Beneath the Whispering Pines

 Beneath the Whispering Pines is finally launching. 

The journey....

I started writing the book way back in 2015, when writing The Chronicles of a 21st Century Coal Miner, I wrote a short called "Masks To Hide Your Chagrin", a story about me and a belated friend, Julia, that was entirely unrelated to the Chronicles manuscript. With time, several small stories from my childhood compiled much like Chronicles had been the many small stories of my time as a coal miner. 

In 2016, I picked up an agent to help peddle Chronicles, which was fraught with rejections due to marketability from a coal miner story, despite the 2016 Presidential Election really pushing coal's return to mainstream by then-candidate Donald Trump. I grew frustrated with the lack of securing a book deal and moved Chronicles to self publishing, after talking with Dorrance, Balboa, and Xlibris, among others, in the self-publishing business. Ultimately I went with Balboa, due to the fact I had actually seen their books in bookstores before and also because the packages fit my personal preferences more so than the others. 

In 2017, I started pushing Chronicles into fruition. Yet, the more I read the script the more I started to struggle with internalizing the marketability of the book, and quickly found myself writing more and more on Masks to Hide Your Chagrin. 

In 2019, I found myself working with dozens of different manuscripts, non-fiction, fiction, and poetry collections. Knowing that pushing partially completed manuscripts to publication required conviction and focus, I ultimately picked Masks to Hide Your Chagrin, which I renamed to Beneath the Whispering Pines, as the plot features prominently a stand of white pines from my childhood. 

In 2020, Balboa adopted the manuscript and title and then... life happened. For real, I didn't realize how hard it was to procure a book that's 96,000 words / 320 pages in length, until I had to push the manuscript. Numerous revisions, including deleting an entire chapter, verb shifts, narration edits, the entire process was exhausting and relied on my coming-and-going creative energy to affix the true story of my childhood into a marketable and enjoyable story to read. By November 2022, the book was finished. I had at this point, read every one of the 96,000 words in the book at least ten times, and each time I would further revise the manuscript. Realizing I was in a perpetual editing hell, I ceased reading it over and over, and sent the book to Balboa for their lengthy review process. It was now April 2023. 

In August, Balboa sent me the galley's and perpetuated the need to sign waivers due to the deprecated quality of the book cover (you can see the original, and the final, below). I had personally designed the cover, as my creative vision was rustic and elusive. I struggled with signing off on the galley and proofs, as I personally wanted to return to that perpetual editing hell and keep working on the manuscript, but after a mere 7 year journey from the first keystrokes on the manuscript, I had no choice but to finally, ultimately, sign the proofs. 

Then I saw a grammatical error.

And then another. 

They were both self-inflicted from my perpetual editing hell, the more I changed things to better them, the more I overlooked pedestrian errors in adjectives and adverbs, as I had read the manuscript so many times, that I had memorized each chapter in its entirety and was no longer reading the book, but skimming it, allowing such errors to manifest. Because I anticipate the book to be a small, quiet and close-knit affair with friends and family, I refused to let them read the galley to find these grammatical errors. The end result?

They get to read them in the final product. 

To do it over again, I'd stick to editing acumens offered up in my college English classes, and done no more than one editing, one revision and then let close friends and acquaintances read the book galley of the manuscript as their sole trek into my creative work, saving the manuscript from my own errors and negligence in production. 

The Cover: The left image is the final, official book cover. To the right, my original design. The dpi (dots per inch) was too small on the original design, in particular with the pine branches. Because the art was drawn in low-scale, I had to commission different pine branches altogether, which led to the final design. 

So what about marketing my book? 

Balboa has some good marketing programs (albeit expensive), but I have found that just contacting local bookstores to stock your book is more of an enjoyable experience than cramming out cash for elaborate marketing campaigns. There's also the issue of the book's cost, due to page length, the book comes in at a whopping $24.99. Luckily, the eBook is much cheaper, at $3.99. I was able to offset some of the cost to the local bookstores with a generously low stocking fee, which comes at-loss for me, the author, but I didn't make my book to make money, I made it because I have a story to tell. This is a difficult proposition for many, but it's one many have to make. 

If you want to read the book, you can find it on Amazon or at a local bookseller. 

Book: Beneath the Whispering Pines

Author: Nathan O'Discin

Publisher: Balboa Press

Genre: Fiction 

Price: $24.99

Page Count: 320