Obviously I was a voracious reader and I was introduced to books a lot through obviously my school library, thankfully my school had one and Scholastic Book Fair and we had a set of encyclopedias at home. And I loved to pull out a random letter and just read about whatever was on the page and I would even read the copyright pages of books and the acknowledgements to try to figure out how did this actual thing happen. How did this book become a book?
I would read the Library of Congress, you know, information, everything, dedication. And as I got older I would read things like Reader’s Digest, right, so I would go to Walden Books. And even though I was maybe, you know, 12 or 13, you know, I would read writer’s magazines. And that’s how I gained a lot of knowledge, even at that young age of how publishing worked. And I would buy what was very expensive to me, which is like $29.95, right, the writer’s market, the big huge volumes.
I would buy those and take them home, you know, even though I was 13 or 14 and I would look at the agents, at the publishing houses and I would say one day I’m going to mail my manuscript to one of these places. So I’ve been informing myself, I guess you could say on the publishing process for a long time, because everything about books has always interested me, not just the putting the words down.
But I would think about, you know, how are they printed, who did the cover art, and how did this happen? And every aspect of it fascinates me, so I’ve been educating myself on it for a long time.
