Allyson Johnson

Pieces of my Mind

Archive for the category “Memoir”

26 May 2026

The Publishing Journey: Step 10 – Chapter Breaks

My final draft of The Three Lives of Mary Sutton has been proofread. (Yes, “Mellie” and “Melly” are the same person, as are “Micky” and “Mickey”. Standardize on “Mellie” and “Mickey.” No, the family did not move from 16th Street to 6th Street; that’s a typo. Yes, I know this speech by Mame is not grammatically correct, but that’s how she would have talked in 1877.)

Now comes the layout stage. How is the book going to look? I confess, I haven’t thought beyond the cover, but my project manager is full of questions.

PM: Do you have thoughts on how to divide the book?

AJ: It should be divided into three sections corresponding to the three lives.

PM: Where should the part markers appear? Before which chapters?

AJ: I had thought that there should be four page-breaks – the first introduction to Mary Sutton and then for each of the three lives there would be the start of a new page. If the designer thinks we need a separate page with just the  name and year to mark each section, that’s ok, though the first section is very short.

PM: I didn’t realize that you only include those section headers—there’s no chapter breaks at all. We can definitely keep it this way if you’d like; however, I wanted to note that the reading experience will be better for a reader if we have chapters. Let me know what you think.

[to myself: Chapters! It’s a story, it goes along. I indicated breaks in the story line by the standard Chicago Book of Style – no indentation for a paragraph that starts a new section. What more do I need? But if “the experience will be better for a reader” I’ll have to go for it.]

AJ: How would you suggest I break up the sections into chapters?  I did indicate breaks by extra spaces and lack of indentation – would each of these breaks be a new chapter?  Do chapters require numeration? Heading?  Would appreciate your guidance here.

PM: For the chapter numbers we’d just do “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” etc. That said, I think that you have scene breaks too often for every single one to be a chapter break (it’d be like 90 chapters).

AJ: Please send me the cleaned up manuscript and I will submit chapter breaks.

PM: Here is the clean manuscript. Please do not make any changes to this document besides the chapter markers—and please do them in Track Changes as well.

AJ: Do I need to come up with chapter titles as well as numbers?

PM: No, just numbers is good, and I recommend that with historical fiction anyway.

[to myself: Whew! I had enough trouble coming up with a title for the book, and the PM didn’t care for it. No chapter titles!]

AJ: About how long should chapters be? In my first try at segmenting they are running from 3-8 pages.

PM: It’s up to you—I would say that chapter length can vary between 5–15 pages, but there are outliers, of course. I’d recommend pulling a few books off your shelf to see what others have done, but ultimately, it’s up to you.

[Some days pass. Trying to cut my book into smaller digestible pieces is like cutting your little girl’s hair for the first time. A snip here, a snip there…]

AJ: I wrestled it down to 29 chapters with an average length of nine pages and none less than five.  Hope this works.

PM: I’ll be in touch in the next couple weeks with your designed pages for your review. Safe travels!

[to myself: Done for now! I’m off!]

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Dear Reader: I’ll be out of the country for a bit, so there will be a hiatus in my posts. Hang on for the next step in the Publishing Journey!

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19 May 2026

What I’ve Been Reading: The Friend

A close friend dies through suicide, and the custody of his harlequin great Dane is forced upon the narrator. Like her late friend and mentor, she is a writer. Sylvia Nunez’s brief volume touches on many topics – what do animals experience? What does one owe to a dead friend? How does one deal with death? With grief? What is the role of a writer in presenting a world? Is writing worth the trouble?

Recently lost a close friend who was in the last stages of metastasized pancreatic cancer chose to take his own life (through Oregon’s “Death with Dignity” process). He planned his death well in advance and let his friends and family know. Now whenever I see an obit saying “he died peacefully at home surrounded by the love of family and friends” I’ll wonder if it was an assisted suicide.

I miss my friend, though we didn’t see each other often. He was a polymath, a gifted artist, a meticulous woodworker, a creative thinker and writer, a fascinating talker and persuader. It doesn’t seem at all sensible that the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime should just go poof!

I liked the role the dog played, as a silent companion in mourning. What does an animal know of death? We have the stories of Greyfriars Bobby who reportedly spent fourteen years guarding his master’s grave, and of Hachiko, who went daily to meet his master at the Shibuya train station for ten years after the master’s death. Is this behavior a testament to loyalty, an example of undying hope, or merely the force of habit? We can can only funble in the dark, imagining what happens in another creature’s brain.

