The Story of Writing Perhaps Joy is the Reward and the Creative Team at TSPA

A PJR early draft reader, Steph Corker, said to me, “Randy, you have to publish this, and I know who’s going to help you do that.” A few days later, I was on the phone with Megan Williams, founder and CEO of The Self Publishing Agency (TSPA), and on my way to becoming a published author. PJR would not be the book I’m proud to share and promote without the professional team at TSPA. But PJR didn’t start as a book idea, it started as an anthology gift idea for a running club, before evolving, through various iterations, to fully describe a changed life in book form. Here’s the story of how PJR was written and published.

***

In 2022 I turned sixty. That year was also the most aggressive running year of my life, standing out as a pinnacle year in terms of outright accomplishments and experiences. Never had I achieved that type of mileage, vertical gain, or event success. Never had I pushed myself that far injury free. I had become stronger as I got older. I was also being hounded by fellow running mates to “write down the stories” we talked about on the trails. Sensing the time was right to let the stories flow out through my fingers, the idea of putting together an anthology of my running stories for the Capra Trail Running Club in Squamish, BC, was born in September that year. I committed myself to do it and began scribbling notes.

Writing was not new for me. I had my heart set on becoming an author as I exited university. My first completed Sci-Fi book, The Guardians, was in a binder on my shelf by my late twenties. At that time, life’s financial requirements dictated that Published Author would not to be my first job title. I became a builder of businesses instead. To that end, I wrote articles, product manuals, marketing/ad copy, seminars, and lectures. On the personal side I crafted speeches, messages, and youth/adult retreat content. I wrote/directed a community play in my mid-thirties. In my late thirties and early forties, sitting for hours on airplanes, in airports, and in hotel rooms around N. America and Europe, I read and wrote. Two-and-a-half more Sci-Fi books—spinouts from The Guardians—ended up in binders. A thriller was also written, a draft making it to the desktop of exceptional editor and writer, Jessica Page Morrell, where it was carved and improved upon by her cutting red pen. But once again, life dictated that my writing be curtailed when a new business interest took priority in 2009. I let Jessica and myself down that year by not pursuing Running Hot, an edge-of-your-seat crime drama born from our family’s agonizing experiences in a grow-op infested neighbourhood in Greater Vancouver, BC. The critical element in my decision to not pursue that project was the pile of rejections I’d received as I peddled my Sci-Fi books and concepts to the agents and publishers I had connected with at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference that I attended annually in the early 2000s. I didn’t have the energy to push a book and build another business from scratch. Book writing was once again put on the shelf.

So, in the fall of 2022, an anthology it would be. Stories, not a book. Because I’d tried books before and they just didn’t get published and read.

The fantasy that I would only compile an anthology of short stories lasted for the first six weeks of my preliminary note taking and writing, after which an obvious story arc for a full-fledged book clearly presented itself in my content: the story would start with me, a non-runner at age forty-eight, and carry forward to me, a decade later, running out of time to get strong enough to complete a 100-mile ultramarathon before I turned sixty. I had an epic journey story to tell. I also had a title I thought was the best ever: 0 to 100 by 60.

***

On Nov 1, 2022, I kicked off a sixteen-week training block that would get me to the March 2023 running of the Antelope Canyon 100-Mile ultramarathon in Page, Arizona. That day I also kicked off the writing of 0 to 100 by 60. My goal was to type a minimum of 5,000 words per ultra-training week with the target of having a reasonably clean 50,000-to-60,000-word first draft done by the time I toed the starting line of my next big ultramarathon. Unlike my run training, which had a definitive race weekend to signal its completion, my writing project’s conclusion was more nebulous. A draft would be complete if I persevered, but would its pages, spat from my home printer, end up in another binder—essentially, a race trained for but never run—or would it become an event? I had a gut feel that this one would make it to commercial print. How that would play out, I had no clue. I settled in to write my fifth book.

Right out of the gate, I had a false start.

Amped up to tell people how I went from couch to 100-miler in the decade of my fifties through stories and information, I found that the stories flowed easily; the data table-based prescriptive writing, not so much. It bogged down. It bored me!

