book – Page 3 – Stacy N. Sergent

As hard as it is to believe, tomorrow will be the electronic release of my first book, Being Called Chaplain: How I Lost My Name and (Eventually) Found My Faith. At least I hope it will. There are still a few things to iron out. This publishing a book thing is nerve-racking stuff. And maybe the most stressful part of it for me has been getting the cover just right. I know everyone says, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but we still do, don’t we? I wanted a cover that would make people want to know what’s inside this book, that would make them pick it up off a shelf or a sales table or click it on Amazon. It wasn’t my choice to put me on the cover. Let’s be honest, I don’t really have a look that sells books. Continue reading “On Not Hiring a Butt Double” →

We’re now two days away from the electronic release of Being Called Chaplain: How I Lost My Name and (Eventually) Found My Faith. In another post (which I am still trying to recover from the internet abyss), I explained how I ended up publishing with Harrelson Press and how smoothly everything was going, right up until the last minute. This is the rest of that story. My editor, Merianna, and I set a timeline for publication. We wanted to release the ebook in January and the print version in March. Merianna suggested Epiphany as a good and theologically interesting date for the ebook launch. She began formatting the book for 6×8 pages and quickly realized that, even after my initial edits, it was still way too long. Even when she changed to 6×9 formatting, we were looking at a book the length of a historical epic or late entry in the Harry Potter series — far too lengthy for the spiritual memoir genre for which we were aiming. Mere days before Epiphany, she emailed me the sad news that there was just no way we could print the complete book in this form. I was devastated. Continue reading “An Epiphany Miracle (of Sorts)” →