I am a writer, so the views of other writers on the process are always interesting to me. I’ve come to believe that there are two types of writers. Type one is exemplified by Nunez’s narrator and her mentor/friend and maybe Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf: writing is painful, torturous, words dragged out of you one by one, agonizing over every phrase. Each word must be true; the whole must beautiful. Writers block is a constant hazard; rejected drafts fill the wastebasket and litter the floor.  

Type two is exemplified by me, and maybe Neil Gaiman, Lee Child, and other writers of popular fiction. Writing is a pleasure, if there is a story I want to tell.  Gloria Steinem said “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel like I should be doing something else.”  I agree with that. Though I often procrastinate, basically I want to tell the story. Yes, the tale should be shapely, it should have real characters, and if possible an arc of conflict and resolution. The story might not have a happy ending but the process of writing it doesn’t hurt.

In the last chapter of The Friend, Nunez shatters the wall of belief by imagining (or reporting?) an actual conversation with an actual friend who had an actual dog and was a failed suicide;  I think this shift breaks faith with the reader, who has gone along with the world Nunez has created, and then is told that it was all a trick. The device is a clever ploy quite suitable for a National Book Award winner though; those awards seem often to be given to authors who do tricks with time and space and the role of the narrator. I don’t care for those tricks; I find them confusing. I just want to tell the story.

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12 May 2026

The Publishing Journey – Step 9: Set up Author Pages on Amazon and Goodreads

In the group of writers I meet with monthly, all channels of publicizing one’s name and books are discussed. This week the Author’s Pages on Amazon and Goodreads were mentioned, and there was enough interest (and angst) to get the topic put on the agenda for the next meeting.

I had occasionally checked out Author pages on Amazon, so I knew what this was about. And setting up the Author page was pretty easy. I searched for my novel, The Three Lives of Mary Sutton, clicked on my name, arrived at a blank author page where I was invited to verify my identity, add a short bio, and select the language I wanted my page to appear in (a crucial step before the page was activated). The only oddity: the page clearly had a space where the author could upload a photograph, but a notice at the side said “Author’s Pages are no longer allowed to upload photos or videos.” Hmm – seems with all the money Jeff Bezos has he could afford to update the form for the Author’s Page to remove the tell-tale icon for uploading a photo.

The whole process took maybe ten minutes. (Check it out HERE!)

Encouraged, I continued to Goodreads. Again I selected my novel (available to pre-order only at this point) and entered my name, expecting to be routed to a form. Aagh! Instead I was routed to a page listing the audio books recorded by Allyson Johnson (who knew there was such a person?) and there was my precious book listed at the bottom!

Goodreads support, I must say, is outstanding. I posed about “two authors with the same name” at 7PM on Wednesday, had a response by 11AM on Thursday asking for more info, and by 3AM on Friday the Goodreads Team had set me up with a separate page, explained the source of the problem and the fix they had arranged. Now I was free to address the process of signing up for a Goodreads Author’s Page.

Whoa! This is a formal form indeed! To complete it I will need

An official author email address (which must be the same as my Goodreads account email address). Hmm. My author website does not include a “Contact Me” section; I expect folks to leave a comment if they want a conversation. I’m reluctant to use my personal email, or the alternate email I use for the little side business I’m involved with. I guess another gmail account is in my future.

And what is a Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) email address? I guess this is something I will get when the Kindle version of my book appears – or maybe I should have it already since the book can be pre-ordered.

“Below is a list of books associated with this author. Please indicate which of the following works are yours.” For some reason my book is listed three times with three different item numbers. I suspect that this refers to different formats – Kindle, Hardcover, and maybe Barnes and Noble? Need to explore.

But wait! the wonderful Goodreads Support Team set me up with a page already! It’s pretty bare bones, and I’ll have to figure out how to add some pizazz, but you can check it out HERE!

I’m officially an Author!

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06 May 2026

The Publishing Journey – Step 8 – Hire a Publicist?

In the Good Old Days, once a publisher had agreed to bring out a book, the author was taken in hand by the publisher and a schedule was created wherein the author would appear at bookstore signings, on radio and TV talk shows, and whereby reviews of the book would be appearing in trade journals, newspapers, and magazines.

