From: Linda
I loved your breakfast menu tips in today’s
e-mail.  I had forgotten I used to make breakfast
sandwiches.  Whenever I made baking powder
biscuits(for chicken & biscuits, shortcake etc) I
made a double batch.  I fried an egg for each one,
added a slice of cheese, wrapped them in plastic
wrap and froze each individually. We zapped them
in the micro l or 2 minutes right out of the
freezer(can’t remember how long exactly). Thanks
for reminding me of a quick tasty breakfast.
Don’t know why I’ve forgotten about making them!

If you are signed up to receive our newsletters and they just stopped coming please let us know.
For some reason our newsletter company just bounces people’s newsletters and then unsubscribes them. We don’t know about it until someone says they haven’t received it for awhile.

WE WILL LET YOU KNOW if you we ever decide to stop doing the newsletter. If you are missing some please let us know and we will get you signed back up or you can do it yourself here.

The problem seems to be the worst with hotmail, aol, yahoo and frontier net.

You can see past newsletter here if you are missing some.

We are sorry about this. Mike has spent days to get it resolved and we have yet to get them to fix it.

Tawra

ere is the 3rd part in our How to self publish a book. Check here for Part One and Two.

How long did it take you to gather all the material?

50 years. We used several recipes from my grandmother and great-grandmother along with mine and mom’s recipes and tips. It took about 2 years to get them all together in a book.

The gathering of the material was the easy part. It was the organizing of it and type setting etc. that was hard. You have to make sure all the meat recipes go together and what about that meat and pasta recipe? Does it go under main dishes or pasta? Then what to do when you have a big whole at the end of the page or a recipe doesn’t fit on a page?

We then spent ages on trying to get the index written. We didn’t just slap Caramel Apples under caramel apples but had to make sure it got under apples too. That is one of the reasons I think our book is easy for people to use but all those things take hours of extra work and those are the things they never tell you about.

Jill

What was the thing that lit the fire under you to continue to pursue writing when road blocks came up.

I feel that this is a true calling from God for me to help others. I wouldn’t still be doing it if I didn’t have constant confirmation from Him that this is what I’m supposed to be doing.

While we were writing it I was just going to quit one night because it was so hard doing it all ourselves. (Mike was working 100 miles from home and only home on the weekends and I had 2 kids (6 months and 20 months) plus CFS.) I received a Word from Him to keep going so I did and we got it done.

MANY times since then I have thought about quitting. Whenever I do I pray and ask if I am supposed to stop and EVERY TIME I get a verse from the Bible that tells me to keep going on and He will do the work I can’t.

The time before last that I thought of quitting about 2 months ago (this was before the publisher got the order for 103,000 books) and I asked if I should keep going he gave me the verse “if you will persevere I will reward you”.

The next day in the mail came a poster that said “Never Give Up”
with a person hanging onto the side of a mountain at the top. I knew that I was supposed to keep going. That poster is now hanging on our office door!

The last time I wanted to quit (about 3 weeks ago), I found out some really stupid mistakes I made in the contract with my publisher and learned some not so great things about them. I was talking to the lawyer until 10 that night.

After I got off the phone I just started bawling and told Mike “I am so sorry I got us into this mess. We have 6,000 books sitting in the garage that we can’t sell, working hard and long hours on this without seeing any money from it.” He finally got me calmed down and we were able to sleep that night.

That next morning I was wondering again if I should keep going on and I sat down to do my Bible study and the very first verse was
Psl 37:7-9
7 “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;
do not fret when men succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.
8 Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;
do not fret-it leads only to evil.
9 For evil men will be cut off, but those who hope in the LORD will inherit the land.

I knew again that I was supposed to just be still and wait. 6 hours later we got the phone call from the publisher that they got the order for 103,000 books.

Knowing what you, and your Mom did behind the scenes is more what I’m wondering. Personal experiences. Do either of you have a degree in writing?

No mom was a SAHM and I went to tech school for horticulture. I just felt like writing a book, did it and dragged the rest of the family right in along behind me! LOL

How did you find out exactly how to construct a professional looking book?

We looked at how other books looked, found some we liked and then just tried to make it look like that but our own style.

The book has had 3 different covers now. Basically we just learned as we went.

