For example, my first book, Where Am I Sleeping Tonight? (A Story of Divorce), Boulden Publishing, 2008, is one that school counselors might like to have available. Who might know children who will be reading your book? Make a list.В How can you reach these people?В ThatвЂ™s where you begin. It is just another opportunity to be creative.В Even before your book is published, you can set your mind to work on marketing it, which has a most desirous goal: getting your book to readers. Because publication brings a new source of stress: MARKETING.ДЄuthors are encouraged if not required to do their own marketing depending on the size of the press you are published with, you may need to do more or less of it on your own.В Most authorly types are not prepared for the social aspect of this endeavor.В We are more apt to be good at staying home and communicating with our computers - or with each other while sitting at our computers.В But marketing doesnвЂ™t have to be daunting. So if you win that lottery, yes, publication will most certainly be sweet, but perhaps sweet like dark chocolate with cranberries - delicious but with a slightly tart taste.

And, like a Harvard applicant, itвЂ™s entirely possible for a manuscript to be completely deserving and still not get in.

Hopefully, all of us can find the joy in creating, because IвЂ™ve read that itвЂ™s as hard to get your unsolicited manuscript published as it is to get into Harvard. Oh, how childrenвЂ™s authors in critique groups pray to get published someday! ItвЂ™s true, just ask them.

Let the rumpus begin