A decade or so ago, I began pursuing a “side hustle” in editing. This came to fruition in a conversation with my dear friend Louise, a historian and writer.

We began with the second edition of The Visalia Electric Railroad, then moved into Trail of Promises. Since then we have worked together on two novels.

The experience with Louise prepared me to work with other authors, primarily folks who had a story to tell but no idea how to get it from their computers (in one person’s case, a manual typewriter) into print.

Not wanting to keep inventory of all these books, I’ve been working on how to make some of them available to the public. (I don’t deal with Amazon because they demand too much, although some of the authors may have listed their books there.) The best method I could figure out was to make a page on my website with links to the assisted self-publishing sites that I have used: Bookbaby and Lulu. They each have online bookstores. You pay them directly, and they send a percentage of the moola to the author.

This is the link to that page: OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS.

I’m writing about this today because something weird happened. Someone ordered 3 copies of Trail of Promises from my website, AND THE BOOK IS NOT LISTED ON MY WEBSITE! Excuse me for shouting; this is profoundly mysterious. I refunded her money via Paypal (who, of course, charged me), and told her I would try to figure out how to make the book available again, since it was a very short run and has been out of print for several years.

Because Lulu is very easy to deal with, and I can put the books which I have designed onto their site for sale through them, I have added Trail of Promises to OTHER PEOPLE’S BOOKS.

Now I sure do hope that the customer returns, sees the availability of the book, and reorders.

Here, I’ll make it easy so that you don’t have to click through to my page: Trail of Promises on Lulu.com

Louise and I thank you for your interest in this eye-popping story, a 312 page book about a true adventure with lots of photos.