Most people think it is so simple to write a book and so did we but we found little things can take hours and even days of work. For example with each book cover we can spend hours discussing what color just to make “the lady’s” dress and does it clash with her blouse. Now does the color on the shoes look right and does it all match the background color. And speaking of background color does it catch people’s attention does the spine of the book grab people’s attention and what color should the words be…. I think you get my drift. You see there are hours of behind the scenes of things that go on just for the cover let alone the book and the website. All of which we have to do the same type of thing for.

Jill

Thanks so much for elaborating on the ins and outs of self publishing, and signing with a publisher. Anne

I am happy to share our experiences. If nothing else just so people understand that it isn’t even close to being as easy as it sounds. That even if Oprah does call, which they did call us (twice and Dr. Phil once), it doesn’t mean you will get on and sell thousands of books. (They said our story was great but that people wouldn’t want to do what we did to get out of debt.) Looking back we see that if I would have gotten on the show we wouldn’t have been able to handle to orders or the work load it would have caused.

Having said all that. If God wasn’t in all of this, we would be nowhere today. It’s only through Him that we could have done this because I had no clue, not to mention I am horrible with grammar and still burn things!! LOL

Check back next week for part 4!

Tawra

Don’t forget to hit the after Halloween sales. You can get many other things there besides candy:

Packages of little toys for party favors.

Cupcake wrappers. Ones with pumpkins can be used all the way through Thanksgiving and if it is just for your family most kids don’t mind if their cupcakes have a pumpkin wrapper on it even in January.

Have a graduation coming at the end of the school year and the school colors have black buy your plates, napkins, streamers etc. now. Do this after each holiday. School colors red (Christmas, Valentines), silver (New Years), green (St. Patties day).

Get costumes for next year or pick up odds and ends if your kids are big into drama. We always kept a costume box. It had a lot of basics; black cape, sword, cowboy hat, cowboy vest, clown wig and nose, black gloves etc.

Check out today’s newsletter for some more ideas. Like one year they had a 24 bag of lunch chips for a dollar. This was cheaper then me packaging them up myself.

Happy Hunting,

Jill

This is a continuation from yesterday’s post.

Now for the additional questions:

Tawra, Thanks so much for all that information. Very enlightening. I’m just the most curious (nosey) person in the world. I was interested in things like, were you and your Mom driving in the car one day and one of you said, “Hey, we’ve got all these recipes, and experience with scraping by. Let’s write a book!”

Well, yes, sort of. I read the Tightwad Gazette years before around 1992 and thought “wow, we do that and even more”. At the time I had no intention of writing a book. I went to school for horticulture and all I wanted to do was open my own greenhouse and herb farm.

I re-read the Tightwad Gazette when I was pregnant with my first baby in 1997. In there she said how everyone kept asking her to write a tightwad cookbook but she hated to cook and it would be too much work to do a good job. That is when I said “I could do that!”

I made the announcement to Mom and Mike that day and they both laughed and said “Ok”. (Their enthusiasm was under whelming!) I was one of the worst cooks you had ever seen. I burned everything! Ok, I confess there some days I still do! I figured if I could learn how to do it then others could do it too! Mike confessed a few months ago that if he would have known then what he knows now he would have told me “no way!”. He said he was just “being supportive” and didn’t think I would really do it! LOL

From the time I came up with the idea and started writing until we got the book back from the printer was 2 babies and 2 years later.

Did you two sit at the table night after night hammering out the book?

Well, sort of. I started writing and Mom would call or come over (she lived across the street at the time) and say “you need to be sure and tell them this…….” . That’s why in the front of the book I say I was the typist.

There were several times I printed it all out and we would sit and edit it and add more stuff.

Check back for Part 3 in 2 days! Tawra

I get asked all the time “I have a great idea for a book. How do I write and sell a book?” I wrote this post back in 2005 to answer this question. I will put an update at the end as to where we are now. In 2005 we had been working on the book for 8 years (writing and then selling) and in business for 6 years. Tawra

How to self-publish a book.

I get questions all the time about how we self-published the book and how we wrote it in general so I thought I would put our story on here. I also received some questions from someone today so I put my answers in under her questions. Tawra

I self-published first. That means I did all the typesetting, editing, designing the cover etc. on my own. It also means I put up the money to pay for the books. We took out a low interest loan on our credit cards for 3% interest since we had good credit. $9,000 for the 1st printing of 2500 books. (The 3rd printing was 30K for 11,000 books)

It’s been 6 years since it came out and we still haven’t seen any income from it. It pays for it’s self but we haven’t made any money yet. I say all that first so you know what is involved if you self publish. If you are looking to make a quick (less than 4 years) income self publishing probably isn’t the route to go.

