Hey, y’all. Have
you read this awesome book called Strong Enough? If you haven’t, what the
heck are you waiting for?!
If you have, you’ll understand what I mean when I
say I’m totally a Whitney. In fact, if you’ve read the book’s dedication,
you may know me as “T”; Ellen and I travel together so we don’t get lost.
We’re each other’s compass, sounding board, and true other half. We
share a brain - you can bet if one of us is being the brilliant, the other is a
drooling, simpering moron. As the yen to my yang, if Ellen is iNovelist,
I am iReader.
I read constantly, and
though I prefer fiction, I will give anything a chance. When my fabulous
fiancé, now husband, bought me a Kindle Fire last year, I expected to use it to
surf the web, plan our wedding, and feed a growing Angry Birds addiction. But read on it? Eh. I like paper books. Why would I want to
read on a shiny screen? Then I realized I could download the classics for
free. I burrowed into the worlds of Jane Austin, Frances Hodgson Burnett,
Harper Lee, and Mark Twain and when I emerged, I was a convert. There was an
entire galaxy of adventures just waiting for my click! I began to
understand Ellen’s plan to self-publish in a way that I never had before, and I
got excited. THIS was the future of literature, and I was a small part of
it.
In the year leading up
to the publication of Strong Enough, I read every e-book I could that seemed
likely to appeal to a similar audience. I came across some great titles,
including How to Kill a Rock Star by Tiffanie DeBartolo and From Notting Hill
with Love Actually by Ali McNamara. Then there were the others. The
ones I won’t name. The books with decent plots and no editing. The
ones with type-o’s and missing words. The ones with recycled plots.
And worst of all, the books with no plot. Sometimes, I felt embarrassment
for the authors. Others, I felt anger that a story with promise had failed so
spectacularly.
Here’s my guilty confession
- I mostly felt pride, though. I knew that Strong Enough didn’t suffer
these errors. I knew that years of editing and reading the manuscript had
given the story a polish some other offerings lacked. I knew that Strong
Enough’s e-book status wasn’t a vanity publishing, but rather a real novel
being published in a modern world, just waiting for its audience.
