And the Trees Talked Back by Frederick J. Burns Book Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway! {Ends 12/22/23}

Review By LAWonder10:

I am not a fan of black and white covers. I love books that are eye-catching… yes, I am a notorious “browser”. However, I am very pleased that I joined this Tour and read this delightful book. I discovered that the lack of color wasn’t as bad as I thought .

And the Trees Talked Back is a wonderful story of a girl’s love for nature and of her vivid imagination. It was a very tender tale. One we can all benefit from. Trees and nature are all worthy of respect and appreciation, as well as animals and other humans.

I thought it had a very good message and was a very tender tale.

The illustrations were all black and white, yet were very well done.

I offer a Four and a Half Stars rating.

This book was gifted to me with no pressure to post a positive review. This is my honest review.

You will notice that I self-published And The Trees Talked Back. You may wonder how I came to that decision and what was involved in self-publishing.

I started out with the idea that I would try the traditional route, which is to obtain a literary agent who would then pitch the book to a large,
well-established publishing company. The publishing company would edit, design the book, get it printed and distributed, and pay the author an advance.

Once my manuscript and illustrations were completed, I drafted a query letter to be emailed to literary agents. I searched online for agents interested in the genre which the book fell under.

Once I found some agents that indicated they were looking for books in my genre, I researched their requirements for submissions. One requirement all agents had was that the manuscript had to be included in the body of the email. It could not be an attachment or a link. This prevented me from emailing my illustrations, which I thought were essential for a fair evaluation of the book. The agents also had in common a time frame of four to eight weeks for responding to a query.

In one sense I was fortunate that most agents responded rather quickly that they were not interested and they wished me well.

After I had received about twelve rejections, I researched deeper into the traditional publishing route. I was disheartened when I read that unless you were already a celebrity or public figure, your chances of being signed and represented by an agent as a first-time author was one percent or less. There may be other statistics out there, but there is a low likelihood of going the traditional route.

I had confidence in my story and illustrations, and I didn’t want to wait months for agents to respond to my queries. Thus, I decided to self-
publish.

In order for the book to be competitive with and meet the same standards as books published by well established publishing companies, I had to hire a freelance professional editor and also a freelance book designer. If I hadn’t illustrated it myself, then I would have had to hire an illustrator as well.

I hired experienced professionals and listened to their advice on editing and on the design of the book. I didn’t agree with every suggestion,
but the dialog back and forth allowed me to make decisions that I think produced a strong and competitive book. A book that was at least as good as other books on the market.

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