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I am a an author, mentor, and children's advocate. As a former classroom teacher, I witnessed far too many young girls getting pregnant. Our girls know so little of themselves, not to mention having to learn how to become mothers in their youth. I wrote this poem as a reminder to all of us that babies are precious commodities that we are to nurture into fine products of humanity. When we give birth and we are still very much babies ourselves, we disrupt motherhood in unforgivable ways that cause our children to suffer from our maternal immaturity. I hope that you will appreciate and share my words with young girls so that they can enjoy being beautiful children before becoming saddened women. Shirley G. Perry-Church Both will Surely Cry.docx

Hello, my audio on my computer is not working. I can't wait to hear what this clown had to say. I swear he missed his calling. Bush was never meant to be a president because he was better at being a comedian. I couldn't cry by his actions because I was too busy laughing at him. Thanks, I'll let you know when I can hear him.

Thanks CDBurns, I know they got me!!! I have so many regrets about this first book. But I am sure you know the saying: "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you!" There is a lot of ugly greed in this world. As I go forward, I am seeking all the good advice that I can find. I truly appreciate you taking the time to enlighten me. I will be researching LuLu.com and the others today. I would also like to know more about what it is that Troy has to offer in terms of helping me to navigate through the book publishing maze. I have spent a lot of money and what money I spend in the future must be money well spent. I am walking very cautiously now. I leave you with another saying that I adhere to: "Live and Learn." I am learning. Thanks so much for the support.

Okay, you definitely went the wrong route with that. Once you had your books edited then your first stop could have been Lulu.com or Createspace. You also had at your disposal a company named Lightning Source that works in direct relationship with Ingram and gives you the potential to place your book every where. More important is that if your book was released and you have the time and energy (which you will still need when you get a traditional book deal) you could have set your website up to take orders before making a single book which means that any thing you made would have been profit. We do a yearbook for our kids every year on Lulu. We homeschool our kids. The yearbook is Full Gloss Color and typically between 50 to 100 pages. The price ranges from 13-20 dollars per book to produce and we only make a limited amount for family to show them what the kids are doing. Our priced is based on 8 pictures per page full color from digital files. If we made 50 copies the price would drop considerably. In short, you definitely got jobbed by that company. A gloss children's book with 60 pages and as few pages as with illustrations that you had saddle stitched should only be about 7-11 bucks a book. That's not an exaggeration but a very good estimation. Using Lulu you would not have spent a dime up front. As you continue to pursue an agent, you should rewrite your business plan and look at an arrangement with Troy and with bloggers of books (which are hard to find these days) and then look at your local schools and build your business around using either Lulu, Createspace or Lightning Source... in that order. If your book is good enough all schools have funds available under Title 1 and they can purchase class sets. You can literally sell your books to the grade level and set up a day with the author event which teachers would die to have because it takes one day of teacher planning away from them and gives them a break, lol. Either way it goes, I definitely wish you luck on the next step.