If you live long enough, and hopefully everyone will, you will reach an age, usually somewhere north of forty, where you begin to take a hard look at how you can best spend the latter half of your life. Bucket lists are created. Ratios come into play. The Fun : Time ratio; The Income : Time ratio; TheTo-Do-List : Time ratio. . . the constant being time, the one thing you can never acquire more of.

At the top of my bucket list, back in 2015, was to write and publish a book to see if I was good enough to potentially augment my future retirement income doing something exciting which, on the surface at least, appeared to be fun. In 2016, Ms. Creant: The Wrong Doers! was released. The book received overwhelming accolades when compared to most books coming from unknown first-time authors. . . but in terms of the additional income generated by my substantial investment of time and money, it fell woefully short of my most basic expectation that it would at least break even. As is typical of my nature, I needed to know why. I had done most everything all the “experts” were recommending at the time, short of throwing insane amounts of additional time and money at an all-encompassing blanket term they call book marketing.

I spent the next few years watching, reading, and most importantly, investigating . . . even dabbling in short-fiction e-book publishing－mostly to see if could write outside of my comfort zone, the nonfiction genre, but also to test some theories from the “experts”.

The $1.99 Author is a compilation of the conclusions I’ve arrived at after spending five long years doing this. This humorous book－one the publishing industry hopes writers do not read－contains 140 UGLY TRUTHS of book publishing, which, for some of us, may represent 140 reasons to rethink our direction in life and how much time and money we are willing to donate to maintain our status in the book author club.