By Sandra L. Jones, wife of The Author of “The Wolf’s Moon,” Patrick Jones

Interview with Anthony Wessel by Gale Martin

I start my writing career with this article dedicated to Anthony Wessel, CEO of Digital Book Today.

He believed in me, in us.  Sometimes in life, you meet people that are cornerstones in your pathways through the maze they call life.  My husband wrote a book.  Great!  How could I possibly have ever known what this self-publishing platform had in store for us, as my whole career has been in the medical field!

Anthony Wessel featured “The Wolf’s Moon” by Patrick Jones on his website.  The book had received just enough reviews and a rating of 4.2 to qualify for the interview questions.  We were so excited!  It was the very first “Featured Article” that we had!!  We had an incredible response on our free Kindle days thanks to the popularity of Digital Book Today.  Jumping up and down, we concluded that the process was now complete – WRONG!  Therein begins the book cover saga.

Anthony humored me during the entire process (bless his heart!) in my excited state by taking the time to listen.  He emailed me once and said, “By the way, I hesitate to mention this but…you may want to think about the book cover because it needs some work.”  Here we thought we had the best thing since buttered popcorn!  What could possibly be wrong with this work of art??  Little did we know that this journey through Book Cover Design 101 would take a year to get to this point!!  The first impression of the reader was The Author’s key objective in bringing “The Wolf’s Moon” to life.  Anthony Wessel suggested that I should write an article on the steps that we went through in this process in order to contribute our learning experiences to others within the writing community.

BTW…It’s FREE for Valentines Day Feb 13-14

Key considerations we used were as follows:

1.  Listen to any feedback that is given to you during the self-publishing process.  Someone once told me that feedback is a “gift.”  That is important.  No one has to take the time, so if they do…pay attention.
2. Follow through with the task you have been given, learn and read everything that you can on the topic.  There are a multitude of resources from experts in the field, like Anthony Wessel.
3. If you are not happy with the result…that is OK.  This self-publishing platform is a continuous learning project.  The more you study, the more it makes sense.
4. Doris-Maria Heilman with 111Publishing told me something very true.  “It is a marthon, not a sprint”.
5. Chad Savage, CEO of Sinister Fonts emailed me after I thanked him for the free fonts and said  that the only payment he wanted was for me to believe…with all my heart.  I thought that was really special.

Simple thoughts, one would think.  Except sometimes you need someone to bring it to your attention. You are too close to it. The good news is that the solution is usually simple!  When I used to troubleshoot instrument performance, I learned to always start at the beginning.  More often than not, the solution was simple, like plugging it in!  Someone else once told me that you have to do something 10 times before your brain puts it to memory (I think it takes me 20!).  But it works.