reading and writing.

Other projects include tweaking my website (www.janyoungauthor.com) and placing the curriculum unit that I wrote last summer on TeachersPayTeachers.com. I have spent the past month and a half familiarizing myself with TpT--the products, the descriptions, and the process of formatting and uploading a digital product. Here, teachers can easily access the CU for an affordable price, and even download a free introductory mini-unit. Visit my TpT store to find "STARTING THE COLT Curriculum Unit Common Core Aligned" and "STARTING THE COLT Mini-Curriculum Unit Common Core Aligned."

Yes, I spent the first few weeks of my summer vacation working on the sequel to The Orange Slipknot. I got a lot done, reworking some parts, improving the last half of my synopsis which I work from, and struggling to clarify a few uncertainties in the timeline of my plot. I wish I could say it's done but I haven't touched it since.

A writer, like anyone else, must prioritize in order to make the most efficient use of time. I must accept the fact that, working in a school, I have much less time for writing projects than I did over 12 years ago when I wrote the book as a mostly stay-at-home mom. It has been very hard for me to learn to write in small chunks of time, governed by the clock. And when I must choose between marketing my book and working on the sequel, I usually choose marketing. After all, if people haven't read the book, what use is a sequel?

Many of my summer days involved several hours of Internet research for lists of phone numbers: book stores, gift stores, feed stores, and western stores, in Nevada and surrounding areas. Then several more hours were spent on phone calls. (Good thing we have unlimited long distance!) Fortunately, I also made many trips to the post office with piles of packages.

I finally got some photos of the Hadley Ranch at Carlin (Maggie Creek), which for the most part is the location I pictured in my mind for much of the story. We enjoy going to Elko on Labor Day weekend for the big stock horse show and this time I remembered my camera. Going over, the sun was in the wrong place, so we decided to try to get pictures coming home. In the afternoon there was a huge dust storm, but I got some pictures that weren't too bad. I added them to the Powerpoint slideshow I have prepared for possible use in author talks.

It's sure exciting to hear kids making frequent comments to me at school about how far they are along in the book, how much they like it, and wondering when the next one will be out. I did a book talk at school, complete with a newspaper reporter who did a nice job with several photos in the paper. Then I did a talk at the middle school for three classes--about 100 kids. Next Saturday I do two talks in Elko, at a bookstore and the library.

Another printing wrinkle...literally. Some books of the second printing turned out to have wrinkles (indentations) on the covers and some had a few blank pages; about a third of the books had to be returned. So many things can go wrong.

I spend hours every week on the internet, finding lists of email or fax contacts for schools and libraries, state by state. Reviews are starting to come in. It's always scary to start reading someone's review of my book, just as it was scary to open that newspaper and see what the article looked like. I don't enjoy being in the spotlight; I felt horribly self-conscious about the article. But so far I have been fortunate in that all my publicity has been positive and tastefully done.

The illustrations are completed and the final editing and proof-reading are in progress. The next step is printing. The Orange Slipknot will be out by Christmas!

As the publication date looms closer, both the publisher and I have started marketing the book. This involves contacting potential buyers as well as making updates to both our websites to facilitate ordering.

Many authors or would-be authors do not realize that writing books requires the author to do a certain amount of publicity and marketing. Even if a large publishing house with a marketing department is handling your book, you need to be as involved as possible, if you want to sell a lot of books.

Writing is only half of being an author. Once you have finished your manuscript, you need to be knowledgeable about how to market your book to publishers. The course I took from the Institute for Children's Literature taught both writing and marketing. Many aspiring authors I have talked to have no idea what to do once they finish their manuscript. There are many books and websites that explain how to find publishers and how to contact them. If you fail to do your homework, randomly select publishers, and do not package your submission in the required manner, you stand very little chance of your manuscript even being looked at, much less published.

Once you have sold your book, you need to help market your book to the public. I have been collecting information on this subject for years and have a file folder of clippings from writers' newsletters and articles. At one point I considered self-publishing through POD (print-on-demand); the author pays anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars, and publishes without the benefit of the discriminating eye of an editor. There are many such publishers available, and as I researched them, I found that by using them, I would be 100% responsible for publicity and marketing. To prepare myself for that possibility, I began looking for even more information about how to do that. I learned that even a traditionally-published book will benefit from author involvement in the marketing process.

Many writers hope to become famous; I don't. Being a rather quiet, private type of person, I admit I dread the idea of publicizing myself. But I have also learned over the years that I can do many things I didn't think I could do, or even things I don't want to do. Making a website for my book was the first step, which I already knew how to do and which didn't involve face-to-face publicity. Then I designed and printed out bookmarks to give people I talk to. I found a graphic for the top, used some of the text I already had on my webpage, and printed it on orange paper. I designed some flyers which I posted around town on bulletin boards. These projects were time-consuming, but not scary.

I also did a few book talks at the school where I work. I have collected ideas for book talks to schools and to writers' groups ever since I started writing this book, so it wasn't hard to come up with a book talk format. Getting positive feedback from the kids and teachers was encouraging. It was fun to dress up in cowboy hat, chaps, boots, spurs, and wildrag, display some cowboy tack, and talk about cowboys, as well as read from my book and present some writing exercises. This wasn't scary either, but did make me a little nervous. I used to be extremely shy but over the years, through many opportunities, have developed the ability to speak in front of groups. I hope to be able to do some book talks, but since I work five days a week, I'm not sure if or how that might work out.

Book signings and media interviews are the kinds of things I dread. Instead, I prefer collecting business cards from vendors at horse activities who are interested in carrying my book, or searching the web for contact information for schools and homeschoolers. I will gladly drop by stores and gift shops, locally or wherever I happen to travel, or call librarians, to see if they might like to carry my book. I am glad that my publisher already has an established clientele that is interested in her books. I am glad she knows about marketing and distribution. I'm glad I did not choose to self-publish, taking on the financial risk and the huge burden of selling my book.