Early chapters that survived, like “Going Fast” and “Going Long” (renamed “Going Far”), were purely story-based and sprinted out. Chapters that required purging, like “Plan to See the Future” and “ACES,” had to meet the axe. In PJR’s acknowledgements, I note that at the six-week mark “I put a very rough manuscript in the hands of Jen Barsky, fellow runner, scrambler, pacer, and English department head, and asked for her blunt feedback. Jen told me what was working, and more importantly, what wasn’t. She was correct in her criticisms and her input gave me the courage to throw at least a third of what was on paper in the trash and rework the entire story arc.” Jen truly saved the book “before it drowned in boring, tedious tables and instruction.” For a while I saved those tables loaded with training plan mileage and elevation gain for appendices, but the notion that the book would benefit from prescriptive appendices fell to the wayside too. I was a storyteller, not a coach, not an expert. I did a thing. I could tell the story of that. How to do the thing … well … I acknowledged to myself that coaching matters were for others, much better qualified than myself, to pontificate on.

The book was crying out to be the story of what happened to me the decade of my fifties and how ultrarunning remade me, not a prescription telling someone else how to do what I did. Any prescriptive content that I felt would support the narrative was subsequently rewritten to be embodied in, and flow from, stories. If any of those rewritten stories jarred the narrative, then I had to accept that the information those stories contained didn’t belong in the book either. The axe fell often and hard in December 2022. The book changed shape.

It’s safe to say that I had a reasonable plot when I started writing the book. The plot was me going from 0 to 100 by 60. What I didn’t know, at the beginning of November 2022, was that the narrative I would pull out from retelling the events in that plot line, the story of my personal transformation on the trails to getting there, would require me to take the storyline past the April 2022 100-miler to a race in August of that year, a race that did not represent my greatest distance, but one that held the greatest meaning in my heart. Coming to grips with what the book was actually becoming, versus what I initially thought it would be, gave me the vision to alter both the structure and personality of the book to a great extent.

The books we love are the books that speak to change, not accomplishment. It took me a while to accept that I wasn’t writing about what I accomplished in the decade of my fifties. Instead, the words that kept flowing through the keyboard were all about how I was affected by it all: what I had learned about myself, physically and mentally. There was a point when the story itself started to demand a different ending than the 100-miler. The new story needed an ending where everything that I learned and became over my late-in-life decade of ultrarunning came together in one final shot at a cherished race I’d lost along the way. My run at the 100-miler was not the climax; my final shot at completing the Squamish 50/50, a race I had previously crashed out of, with time running out, was the prize. Getting back to that start line was what my ultrarunning heart yearned for—it also presented me with my greatest physical and mental running challenges of all.

In January and February of 2023, the book transformed from me going 0 to 100 by 60, to me getting a late start, going far, and having a 50/50 chance. A more compelling read? That’s what the pros at The Self Publishing Agency started telling me after I first connected with their team in early March. And they would be the key to making PJR a published reality.

***

As noted off the top, on Feb 26, 2023, early draft reader, Steph Corker, said to me, “Randy, you have to publish this, and I know who’s going to help you do that.” During that conversation she also noted (next words are straight from my written notes) “that I was thin on character development, needed more context for the races, wasn’t giving her enough emotion in the dark moments, and was too shy with my backstory.” More than once Steph said, “I want more!” She conveyed with certainty that a professional editor could help me bring out the punch and depth that was missing. She concluded by saying that she would introduce me to her friend, Megan Williams, the founder and CEO of The Self Publishing Agency. Megan and team had guided Steph to her first business book publication, The Now What.

A few days later, I was on the phone with Megan. Short days after that I had a signed contract with TSPA to get my book out to the world. Up till then I had it in my head that I would find an editor independently, as I had done fifteen years prior, and I had a list of targets in hand. From there, if the book turned into something real, I would figure out how to get it printed on my own. I was an entrepreneur. I could do that, I kept telling myself. Then again, I had also made it a habit in my business life to surround myself with smart and capable people, so, after a few calls with Megan, plus more research into what her team could offer, it was a complete no-brainer to sign with TSPA. From the outset they all appeared much smarter and more capable than me in a world where I had no experience. They didn’t let me down.

I’m a project person. When I look back at my three distinct careers, I see one project after another throughout each iteration of myself. Projects are my one constant. I tend to start things from scratch, love the process of discovering how to build them up, then I get great satisfaction from completing them. After that, I’m out looking for the next project. The first person I was introduced to at TSPA was Ira Vergani, the authors’ project manager. A perfect place for me to start.

