Uta Burke of East Brunswick self-published a young-adult paranormal novel, “Immortal Link,” which finds a teenager in Jim Thorpe, Pa., taking revenge on her attacker and receiving more justice than she thought humanly possible. Soccer is kind of Ken Jones’ thing. The Old Bridge resident fondly remembers falling in love with the sport growing up, watching condensed games on PBS’s “Soccer Made in Germany” and playing on the pitch when he was young.
Jones coached in Old Bridge for a while when his son Matt played, and as the years went by, he never lost his passion for the game.
“I’ve had just a lifelong interest in the sport,” he said as a Chelsea match played on television in another room.
So when he decided to write a book, soccer became an obvious topic of choice. Jones mulled writing about coaching but quickly found the market already flooded with instructional guides.
Old Bridge resident Ken Jones, with son Matt, channeled his passion for soccer when writing his book, “An American Soccer Dream.” His interest then shifted to the struggling United States National Soccer Team. With the 2014 World Cup on the horizon, he began to wonder: What would it take to win it all in Rio? The question intrigued him, and in between shuttling his son around on the weekends to choir, hockey and other commitments, Jones, the chief operating officer of Xerdict Group, a software collaboration company, started to do some research, which quickly turned into a lot of research.
He pored over books on soccer’s history, strategies and fan-based accounts of the game and digested soccer news from a bevy of media outlets. He analyzed what made certain clubs fromaround the world so successful and even the driving forces behind some of America’s most famous Olympic teams: the 1992 “Dream Team” basketball squad and the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” hockey champs.
Four years of researching and writing later, Jones has authored his first book, “AnAmerican Soccer Dream,” a 615-page fictional yet reality-based tome on how the United States is striving to reach the pinnacle of soccer success at the 2014 World Cup. And through the help of a selfpublishing website, Jones did it all by himself.
Self-publishing is a method that is growing by “leaps and bounds” and constantly innovating, said Carol Gebhardt MacAllister, both a traditionally and self-published author who lived in Milltown before retiring to Puerto Rico. MacAllister, who has published four books on her own, said self-publishing has many benefits for writers, providing them with full control over their work and with fewer “fingers in the pie,” thus a higher percentage of the sales.
“I find that working with a publisher is slow and at times, one must make concessions with his manuscript because of outside editor remarks,” MacAllister said.
But the self-publishing route is labor intensive, she warned. A writer must conceive the project, write the manuscript, do the editing, physically type the text, design the interior pages, design the cover, register the book with a bar code, get an ISBN number, work with the printer by checking proofs, pay for the project, and do all the marketing, which she said might just be the hardest part of selfpublishing. “It takes a lot of effort, time and a business sense,” MacAllister said, noting that all of this takes away from the time a writer should be using to work on his next project.
However, through some selfpublishing websites like Amazon.com’s CreateSpace, Uta Burke, an East Brunswick resident who self-published her novel “Immortal Link,” said the process is becoming easier than ever, taking writers through the step-by-step process of creating a book.
But even with the ease of publishing, Burke said the most important thing a would-be self-published author can do is hire a professional editor. “Immortal Link” went through three rewrites before her editor was happy with it.
“Unedited books give self-publishing a bad name,” she said. “Always put your best foot forward and only publish your best possible work.”
Still, self-publishing is a source of contention among some writers, said Jon Gibbs, founder of the New Jersey Authors’ Network. The topic can lead to a politics-and religionlike debate. A traditionally published author himself, whose novel “Fur-Face” was published by the Echelon Press last fall, Gibbs said there is friction between the two camps: The traditionally published authors who went through the rigors of editing and publishing, sitting at a book fair next to self-published authors, some of whom may have just hit spellcheck and sent it off to print. While he is personally accepting of all writers, Gibbs said that self-publishing really comes down to the important question of why you are publishing in the first place. If it is just to be able to show someone that you wrote a book and maybe get some others to read it, self-publishing might be theway to go. But to receive that elusive writer’s contract? Well, Gibbs said that’s validation.
“Somebody else, who’s got nothing to gain and stuff to lose because they are investing in getting your book … they are taking a chance on you,” he said. “And you don’t get that with self-publishing.”
Yet for Jones, who didn’t have big “New York Times bestseller” dreams for “An American Soccer Dream,” self-publishing worked out just fine. He sold about 100 or so books, and he is proud of his feat and hopes that it will help others grow to love soccer like he does. And maybe what is more important, it may help his son develop a passion for reading and writing.
“What better way to teach someone than to actually do it yourself,” he said.
And for those who say they could never write a book, Jones has some sage and oftstated advice:
“You can do anything you put your mind to.”
Contact Chris Zawistowski at [email protected].