Operation Amazon Christmas - After Action Report

[woody649]

Prologue:

Good friends across town invited me to join their family for Thanksgiving dinner, knowing I wasn't able to cook my own (I had lost my power, telephone, and Internet late Wednesday night). Their 12-year old daughter knows that I have published a few books, so I guess she thinks I'm a "pro." After dinner, she presented me with a manuscript printout of a book she wrote -- about a 12-year-old girl dragon. When I got it home and read it, I thought it was remarkably good for a 12-year old. So I got the bright idea to give it a quick edit, format it as a real book, and upload it to Amazon's self publishing site to put it in print. I got together with her father last weekend and we set up an author account linked to her bank account, uploaded the book, and it's now on sale as both a printed book and a Kindle edition.

https://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Thief-G...ks%2C99&sr=1-2

The back story on this is that the author's older brother is severely special needs, so her parents don't have a lot of time to spend with her. That probably explains why she spends a lot of time reading, and now writing. I showed the book to a couple of co-workers who have daughters the same age, and they both said "My daughter couldn't have written that."

I bought the Kindle, and her father bought both the Kindle edition and the print version. Some other freinds and e-friends have also bought copies, joining me in hoping it would light up her Christmas and perhaps encourage her to keep writing.

It's a LITTLE book, for sure, and definitely not adult fare. It won't replace Isaac Asimov's books on anyone's best-seller shelf, but I thought it would blow the kid's mind if she saw a sales report that a bunch of people bought HER book.


Update:

To say that Grace was blown away would be an understatement. To borrow a phrase from MY favorite author, she was gobsmacked. She opened the book and looked at it and was sort of, "Okay, it's a little book" -- and then the light bulb went on and she looked around the room at everybody and said, "Hey! It's MY book! Thank you, thank, you, thank you!" Then her father fired up his computer and showed her that HER book is for sale on Amazon, and that twenty people have bought copies of HER book, and she couldn't wait to tell her friends. I lost count of how many times she said it was her best Christmas present ever.

I'd say we got just the reaction her father and I were hoping for.