Within weeks Ira had my book project timeline, from first edits to first print run, loaded in an online program with clearly defined tasks, dates, and checkboxes. I was in project-person-heaven! I will say, entering Ira’s world of get-it-done must be creative-person-hell for many flowy-whatever-don’t-you-dare-try-to-organize-me-artistic-types, but let’s face it, organization is exactly what those people need to get their books on bookshelves, which is what the TSPA’s smarts deliver for them if they are willing to submit to professional guidance.

Next, and this was critical, before I submitted my first draft to my (yet) un-assigned editor, I had an Author Brand Session with TSPA branding specialist, Anna Mullens. In a nutshell, Anna forced me to boil down who I was as an author, why my story had merit for others, what was in it for the reader, what my elevator pitch was.

Game changing.

My notes from that session reveal that Anna drew from me the notion that the heart of my story was primarily about fighting to get to the next challenging starting lines in my life, rather than a celebration of the finish lines. It threw its weight behind new beginnings, rather than races run. The book answered the question: What if the opportunity to do something you had never dreamed of, or even imagined you were capable of doing, presented itself—and you took it—would the experiences on your new path change you forever? Starting new imaginative projects was my lifelong brand. PJR was becoming my product that offered inspiration to others to take on new challenges in their lives too. Anna’s session significantly informed my last minute first draft edits and each subsequent edit to the end. I returned to my notes from her session repeatedly.

***

I distinctly remember my reaction when Ira emailed me the name of the editor she and Megan had assigned to me. After ten minutes of web searching, I emailed Megan back and said, “I don’t think you picked the right editor for me. Tara McGuire is not going to be interested in my book.”

“Oh no. She’s the right editor for your book,” Megan replied, fully confident. “Tara’s already read the pages you sent to us and she’s waiting to be introduced.”

I was gobsmacked.

I also had an immediate choice to make. Take the next step with the self-deprecating assumption my work wasn’t worthy of the exceptional talent who was about to judge it, thereby sabotaging myself with feelings of inferiority right off the start line, or grow up, believe in the words that I’d crafted, believe that I could be molded into a published author by professional hands, and get in the game with the big-league players. Just like at the start of every ultramarathon I ever ran, I had to move past my imposter syndrome when the time came to get out on the course with the truly talented people and get dirty. I had to trust that I’d toiled long enough on my preparation to justify taking a position in the published author starting corral. I had to believe I could hold my own.

As part of her acknowledgement that she’d received my first draft, Tara sent me a meme that said, “Your editor does not love your book. Your editor does not love you.” At that moment, I knew Megan and Ira had chosen the right editor for me. My writing was about to get its ass kicked—for the better. In my business life I always did well with people who started off with the gruff truth.

I knew from my limited work with Jessica Page Morrell back in ’08 what it was like to be professionally edited. It hurt. Back then, Jessica tormented my pride. Defensiveness had to be set aside to clearly see my own mistakes. What I thought were my best words got red lines through them with question marks begging for clarity. To be edited was to be challenged to figure out why my words were wrong, not spurred to argue why they were right. To be edited was to submit to teaching.

***

Tara became my teacher. She called out my shyness about backstory and insisted that I give her more insider knowledge into characters and feelings. She pushed me to expose myself because readers thrive on intimate details. They want to flinch when the characters flinched. They want to cry when the characters fell apart. They want to go deep inside … and my first draft was full of closed doors. Tara pried them open with hundreds of comments. “Tell me more. Why is this so important? What did it feel like? Show me!” My first draft told the reader what happened and scratched the surface of how I felt. Tara challenged me to paint for the reader the colourful details of events and draw them into feeling my emotions themselves with authentic heartfelt prose.

Near the end of my first draft prep, a reader had asked me to expand on a hockey accident that cracked my ribs five weeks before I ran my first marathon. I plunked myself down at the computer and added those words. They were expressive. Lively. It was a great addition. I was on my writing game that day and didn’t hold back.

When Tara got to those few paragraphs she noted: “This is exceptional writing. Either take this out because the rest of the book doesn’t live up to it or make the rest of the book like this.”

Oh sh*t.

She was right.

