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Rebekah’s Journey

by Ann Bell

“Strength in Weakness”

Quaker women in the eighteenth century were known as the First Women Feminists. Their strength in spite of tremendous adversity has been an inspiration to generations.

Due to traumatic family circumstances, Rebekah Bradford is forced to sign an indentured servant contract to leave her home in London and work for a Philadelphia Quaker family.

Rebekah’s journey though life takes her from servanthood to wife and mother and business woman during a period when Quakers were struggling to maintain their identity as the colony attempted to find a place in history that was often in stark conflict with its founder, William Penn.

Available through Amazon.com in print orKindle edition.

The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse

The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse

The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse would never have come into being if it were not for the social networking site Facebook. This is proof of its power to bring people from all parts of the country together.

This story was written in the early 1970s to explain the Trinity to my own children, Teresa and Philip. Time passed; the manuscript remained in the box. Ten years later, we were living in a small town in Montana when my first book was published. With that confidence, I considered publishing The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse. Finding an illustrator in an isolated town of 350 seemed impossible, except my daughter, now in middle school, had a classmate who was an excellent artist. Sheree did a number of sketches for me, but the path to publication was blocked and the illustrations and loose pages went back into a box.

Time went by. The pages of the manuscript turned yellow. I changed addresses twelve times, my last name even changed. My son and daughter each had a son and daughter. I went on to publish fifteen other books, but The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse remained in the box.

One bright Texas spring day I was walking around theneighborhood with a friend discussing the local children’s book festival. She asked if I had ever written a children’s book and I told her about Scampy. Her interest was immediately peaked and she asked to see it. We walked back to my house and I pulled the yellow pages and illustrations from the shelf and dusted them off.

With an extensive art background, my neighbor was amazed that such sketches could be done by a middle school student and encouraged me to try to publish the story again now that the technology had changed. One major problem: Twenty-six years later, how could I possibly locate Sheree to obtain her permission to use her sketches in the book? Would she even remember doing them?

Not knowing where else to turn, I turned to Facebook. I only had one Facebook friend from that area of Montana, but she did not remember Sheree. However, there was a Facebook friend of a friend on her page that I remembered. On a long shot, I contacted that friend of a friend through her Inbox. A week went by and I heard nothing so I assumed Sheree could not be located.

About a week later, a message appeared in my Facebook Inbox containing Sheree’s married name, address, and telephone number. Even more amazing, when I contacted Sheree she actually remembered the sketches she had done in middle school.

Six weeks later, The Adventures of Scampy Churchmouse wasavailable through amazon.com for others to enjoy how Scampy learned about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

 

  

Exploring Web 2.0 Resource

Exploring Web 2.0: Second Generation Interactive Tools - Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis, Networking, Virtual Worlds, and More.

In recent months exciting changes began happening on the World Wide Web. More services and features were becoming available, but most Internet users were unaware of this new potential until the “Net Generation” began embracing thesee new Web-based tools. Within months, the business community, educators, authors, and casual internet users found these tools invaluable to communication, collaboration, and research.   

This vital resource is available in both paperback and kindle edition from Amazon.com or directly from the publisher at Katy Crossing Press.

 

Amazon.com Sales Rankings and Book Reviews

 

Sales Rank and Reader Reviews

Is there value for authors or readers to follow the Amazon sales rank or reader reviews?
  Every author likes to read positive reviews of their work, but if the reader reviews on amazon.com are unmonitored, their value becomes nebulous. On the Amazon pages, the readers may assume they are reading reviews by professional reviewers or impartial readers, while in fact, the author of the book may have made an asserted effort to have their friends and family submit raving reviews on their behalf.

 On the other hand, some elementary teachers encourage their students to submit amazon.com book reviews as a class assignment. As in many book reports, the actual book is merely scanned and the review becomes more of a work of fiction than an honest evaluation of the book.

The sales ranking system of amazon.com is often not used in the way it was originally intended. On Amazon’s FAQ page they claim that the Sales Rank is “interesting.” From Amazon’s perspective users are not supposed to find the sales rankings informative or helpful, just interesting. A decade after book-sales rankings were introduced, it remains an object of obsession for many authors. Because brick and mortar bookstores are restrained by shelf space, the Web stores such as amazon.com give millions of books a ranking. These are updated hourly and displayed on the book’s sales page and on best-seller lists. Little is known about the reliability of Amazon’s ranking system even though scores of scholars and publishers have attempted to reverse-engineer the system to determine how a sales ranking translates into actual sales. The Amazon ranking system is useful for potential authors to useful to determine the need for a book on a particular subject matter. However, forget writer’s block — many authors put their manuscripts aside because they cannot stop checking their rankings.

To make life easier for the compulsive Amazon-Sales-Ranking authors, there is now a website design specifically for them: Aaron Shepard’s Sales Rank Express.

Using this website, authors can obtain their current sales ranking and be back working on their manuscript within seconds. Authors can then say, ‘that’s interesting’ and concentrate on the blank screen before them. What a great time saver!