No more, even with the Big Five of publishing. An author is now expected to come equipped with a Platform (which may include a website, a podcast, a regular column in a national newspaper, and /or an account on Facebook, X, or Instagram with hundreds of followers.

Or you can hire a publicist.

The publicist will contact book stores, trade journals, podcasters, and reviewers to set up the reviews, book store appearances, and media exposure – for a fee. You have say $5000 to spend; the publicist will undertake to reach out to sixty media outlets on your behalf. (Whew – that’s $83 per phone call!) But wait – there’s a catch – there is no guarantee that any of these sixty outreach efforts will actually result in any interviews, podcast appearances, bookstore signings, or reviews. Absolutely none.

It’s a leap in the dark – a leap of faith.

But you probably don’t know sixty people who do reviews, podcasts, etc. And you don’t like the prospect of cold-calling media opportunities. So it makes some sense to hire someone who does know people and doesn’t mind hitting them up.

But how do you know that a particular publicist actually knows sixty of the appropriate people? How do you know he/she will actually make those calls?

You could find sixty appropriate people if you put your mind to it. You could do a web search. You could make a list. When you were at work you cold-called people all the time.

But all that research takes time. You quit your job in sales and marketing so you could write, not so you could become a marketer on your own behalf.

So you close your eyes, hold your nose, and leap – hoping there’s a trampoline down there.

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21 Apr 2026
1 Comment

The Publishing Journey – Step 7: Build Your Network

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Turns out that old adage applies to publishing a book, also. I want all my connections to know about my book, to buy it if only to demonstrate their respect for my efforts, better yet to read it, review it on Amazon and Goodreads, and recommend it to their book clubs!

OK, World of Allyson, I’m going to have to call in my chips. Let’s see… who do I know? Who am I connected with, however loosely?

The Johnson family – including ten households. Maybe twelve if I include some cousins who we still send Christmas cards to, though we haven’t seen each other in years.

The Young family – ten more households

The Sutton family – we had a reunion last year and I met some new cousins – seven more households.

Attendees at the Women’s Fitness Camp I help organize – maybe fifty over the last several years

Members of my Overseas Campus group – sixty survivors

Subscribers to the Morning Forum lecture series – I’m on the board – about four hundred and fifty, if I could use the mailing list – uncertain

Followers on my blog – about 300

Members of my high school graduating class – we have an active website – about two hundred and fifty

Members of the local Garden Club – I’m on the board – about one hundred and fifty

Members of my college graduating class – about five hundred, but getting in touch might not be easy.

Subscribers to the Los Altos Town Crier – I have written op-eds and other columns for fifteen years – if only one in one hundred of the 16,000 subscribers buys my book, how wonderful would that be?

It doesn’t add up to a best-seller, but it’s not bad. World of Allyson, prepare to hear from me!

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14 Apr 2026
1 Comment

The Publishing Journey – Step 6: Build your Literary Community

What the heck is a “Literary Community”? Why do I need it?

Well, back in the day, an author could count on their publisher to provide visibility for a new release, with a book launch event, book tours, interviews, trade reviews, and so on. But per Jim Millot in Publishers Weekly “The total number of books published in the U.S. in 2025 with ISBN numbers jumped 32.5% over 2024, to more than four million books, according to statistics compiled by Bowker.”

The five major publishers with all their subsidiary imprints published over a million of these titles, with small presses, hybrid presses, and self-publishers providing the balance. But at the same time that the number of new releases is ballooning, the universe of hard-copy book buyers is stable or shrinking.

So how does one find buyers for a new novel? Social media, that dreaded sinkhole of targeted advertisements and cute cat memes, has become a main channel for publicizing a new release. One goal is to find a community of contributors focused on a topic or genre that relates to one’s book, and become a member of that community. Post often, post constructively, and put your name on every post. When the book is released, the power of name recognition will kick in. Other contributors, seeing a familiar name, will be more tempted to click on that “BUY NOW” button.

Sounds like a long-shot bet, doesn’t it? But with the average published book selling less than one thousand copies across all formats and all markets (per Steve Piersanti – Barrett-Koehler Publishers) the author must resort to any possible stratagem.