I knew why my first draft felt like it was locked up tight. First, it was a running book and I wanted it to gallop. I had purposefully kept the written load light to achieve that. Ergo, I was cheap with the details. Second, I had spent a lot of years writing for business, an environment where the message with the fewest words was the most likely to be understood. I was trained to be economical with my words. That hesitancy to be expressive was difficult to break out of. Third, I was writing about real, not fictional, people. I was timid about (oh just say it, afraid of) hurting my friends’ feelings with descriptions they might not think were perfect or by revealing intimate, sometimes painful, backstory. As a result, I had a story made up of “stick people” (to use Tara’s exact words) and I knew it.

Tara’s first edit came back with many hundreds of corrections and comments. I’m told that a lot of authors simply press the “Accept All” button on the editing bar of their returned manuscript and carry on. I did not. I went through every single correction Tara made and only accepted or declined each change after I understood why she recommended the adjustment. In the process I learned about my repetitive writing mistakes and my many unique one-timers. I learned to use sentence structure more keenly for punch and effect. I went back to grammar school and jumped when the ruler smacked my desk a time or two. I started to grasp tense in a way I had never understood it. I learned to control it. Use it. Specifically, I set the two chapters that recalled my experiences at the 2021 and 2022 Squamish 50/50 events in first person present—pulling the reader into a moment by moment experience of those races versus seeing them at arm’s length. When readers have said, “I felt I was there,” it was for a reason. 

I studied each comment Tara made. I didn’t try to defend myself when she questioned my style or content. I looked intently for what she said my draft was missing or how it was going astray. That didn’t mean I acquiesced to every suggestion Tara made. She encouraged me not to do that. Instead, I followed her lead and rewrote what needed expansion or embellishment or clarity and I firmly kept a few doors closed to be true to myself and take care of others the way I saw fit. That said, I rarely rejected Tara’s input. She broke the doors down and my descriptive words flowed out.

The first draft I submitted to Tara contained 53,000 words. My second submission, 67,000.

The backstory was in. The stick people were gone. Descriptions and emotions were much more vivid—and colourfully true. Cliché metaphors were reimagined in my own words because Tara poked me at one point when I yet again used a common phrase and said, “You have the chops to write a better metaphor than this!” So, I did. Tara prodded me to depict events and feelings with evocative words I was proud of. Scenes became authentically mine, prose grounded in my recollection of the experiences.

I was afraid that Tara was too good for my manuscript at the start. Then she drove me to strengthen my writing to the extent where I could lift whole paragraphs to her level. Perhaps she did come to love a word or two when I achieved that. By the end, I felt I belonged in the same race as her. Like my ultramarathons, I was never going to be the race winner, the podium was only for the elites, but I was going to be a finisher. Tara got me to my literary finish line. As my editor, she would never love me, but I could love her for what she did for me.

***

My first draft of 0 to 100 by 60 went to Tara near the end of March 2022. We both knew when I submitted it that its best ever title wouldn’t last. The book had become about far more than finishing a 100-miler. It came back from Tara at the end of April bearing one of a few optional titles I’d sent to her as I brainstormed that month: Far From Old. That new title was a much better reflection of what the book was becoming. It also rang true from more than one angle. 

In the comments on her first edit, Tara had highlighted a variety of phrases in the book with notes that simply said, “Title?” One of those notes was attached to a phrase inside a quote from David Roberts’ book, Limits of the Known. “Perhaps joy is the reward,” Roberts wrote while dissecting George Mallory’s assertion that he had adventured for the sheer joy of it; Mallory saying, “And joy is, after all, the end of life.” At first, I entirely dismissed that title suggestion as too obscure. But the phrase kept coming to mind as I worked through all of Tara’s corrections and comments. As the heart of the book started to beat more rhythmically through the chapters, I realized that a few edits here and there could deliver the background necessary for the phrase to be fulfilled in a joy/reward theme intertwined from start to finish, cinching the book tight. Perhaps Joy is the Reward was secured in May.

***

The last thing Tara asked me to do before all my words went to design was to remove the scaffolding from my book. From my years in residential and commercial construction I understood what she was saying. But I was afraid the book would not hold up without it. Here was my worry.

I had a specific goal to leave a reader (if they sat down and read the book over a short period of time) with the feeling that they had experienced an ultramarathon. To achieve that, I structured the final layout of the book to take the reader through the stages a runner experienced in a race, with aid stations between each section where the runner would be oriented to the terrain of the next leg.

