I got about half way through the article and found a mother who couldn’t let her child leave the house!
I spent three years working on my “alternative governance”. This project seemed like it would never end for I always found ways to improve it. But I knew I had to let it out the door. That was in 2000, and I self-published it.
Looking back, the first edition was not great. But it got me a volunteer job as a political/social writer for a local rural newspaper. My publisher wanted 600 words or less. It was a real challenge to frame a complex social issue in so little space. But man-oh-man, did my writing ever tighten up!
Second edition in 2004; third in 2009, and fourth in 2017.
The publishing world has changed a lot in all this time. Self-publishing was affordable in 2000, but that has only meant just about anyone can write and publish a book. More competition to market around.
The 2009 edition has been free on my website since 2009. But reading a book off a computer screen is not my idea of fun, so I wanted to publish an e-book. When Mr. Trump rose to his current office, I thought this might be the time when the world would consider my ideas seriously. And an e-book would be more readable.
With my editor beside me, we contacted six publishers to turn my book into an e-book. Only two got back to us, and neither seems honest enough for either of us. So we decided to e-book publish ourselves. It shouldn’t have been that difficult to turn a WORD document into an e-book, but it was more work than we had anticipated. And in the end, I really don’t have full coverage as not everyone is using Kindle and Kobo.
And as I was working with the 2009 text, I started adding a few ideas I had thought in the previous eight years. And by not looking at the text for many years, I was able to see new ways to improve old text (I wasn’t surprised). And I did find about 50 “gremlins” that my editor and I had missed back in 2009. So there were enough revisions to call it a new edition.
I had been active on internet forums for two years promoting. Despite spending hours on these forums and finding all sorts of people who recognize the system is broken, I could not find anyone really interested in even reading about a new way. With no tangible results, I quit forums in February.
Somehow I stumbled onto Medium in April. Definitely there is a higher class of reader here — as well as an interesting format.I will spend a few months here to see what happens.