So what are the communities I might try to join? There are several Facebook groups which focus on historical fiction, both readers of and writers of. That’s a start – though most FB groups do not allow direct publicizing of one’s own work. So I have joined:

  • the Historical Fiction Book Lovers.
  • the Historical Fiction Book Club
  • the Historical Fiction Lover’s Book Club
  • the Historical Fiction Authors

Unfortunately for my literary community building, I don’t always have that much to say, and what I do say, I usually say on my blog. Being an active contributor to even these four FB groups is going to take time I usually spend (on a good day) writing my next novel.

(Some of my younger relatives point out that FaceBook is mostly used these days by parents and grandparents doting on their children. The real jazzy stuff goes on TikTok and Instagram. The more I thought about this, the better I felt about FB – it’s those same parents and grandparents who are still buying hardback books, bless their hearts!)

Image – Pete Sutton

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07 Apr 2026

The Publishing Journey – Step 5: the Website

Image courtesy of Tortoise and Hare Software

When I quit my day job, I decided to create a blog. With a little help from friends, I was able to get going on WordPress.com and have published quite a few posts, as you can see by the lengthy string of tags and archives to the right.

Now I’m publishing a novel – do I need a special Author Website? Or could I modify what I had to bring it up to date?

A friend, Carol Efron, who is also publishing a novel through She Writes Press, invited me to take a look at the website which she had created. Wow! A bunch of ideas: a home page! links to buy my book or read my first effort online! A picture of myself on the About page (which had not been updated for far too many months)!

If you are reading this post through a link or subscription, maybe you haven’t noticed any of the new look. But click on the About, Books, Travel, and Home tabs at the top and explore a bit. Then click on the Comment button to the left and tell me what you think!

BONUS: If you explore, you’ll find the FINAL COVER of my novel “The Three Lives of Mary Sutton” which I teased you about in Step 3 two weeks ago.

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24 Mar 2026
2 Comments

The Publishing Journey: Step 3 – Design a Cover

I had a title for my novel.  “Her Own Way”. I thought this indicated clearly that the book is about a woman, one who carves her own path rather than meeting the expectations of others. Would you want to read that book? 

My publisher’s crew did not like that title. “Too generic” they said.  They gave me some other choices: 

The Liberation of Nellie Young

The Many Lives of Nellie Young

The Three Lives of Mary Sutton

The Sutton Sisters

I had jokingly suggested that “I led Three Lives” would have been  a good title for the book if that title had not been claimed already by a long-running TV series (though few of my prospective readers would ever have head of it.)  So I went with Option 3. 

I had suggested that I wanted a picture of the great-grandmother who inspired my novel on the cover.  the publishing crew seemed amenable, and Isent two different photos.  Sorry, these are not in the required high-definition format and would look pixilated on the cover – ok if this were a Sci-fi novel but not for a historical.  

Fortunately, I have a friend who worked for Adobe and knows all about creating a 300 dpi photo file fro a 150 dpi scanned image. I scanned the photos on my home multi-function printer and Jim transformed the scanner’s output into the required format.  Hurdle overcome. Enhanced versions sent. 

Sorry.  After several tries, the publisher’s crew of artists communicated that it would not be possible to make a cover that was properly eye-catching using the historic photos.  The one I liked had too much old-=fashioned detail (a chair, a fern) and could not be cropped.  The other one was possible, but they could not figure out how to make her static figure look dynamic against a historic street scene. And the whole effect was too busy. 

In several exchanges of letters, I was educated in the new requirements of cover design.  

Most importantly, the cover needs to convey its message when shrunk to a dimension about the size of a large postage stamp.  

*This is the size which will be displayed in print inserts to local newspapers from local bookstores. 

* This is the size which will appear in print advertising in magazines such as my University’s alumni magazine or in “Wirter’s Digest” or in the New York Review of books.  And above all 

*This is the size which will appear on a potential reader’s phone or tablet when he/she clicks through Amazon looking for something of interest. 

The artists sent four suggestions: 

One simply showed a woman’s expressionless face. What does that tell you?  Not that one. 

One showed a woman from the back, wearing a long black dress, arms pressed close to her sides, her hair in a severe bun.  She looked like Morticia. Why would you want to read about her?  Not that one.

One showed a rather plain young girl dressed again in a long black dress, looking sadly out of a window. No fun.

The fourth was ok.  I sent a note indicating that I thought this was the best of the four.  To my dismay, the team took this to be a full approval . I had expended energy already over my photo failure, and did not demur, as I had no alternative suggestion prepared.   