• Going out strong

• Aid Station 1

• Encountering the first physical breakdowns

• Aid Station 2

• Relying on race strategies for nutrition and pain management

• Aid Station 3

• Discovering that strength of mind, more than legs, was required for the finish

• Aid Station 4

• Fighting for that finish with mental fortitude overcoming physical suffering

It wasn’t a bad structure but starting with the first readers who tackled the drafts laid out like this I was getting feedback that the aid station chapters, some of them lengthy, were breaking up the flow of the book. Not the feedback I wanted to hear when my goal was for my book to gallop. When I put my outline in bullet form (as above) and read down it quickly it was obvious that continuity was compromised. My brilliant words, intended to be smooth transitions, had become roadblocks.

But the content of those aid stations was so good! And my section headings made the Table of Contents look like a race description! It was all so perfect. … Argh. It was a struggle to accept that my ingenious concept was screwing up the book.

The week before I submitted my 100% final edits to design, I surrendered to Tara’s recommendation: I pulled any content out of the aid stations that I felt I couldn’t lose and sewed it into the chapters that would remain. I then boiled thousands of words down to a pertinent sentence or two that the reader would encounter on single-page section breaks.

Looking back, from a book construction perspective, those aid station chapters had been the scaffolding I needed to thematically assemble the book. Without doubt, they were invaluable throughout the entire writing process. They guided my content. In the end, they needed to be stripped away and I needed to believe that the contents of the chapters would achieve my goal—at a subconscious level rather than in the reader’s face.

I was more than pleased with the result. The new minimalist section breaks were clean and precise, instantly pivoting the reader to the next section without a tedious explanation of what was to come. Two updated section headings paid homage to the working titles of the book: 0 to 100 by 60, and Far From Old. Both, in their correct places, perfectly described what followed them. Post publication, numerous readers have said to me, “I’m not a runner, but after I read your book, I felt like I’d been out there with you.” The scaffolding was gone; the structure was sound. I had achieved my goal. My editor had coached me to it.

***

Stripped down and anxious to gallop, Perhaps Joy is the Reward was ready for design and the book designer assigned to me by Ira and Megan was Petya Tsankova.

In my varied careers, especially my thirteen-year high tech career, I’d worked with some extremely talented marketing artists. Working with Petya harkened back to those inspiring and collaborative days in ways that made the design leg of the publication journey uniquely and creatively special.

Petya’s role was twofold: design the interior pages of the book; design the exterior covers.

To be honest, I had never considered that the interior of a book was designed, sometimes page by page. I was fascinated by this process and Petya walked me through it with patience and precision. Fonts and their sizes needed to be chosen for different elements of the content. Line spacing needed to be considered with readability and printing costs in mind. Which words got hyphenated at the end of a line? Was it better to squish the line to avoid the hyphen? How did it all look on the page if you did one or the other? Which was more readable? Paper type had to be decided upon. Final book dimensions had me second-guessing myself for a while. Every aspect of what the book looked and felt like had to be determined in design. There was a lot to it. Petya put up with all my dumb questions and I enjoyed how she was open to the marketing considerations of it all. Especially when it came to cover design. 

Well before I entered the editing process with Tara, I had done cover image tests with friends and my broader group of Instagram followers. The results were interesting. Friends tended to pick cover images of me. Me racing. Me smiling. “I would buy that book because that image is so you.” Non-acquaintances tended to pick the pretty landscape shots. “I would pick up that book because I love that image.” The latter leaned closer to what made sense from a marketing perspective—sales to friends end quickly—and when I sent the first bundle of photos to Megan, Ira, and Petya for their feedback, the photos of me racing and smiling were dumped right away. Clearly, I didn’t have the face to sell the book.

We eventually agreed on a beautiful shot of me striding across a snowfield in the alpine with cascading mountain ranges drifting off behind. It was a glorious photo. More testing showed that people of all types gravitated to the beauty of the image. I lost sleep over it. Something about how I was striding along, purposeful yet relaxed, failed to communicate that what I was doing was hard. It wasn’t a clear leap for a prospective purchaser to conclude, “Oh yeah, he’s way up on the frickin’ mountain, must have been hard to get there.” Nope. The cover looked too easy to me, and when the image was coupled with the word JOY it all felt way too easy—the exact opposite of what the pages between the covers were about: doing hard things.

