Jay and I have spent the past few years writing. While my main focus has been the Vine, he has been alternating between making technology and management recommendations to publishing companies and writing Westminster Board of Selectmen stories. Somehow he also managed to find time to write a book!

If you’re in the publishing industry, it seems that everyone who crosses your path has written a book and wants advice on how to get it published. Despite Jay being more in the IT, customer service and finance side of the business, everyone from total strangers, neighbors, friends and family have asked us ‘how do you go about getting a book published?’

Times have sure changed. When I started working at Little, Brown and Company Publishers in 1992, there were people whose jobs it was to read unsolicited manuscripts. At that time, the Boston-based publishing house was receiving about 100 per day. By the time I stopped working there in 1997, they were no longer even accepting unsolicited manuscripts. Self publishing has come a long way. Digital publishing is now the fastest growing segment of the publishing marketplace, and authors are able to bypass traditional publishers and sell thousands of copies themselves.

While writing his book, Keeping Up, Jay was also researching how to self-publish it. A few times during the writing process, he asked me to edit and critique his story. I was hesitant. My immediate concern was ‘Oh no, what if I hate it?’ I’m known for my honesty, and sometimes maybe I’m a little too blunt. So, for a while I made myself ‘too busy’ to read it. Finally, completely out of excuses and with a printed copy on my bedside table, I agreed to read it.

In his 25+ year career in publishing, Jay has seen quite a bit—corporate excess, incompetence, greed and theft. He's also seen numbers manipulation, kickbacks and even executives liberating coffee from the lunchroom in some kind of odd ‘Oh yeah, I’ll get back at you’ scenario. With the spotlight being put on so many companies these days for fraud, sketchy bookkeeping and incompetence, it has gotten to the point where I’ll see a headline in the Wall Street Journal that Jay already wrote about in Keeping Up. What would have, ten years ago, seemed like wild fiction, has played out in real life in the news, and Jay enjoyed weaving his experiences and a fictional story into Keeping Up.

If I hadn’t been hearing the bits and pieces of this story coming home from the office over the past 15 years, I would think that Keeping Up must just be an exaggerated tale. However, Keeping Up is really just proof that although many things are too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have actually happened.

So, now that I’m ‘unemployed’ or ‘retired’ (depends on how you and I look at it), I think I’ll make my first initiative to get Keeping Up published and a whole lot of viral support. I love reading things that Jay writes. But where this book goes is up to you.

So, if you’ve been reading the Vine for any part of the two+ years that we’ve provided free content for Westminster readers, here’s one thing I’d like you to consider doing. I have self-published Keeping Up and ask that readers check it out and if you’re interested, purchase Keeping Up for yourself or as a gift.

P.S. If you are my mother or Jay’s mother, there’s no need for either of you to buy it. I’m trying to convince Jay to modify the story to be in a ‘mom-friendly’ format, not the decidedly R-rated version it is now. :)

Click here to get a FREE Kindle app for your iPhone, iPod or iPad

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Click here to purchase Keeping Up for $9.95.

If you like the story, I encourage you to share it to your Facebook or LinkedIn profile and recommend it to your friends and business acquaintances.

I’m still working on creating a print edition. If you would be interested in purchasing a print copy of Keeping Up, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and I’ll let you know when I get that figured out.

If you’ve got a book of your own that you are interested in self-publishing, feel free to drop me a line.

Thank you for your support.

Keeping Up

When the private equity group OPM (Omni Publishing & Manufacturing) mistakenly purchases Healey Abrasives, a dinosaur-like manufacturing company that doesn’t fit with their strategic vision of acquiring companies vertically in the publishing marketplace, Charles Boyer, the morally and mathematically challenged Healey CEO, is given free rein and fat bonus checks to wreak havoc on the company and his associates. His spreadsheet error, which results in a factory closing, massive layoffs, and a disastrous foray into outsourcing, launches Charles, John Cohen--an employee fired and then rehired as a consultant, and Dave Gifford--the Chairman of the private equity group, on a cross country boondoggle, during which they pay little if any attention to business but plenty to sex, strip clubs, and spending investor money.

Throughout the trip Charles is hounded by a Jehovah’s Witness he came to know accidentally but intimately while stranded on a plane, and by his not so beloved wife, Dottie, whose purpose in life seems to be to offset Charles’ monetary good fortune. As Charles bounces from one misadventure to another, Dave, the Witness, Dottie, and John find their lives changed forever, until even Charles unexpectedly finds his footing and redemption in a most unconventional way involving an affair and answered prayers.

The author spent eight years as SVP of a venture capital funded, hedge fund controlled, acquisitive publishing company, merging the operations of small, successful entrepreneurial publishing companies into a much larger, spectacularly unsuccessful publishing company.

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