Of course, a week or so later I had all sorts of better ideas for the cover, but that ship had sailed.  Maybe when the book goes to its second printing? (Ha!  In your dreams – but why not dream?) 

No, I’m not showing you the actual cover.  Apparently the “cover reveal” is a big deal later in the process.  Stand by. 

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10 Mar 2026

The Publishing Journey: Step 1 – Write a book

The first novel I wrote took me ten years to finish. I had expected once I retired that I would whip it into shape in six months from the fragments I had generated during my off hours at work. Vain dream. I had hoped that once it was finished I would find an agent, who would find a publisher, who would find an audience. More vain dreams. I ended up publishing that first effort online (see ajmccready.com) where instead of going viral it sank like a dime into jello, without a ripple.

Undaunted, I’ve written another book. This one took me only about two years, as I had a historical framework to start from – the fragmentary story of my paternal great-grandmother. And I got a lucky break: a previously unknown relative contacted me, hoping to complete a genealogical record she had been researching, and she ended up being my personal research savior, digging up details of my great-grandmother’s story from census reports, cemetery documents, ship’s passenger lists, and poorhouse records.

There were still enough gaps in the history to allow my imagination free rein. My great-grandmother lived in New York City during the Gilded Age, so there was a wealth of historical possibility I could insert into her story. E.L. Doctorow had inserted Teddy Roosevelt and other historical personages into his classic “Ragtime”; I could do the same. I had fun. I put together almost three hundred pages. I imagined the book being published, with a cover featuring a photo I had recovered of my great-grandmother looking resolute and intrepid.

Onward!

[Graphic on imagined cover of “Fox Spirit” is copyrighted by artist Meredith Dilllman]

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17 Feb 2026
1 Comment

What I’ve Been Reading: Triple Trouble/ The Hate U Give

Triple Trouble/The Hate U Give

My eyes lit on a battered discarded library book in one of the neighborhood Little Free Libraries.  “Triple Trouble – Lambert” in black capitals on the spine. Could it be?  Yes it was – written by Janet Lambert, the queen of Young Adult fiction in the 50’s, and part of a series that somehow I had never read. (Ah, the publication date was 1965 – I had grown out of the Teenage section of the library by then.) I took the book home, and settled down into a time warp.

Cinda Hollister, the seventeen year old protagonist of “Triple Trouble” lives in a house with a library and a Persian rug and hardwood floors and columns on the front porch and a balcony and a broad slope of lawn and a basement with a rec room.  Her oldest brother is at Princeton, the second is into sports at a the University of Michigan and coaches Little League, and she also has a fourteen-year-old “terror” of a little brother and a quiet little sister. The house isn’t air-conditioned, but they can cool off at the club pool.  They have a cottage at the shore but rent it out for part of the summer.

So what is the Triple Trouble?  Will the oldest brother drop out of Princeton to marry his girlfriend?  Will the second brother drop out of college to accept a contract with a pro baseball team? Will Cinda be taken in by the artsy poet who fascinates her or will she stick with her white-bread suburban high school boyfriend?  At the end, Cinda says ““You know, [Mom], this has been quite a summer…. But you weathered it in fine style.  And because you stood by and kept your good sense of values, we all did.”

By chance, at home I had just begun to read a different Young Adult book, “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas, published in 2017.  Starr Carter, the 16-year-old protagonist, lives in a black neighborhood of Los Angeles with her father, an ex-con who runs a grocery store, her mother, a nurse,  and off-and-on her half-brother, who stays with his father when the man his mother lives with gets violent. The language is graphic, and the action is violent.

Starr has already seen her childhood friend Natasha killed in a drive-by shooting, and early on in “The Hate U Give” she is the passenger in a car which is pulled over by a white policeman who with little provocation shoots the driver, Starr’s close friend) in the back. The rest of the book deals with Starr’s wrestling with her nightmares, the media, the legal system, and the different demands of her friends and family.

Lambert writes of a world that could pass as a MAGA fantasy, while Thomas writes of a reality nearly as dystopian as “the Hunger Games.” Oddly, though, they both end in the same place – the importance of family, community, and values. 

I grew up in a suburban bubble not very different from the one in “Triple Trouble” and felt very much at home in Janet Lambert’s world. I’m sorry that today’s Young Adult readers face a much grittier reality than I had to, but glad that the fundamentals underlying what they are reading about seem to endure.

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