In a small town like Winnemucca, where you often run into people you know, it's a good idea for an author to have a large purse and always carry at least one book at all times. I've sold books standing in line at the post office and grocery store, to the bank teller, in parking lots, in Walmart, and half a dozen at the Ranch Hand Rodeo, where a boy I know saw me in the food line and said he had just finished my second book and LOVED IT, and the boy with him told me he couldn't wait to read it too. Great publicity, LOL.

Whether talking to a class I'm subbing in, or visiting with adults, I've found that many have misconceptions about writers. Some assume that publishing a book means the money just starts rolling in. Many are surprised to learn that an author must give a 40% discount to stores! This makes for a good class discussion on economics. They ask how much it cost me to publish my book, not realizing that it costs the author nothing in advance to go through a traditional publisher. Many ask why I didn't self-publish, so I explain that I thought seriously about it, and almost went that route when my efforts to find a publisher came to a standstill. It is becoming a more and more popular option, but there are pitfalls to that path, besides the initial cost to the author. I enjoy the opportunities to talk to people about writing and publishing.

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."

Galleys are the uncorrected preliminary version of a book that can be sent to reviewers a few months before the book actually comes out. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_proof) The galleys of Starting the Colt have been printed and sent out to reviewers. In proofreading one last time (I think!), I managed to find a few things that needed fixing. We are getting close to publication! It was very exciting to receive my galley copies in the mail and see what my book will look like shortly.

What I found amazing in proofreading was that as many times as I have read through my story, I found it as hard to put down as if I'd never read it. My husband asked me one evening when we were going to eat dinner. I thought to myself, "Not now! I'm right at the good part--I have to keep reading!" Not like I didn't know what was going to happen, right? And yes, I did get up and start dinner...after just a few more minutes of reading.

It reminded me of the many times my mom scolded, "Jaaaaan-ice! Haven't you started on your chores yet?" And I would answer, "Oh, just let me finish this page" or chapter, or one more chapter, or however much I thought I could sneak in before she'd get after me again to do my homework or piano practice or my chore list taped on the refrigerator. Has my love of books been passed on to my kids and grandkids? You bet!

As anyone can see who reads this blog, I hate writing about myself. I put it off as long as I can, and ignore the whisperings of my guilty conscience. I know I am not the only writer who struggles with publicizing her work--many writers are, by nature, introverts, and we would much rather bury ourselves in writing or writing-related projects, guarding our privacy. At the same time, I enjoy doing presentations and talking about my books, so there is a tension there.

Rereading my last blog post, about a student writing activity last school year that didn't go as well as I had hoped, reminded me that later that year, I had just the opposite experience. One day I was subbing and a girl asked me how to write a book. An idea popped into my head, and, seeing we had some extra time, I decided to use her question as a class activity.

I wrote a basic story idea on the board, then we played with it. The class helped me add detail after detail until we had the whole board covered with possibilities. Not only was it fun and instructive--at recess two teachers came in, saw it and asked me about it, so I explained what we had done. One asked if I could come to her class and do the same activity! So a few days later I popped into her room (which just happened to be my granddaughter's class) for an hour and we did the same thing. Then she used it as a class assignment after I left, to write the story we had outlined.

I found it amazing that the unplanned idea turned out so good that I know I will use it again and again, yet the one I had slaved over did not turn out as well as I had envisioned. This often happens in writing. Books, or characters in books, sometimes take on a life of their own, beyond what you had originally planned.

Lately I have been working on the Nevada pages of the curriculum unit. I wrote The Orange Slipknot because I wanted to share my love of Nevada--not the glitz of Las Vegas, but the beauty and uniqueness of buckaroo country. I grew up in California, so Nevada is my adopted state. I was a town girl, not a country girl. I never imagined I would grow up to marry a cowboy and raise my kids 50 miles from a town. Life here was so different from what I had known. My letters home to family and friends were filled with adventures and anecdotes that had them shaking their heads. More than once I was told I should write a book. Those letters contained the seeds of stories to come.

When I started my journey into writing, I began by reading books about writing for children. They all advised, "Write about what you know and feel passionately about." I knew I would write about kids growing up in Nevada. My first piece of writing was called "The Best Thing About Nevada," in which a boy tells about all the things he loves about living in Nevada and cowboying with his dad. I didn't know it then, but it was "Ben" in disguise! So many elements from that essay found their way into The Orange Slipknot years later.

Not too long after that I took a course on writing for children. Several of my assignments became Nevada pieces of one sort or another. The first piece that I sold was a magazine article about kids and horses. It would be a few years before I came up with a story that I thought I could develop into a book, but this book was destined to be about growing up in Nevada's cowboy country.

Cowboy country is ranching country, and ranching means beef cattle. As I got more and more interested in sharing my ideas with kids unfamiliar with this lifestyle, I began to realize that many kids don't even know where hamburger comes from. I got involved with Ag in the Classroom and started reading Range magazine. I began to think about how I could use stories to help educate kids about agriculture while entertaining them with cowboy tales.

Agricultural roots were once strong in this country, but now most people are so far from that lifestyle that they have little concept of the relationship between ranching and our food supply. Much of what people do hear about ranching is filtered through the environmentalist view that ranching on public lands is evil and that ranchers are rich free-loaders. Many people probably associate cowboys with either the past or with rodeos, not realizing that this lifestyle is still alive and well in the contemporary West.

I was fairly sure that few juvenile publishers were interested in my topic, preferring urban and multi-cultural settings. When I found Raven Publishing's website and read that the publisher was from a ranching background, my hopes rose. Finally I found a publisher who shared my values!