A big congratulations goes out to two Write Your Book Clients who received prestigious 2014 Nautilus Book Awards:
Vint Virga, DVM, author of The Soul of All Living Creatures: What Animals Can Teach us About Being Human won the silver Nautilus Book Award in the category of Animals and Nature. I met Vint at the Harvard Medical School CME publishing course and guided him in writing his book proposal, which won the book proposal contest at the Harvard course the following year. One of the things that most impressed me about Vint was his commitment to the art of writing. He received two prestigious MacDowell Fellowships and his constancy and effort in “finding his voice as a writer,” as he once put it, shows in the moving stories you’ll find in this Award-winning book.
We had just inherited an 8-month-old labradoodle named Sophie when I began working with Vint. He taught me many things about understanding our canine companion and some of the challenges she first presented with. Thanks in part to Vint’s observations, our once silent Sophie now barks. One could say she has found her voice, as well (though not her writing voice).
Kimber Simpkins, author of Full: How one woman found yoga, eased her inner hunger, and started loving herself looked positively radiant when I met her for the first time in person when I traveled to San Francisco this February for the San Francisco Writers Conference (all our work together had been by phone and e-mail, and through my Bring Your Book to Life® Program). Within a couple of months of self-publishing Full, Kimber received an offer from New Harbinger Publications to publish the book and she is at work now with some revisions.
Even pre-revision, though, the self-published book won the Silver Nautilus Award in the category of Body-Centered Practices and Movement Therapies. A quick look on Amazon showed the price of this now rare collector’s edition of Full at $55-$105.64 (and I have to admit I have no intention of selling my copies), but you can pre-order the book in hardcover on Powells.com for only $24.95 and support an independent bookstore to boot!
Kimber, too, took time and diligence to find her writing voice and it shows it in this moving, insightful and, at times, humorous work. Both authors are examples of writers who explored, worked through multiple revisions and pruned—even when it meant letting go of a passage they liked but that didn’t belong or flow. Though neither was a professional writer at the time of writing these first books, you’d never imagine that when reading these books—they became professionals through the book writing.