With time quickly approaching our print deadline, I put out the call to my friend and mentor, Solana Green, the photographer of the chosen image, asking her if she had any more shots of that day; a climb we did on Brandywine Mountain two weeks before the events in the final chapter of the book. She came back with a few. One, 90% sky with a rocky foreground and me and Solana’s dog, Zeus, in the distance, caught my eye. I sent it to Petya. She modified and cleaned it and sent it back in concept form. It worked.

Before pitching our last-minute change to Megan, Petya and I looked for words to describe why it made sense. Petya nailed it. “The man and dog appear indecisive. The outcome is uncertain. The viewer cannot see what the man sees over the edge—they are drawn to find out. The stones feel hard. The journey looks hard.” In that photo we had more than an image: we had a metaphor, one that subtly expressed the subtitle, “A late start, going far, and a 50/50 chance.” We also had a big pile of rocks to juxtapose the word JOY in the title.

Finding the right image was critical in our efforts to overcome our final design obstacle: making JOY not feel joyful.

No matter how many iterations of font, colour, and sizing Petya trialled, the title always politely called the reader to a tea party with friends, or to a ladies’ prayer group at church. No matter how she spun it, JOY always came across as just too damned happy! … Until the iteration where Petya hardened the font and left justified the text. When centred, JOY, regardless of font, was happy. Left justify it, and a crisp-fonted JOY was suddenly able to embody some of the hardness of the rocks in the image. Such a subtle thing, yet Petya figured it out. Centred JOY: always happy. Left justified JOY: capable of being something else. Our visual brains work in odd conceptually interpretive ways.

Petya was successful because she had the artistic skill to draw out of the book, and me, what the title needed to show visually and feel like interpretively to truthfully represent the book’s contents. The book did not hold an ounce of the joy experienced with special friends sitting amidst flowers sipping tea in lacey clothes. The book expressed a joy dripping with sweat and stained with blood and shared through the tears that flowed from the rare upwelling of visceral emotion born of hard-fought physical accomplishment. A brutally earned joy was the reward.

***

In early July, Petya delivered her designs to line editor, Elise Volkman. By that point, Tara had been through the manuscript three times; I’d been through it ad nauseam. So, it was only fitting that Elise would discover about a hundred final corrections. Could not believe it! The errors I failed to see in my own work! Everything from commas, to extra spaces, to spelling inconsistencies, to getting citations and bibliographies correct, to a host of other little details. I was so impressed with Elise’s ability to see the minutiae and thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with her to get the technical aspects of the book right. A book printed without Elise would have tripped up discerning readers to its own detriment. She saved the book, its readers, and me from niggling aggravation.

By mid-July, Ira had sourced a Canadian printing company for the paperback and Petya stickhandled the final design hand-off with them. (Yes, I mixed sports metaphors.) At the same time, Petya handed the final design—retooled for Amazon—to Tage Lee, the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) specialist who completed PJR’s upload to Amazon’s print and eBook sales platform. Yet another TSPA team member who surpassed my expectations.

Had I pursued publication on my own I might have found a skilled editor. Or not. I would not have found Tara. I highly doubt that I would have had a cover designed as professionally and thoughtfully as Petya’s work. I would have released a printed version I’d have cringed at when it came to little errors because I would not have contracted an Elise. And I could not have seamlessly coordinated the manuscript transfers to trade print and Amazon print and eBook without help from multiple members of the TSPA team—all coordinated by Ira.

Perhaps Joy is the Reward launched at the Capra Trail and Mountain Running store in Squamish, BC, on September 16, 2023, ten-and-a-half months after I first put committed fingers to keyboard.

Since then, reader feedback from runners and non-runners alike has been encouraging and heartwarming.

PJR would not be the successful book it is becoming without Megan, Ira, Anna, Tara, Petya, Elise and others on the TSPA team, and of course, Solana and Mike at Capra who supported its release so strongly. A part of PJR speaks to the important role community plays when we strive to achieve hard things in our lives. PJR’s journey to becoming a book was dependent on strength of community as well.

Looking back at the project, I can see that I’m not self-published. Instead, I’m an independent author who benefitted tremendously from joining forces with The Self Publishing Agency to get my book to print. Now, how it performs in the world is up to me.