eBook stubs for Beneath the Whispering Pines

 I had only read my first eBook several years ago, in fact, I blogged about it. Beneath the Whispering Pines went live abruptly this past Tuesday, September 25, 2023. Sales have been way above expectation, but it was namely because anticipation only had one option: buy the paperback. 

For whatever reason, the eBook lagged far behind in production and only went live yesterday, which has had several purchases on the Balboa Bookstore moreso than Amazon, in fact, the book is now trending on Balboa thanks in part to them including the sales of eBooks as equitable to paperback. 

Not all booksellers do this, however.

In fact, Amazon doesn't count eBooks towards rankings of books on their websites. I am not sure why, the Kindle helped usher in the trend of eBooks, notably the Paperwhite Kindle series. Is it that eBooks are subpar? When reading my eBooks (I have a handful), I enjoy being able to find things, like when using my trust Abs Diet Recipe book, I can skip the fluff that is renown for recipe blogs and books and get straight to the steak and taters, so to speak. 

Overall though, there's just something inherently comforting for me when reading books, even when it's my own, as a paper copy. 

If you haven't already, you can pick up a copy directly from Balboa Press, or Amazon below: 

Beneath the Whispering Pines - Balboa

Beneath the Whispering Pines - Amazon

Additionally, during the book tour, I will have books and eBook stubs on hand. See ya'll then! 

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

Fading Green Thumb

As a kid, my parents had to deal with a peculiar interest of mine: gardening. It was so rare for a 7-year-old to be an expert in gardening, it baffled the garden center employees. "Are you lost, young man?" Would infrequently come up. One such place, the local True Value Hardware store in Union, West Virginia, that we simply called Kittle's, was an exception. The folks running the store loved me and would help me learn to garden. By age 9, I was growing sunflowers that towered over me like skyscrapers, pumpkins heavier than me, and the juiciest of tomatoes anyone could ask for. Hell, I could even grow any old moldly lump-of-a-bulb Michigan Bulb could send me in the mail. Gurney's seed became a staple. In fact, ordering from catalogs was normal for me, I was far away from any meaningful garden center, Walmart was 40 minutes away, with the nearest Lowe's a whopping 2 hour trek. 

One time, I found an old book from the 1970s at the Union Public Library that discussed hybridizing garden breeds. In the back was a resource section for hundreds of specialty garden catalogs. I licked no less than 60 stamps and sent off my requests for the catalogs. What we got back was of mixed result in the 1990s. Most were unable to forward and were returned to me, rejected. Others wrote back stating that they no longer had a nursery. A couple sent me a catalog of one of the bigger-market nurseries like Spring Hill, which had acquired their assets many moons ago. I managed to plead and beg my Dad to purchase something from the catalogues, which without fail he usually, eventually, submitted a check off for the plants and they'd arrive later in the spring. 

And then magic would happen. 

If you're at all familiar with Gurney's, Michigan Bulb, Burgess, Spring Hill Nurseries and any number of "mainstream" nursey catalog companies you will know that what you get is... um. Pedestrian? At best. These bulbs are usually tiny, if not moldy and wilty, and you get to play push back with them on the items you got in a mad attempt to get something that is actually still alive when it arrives in the mail. 

Not me as a kid. 

No sir. Even the moldy tulip bulbs I could muster into a blooming April joy. Don't ask me how, I have no idea. I was able to grow anything like a champ as a kid. My Maw-Maw would often say it was because I spent so much time with the plants. 

Probably. 

Cucumbers are another crop I struggle to get to produce nowadays. As a kid, I would regularly munch on one while tending the crops. 

Because that's truly what I did. I'd spend hours in the gardens, not a weed in sight. I saw a bug, I squished it between my fingers. Gone. History. The result was something extraordinary. Be it a Dill's Atlantic Giant Pumpkin, squash that would deserving of a trophy, the most delicious corn, tomatoes the size of my fists, peppers the size of both fists. Flowers falling to the ground slain in blossom. Truly, a gifted child destined to grow some incredible plants. 

Then I grew up. And the plants got more difficult. 

Maybe they're ornery. Maybe I am. Whatever the case may be, the plants struggle to get to the vigor as they did back when I was a kid. This is not to say I haven't grown things of notoriety, I have, in fact, in 2021, I won the Victor Tessaro Award in vegetables at the State Fair of West Virginia. This award stands in a sea of blue, red, white and other lesser-ranked ribbons on my mantle that is quickly filling. It's just much more difficult to grow things now. In fact, the last time I grew a pumpkin worthy of carving for Halloween was when I was sixteen - born from seeds I didn't even sow directly. No sir, these vines emerged from the lattice of our patio deck the following spring after cascading to the earth below from in-between the deck treads while carving pumpkins the previous fall. 

That was the last time. 

So, what gives? It seems that this unintentional pumpkin patch that invaded our yard those many years ago was a pure outlier. I have had gardens every year and grew pumpkin plants - some reached as long at 20 feet long - but the pumpkins were always small, 8" across at maximum, and usually smaller than that. Why then, I wondered, was I able to grow them so effortlessly as a child? Maybe my memory is foggy and those pumpkins I were growing were actually smaller but whereas I was smaller, they felt amicable to a large pumpkin in my fledgling hands. 

But there's pictures. They were of "normal" size. 

I think the issue is truly, the weeds, pests, and otherwise neglect the adult life leaves on my hands in the summer. As a kid, I had most of June (and we wouldn't set the garden until early June), all of July and August to grow and nurture gardens. Today, I have 12 days of the summer, roughly, dedicated to not working or at the gym or doing family functions, where I can tend to a garden. Fading green thumb? Perhaps is just Fading Time to Hobby.