I got a publisher to take it over 2 and a half years ago and the new edition just came out last Feb. It was supposed to be out Aug. 2003 but they have been messing around and just not getting it done. The publisher we chose was a really bad move on our part! (more about that later)

Basically if you want a publisher to do it and not self publish you have to send a letter to each publisher and just ask them to look at your idea. You can get a lot of ideas from the books 1001 ways to market your book by John Kramer and How to Jump Start Your book Sales. I think their last name is Ross.

http://www.bookmarket.com/ This is John Kramer’s website and he used to have some good info on finding a publisher. I haven’t been there for a while but I think it’s still on there. If you do get a publisher they pay 10% of they price they sell it for which is 60% off to bookstores. So for the book that will be $20 in the store I will get about $ .80. Also if they get a “special” deal with places like Sams or the school book clubs then you get about .25 for each book. You have to spend the money to get publicity and pay for your plane tickets etc. for TV appearances if that is something you are thinking of doing.

The publisher paid to have our book re-designed. Then they paid for the first trial run of 5,000 books. A very large bookseller, Books Are Fun, wanted to do a trial run of 500. They are a huge company that sells to schools. Books Are Fun just ordered 103,000 copies 2 weeks ago. This sounds like a great deal but…..

Books Are Fun will pay for the printing and give my publisher 70 cents a book which I get 33% or 23 cents for each book. Even though it sounds like a great deal of books by the time we pay off the remaining books in our garage, 10K, and split the remaining money (14K) with my mom, my co-author, then we will have made about 7K or $800 a year for the last 8 years worth of work each. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that I have a re-order form in the back and it is very good advertising so we should get re-orders from this. There is a possibility that Books Are Fun will order more so we could sell a lot more books over the 103,000 they already purchased.

Anyway, I am hoping this will help us turn the corner so we can actually make some money doing this. You will have to be patient. Even having “proven” myself that I can get a lot of media attention the publishers still rejected me so if you really believe in your idea then just keep sending them letters.

It is a lot of work, a full time job. I don’t have the time or the energy (I have 3 kids, CFS and FM) so I can’t sell them like I would like to. (Which is why we haven’t made a profit yet.) I can’t concentrate on it for any time at all at the moment. Unfortunately books just don’t sell themselves. You have to spend a lot of time and money trying to get interviews and sending out free copies to the media. It’s like any other small business it usually takes 3-5 years to start making money at it.

The one piece of advice someone gave me when I asked them what you asked me is “writing the book is easy. It’s selling them that’s the hard part.” That has turned out to be the truth, so I give that advice myself now. I would say writing it is only about 5% of the work. The other 95% is marketing and your book won’t sell without it!

I don’t do all the work myself. My mom helps me write and edit. My husband does all the computer work, editing, proofreading, bookkeeping and my heavy lifter for the post office. My brother draws all the art work. So there is a lot of work that is involved.

More tomorrow! Tawra

You can’t escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

Translated in “Jillese” If you pay for something on credit today you will have still have to  pay for it tomorrow. You aren’t getting it for free. The same goes for all those buy now and you don’t have to pay until the year 2011 ads.  Be careful.

I’m not sure why but when we started using credit cards we lost all responsibility for our money. Holiday shopping is already starting so be very careful and think about things each time you pull all that credit card to pay. You will be responsible for it tomorrow (or next month).

That quote goes for other things besides money. You may decide you aren’t going to do the dinner dishes today but trust me they will be there in the morning for you (I hate to be the one to break it to you but there really aren’t any house fairies who come in the night and do them) :) And one day you will have to break down and clean out that closet.

I think you get my drift. It’s Monday so try to get up, make a plan and then work it. Set your home in order for the week.

Jill

Last night was one of those nights at Tawra’s house. We had one child’s teacher conference and right after it another one’s concert. As soon as Tawra got in the door with the kids from school it was full gear trying to fix dinner, get homework done, everyone dressed and out the door with dad coming home later from work.

I know I have said it before but it is important to have some quick and easy meals for these kinds of days. Today I will try to be more specific in my ideas.

Make a list of 5 meals on a 3×5 card to keep in your recipe file. They should have all or most of these qualifications.

1. Can be made the day before or early in the day.

2. Have ingredients which can be kept in the pantry or freezer and always on hand.

3. Can be kept warm easily.

4. Are one pot dishes (they are a whole meal in and of themselves, not needing a lot of side dishes)

5. Can be easily served to different people at different times.

6. Doesn’t need a lot of pans to make or dishes to eat with.

Let me give you a list of examples of what I mean.

Chili - This can easily be made the day before or morning of. All the ingredients are kept in pantry and freezer. It uses one pot. One bowl to eat out of and can be kept warm to eat at different times.

Stew - the same as chili

Veggie Soup - the same

Roast, Potatoes and Carrots - This too can be put in the oven or crock pot early in the day and slow cooked. It can easily be kept warm in the crock pot or oven and needs only one plate and is a full meal in and of itself.

Hamburger Casserole - Also the same and you can really use any of your favorite casseroles to do this.

Most of these seem like familiar dishes but there is nothing wrong with that. Did you know most families eat the same 10 meals over and over. Most families don’t really mind. The main object is to have a meal already cooked with very little mess in the kitchen from prep and from dishes used for eating.

You can of course add things like a salad, veggie, bread to the meal if you have time but the whole idea is if you don’t have time you don’t have to add anything at all.

Check out your Dining on a Dime. We have all of these recipes and a ton more plus a bunch of other ideas.

Make your life easier - plan ahead.

Jill

BTW, we have our Menus On A Dime series on sale this week for 1/2 price! Check it out here.

I’ve had some people wonder where I’ve been. I haven’t been feeling that great so I’m not doing much at the moment.

I have been really sick with my CFS for the last 2 weeks. I thought at first it was from drying up from breastfeeding but I’m not sure if it’s that or the fact that I’ve been swimming 4-5 times a week now. I started swimming and at first it seemed like it was helping but now I’m going downhill fast. (exersise makes CFS worse but FM better) I’m also having major mood issues from my hormones going nuts while drying up too so that’s not helping matters either.

Last week the two older boys both had the Swine Flu so they were home all week. So far no one else has gotten it. They had a 103-104 fever for 2 days, took meds and were fine. I’m not sure what the big deal is. I think the news just wants something to talk about because it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t any worse that any other flu. People really need to get a grip over this! Anyway, sorry, I got off the track. (BTW, don’t comment or email I know that there are people at risk like me and the baby but for “normal” people it’s not a big deal)

So I’ve been pretty much not doing anything. It’s very frustrating because I sit and rest to try and feel better but I just feel as bad so that doesn’t do me much good. The problem is I then try to force myself to do stuff but when I do stuff because I’m not feeling good I’m not firing on all thrusters so I do stupid stuff like burn my arm while cooking and drop a glass and shatter it.

We tried making some cooking videos the other day and after that I was so sick I couldn’t stop shaking. Needless to say we won’t be doing any of the videos. (sorry!) After that I decided to not doing anything on the business except what was essential.

Mom’s leg pain has been really bad too so we both are taking off for a while. We will still post but it may not been as often as normal.

Jack is doing really well. He is getting big. I can hardly carry him in his car seat now. I can’t believe he’s 4 months already!

My first son and last son, aren’t they cute?

So that’s it for us right now. Tawra

Hey, Tawra,
When are you going to get a FaceBook account?? I think you should create a page there for your fans. I follow both you & Susanne Myers with HillbillyHousewife.com.

One of your “fans”
~~ Lagea M.

Thanks for letting us know you enjoy our stuff.  I have been asked this question a few times now so I thought  I would let everyone know what’s up.  At this time I have no plans to do either Facebook or Twitter.  It’s nothing personal against them but honestly I’m just too worn out to mess with it. I am cutting WAY back on my computer time and only going to be doing the things that are essential to keep the website and blog going for the next several months-year.

If I added these things to the mix I just wouldn’t be able to cut back on the computer time and I just can’t keep up right now.  (As I was getting ready to work on this my daughter said “Wow mom, are you ok? You look pretty bad.” Leave it to your kids to let you know how things really are! LOL)

I will post more on that tomorrow but for now I’m sorry I just can’t be on there. If you want to keep up you can check the blog and sign up for email alerts from it on the right side under the RSS feed.  Tawra