Teen Author Frances Buchanan discusses her book “The Centurion’s Gift”

Check out this inspirational story from Frances, who wrote and published her first book, The Centurion’s Gift.  The destruction of their home forces Marcus and Aquilus to flee from Rome and their enemies. Can they find safety with the Christian community in Jerusalem? Will self-reliance be enough to see them through, or do they need to trust and love God more than ever before? As they journey together, can they find the courage to forgive? An exciting children’s adventure story set during the early years of the Church, The Centurion’s Gift takes you through Nero’s reign of terror and across the Mediterranean Sea as the three heroes learn more about themselves and their faith and face the dangers which surround them.

I asked Frances to tell me more about her book-publishing journey.

“The idea for the story came when I was 10 years old. A Christian newspaper was running a writing competition for the best 500-word short story. I already loved writing and had soon written and submitted my entry. You can imagine my happiness when I got a letter back saying I had won!

At the time, I hadn’t thought about writing to make money, and I regarded it merely as a fun and interesting hobby, to be pursued in my free time when my parents were resting from homeschooling me and my three brothers and sisters.

Soon after winning the competition, my parents moved to France and I had to learn a new language and go to school for the first time. This took up a lot of my time and my writing slowed down to a near standstill.

But I had fallen in love with my characters,and I wanted to know how they would act, what they thought, who they really were. So I would snatch every spare moment my studies would give me to think of plot points and situations where I could get my characters to show who they were.

Slowly, bit by bit, I wrote a first draft, and asked my mother to act as editor. Out came the red pen. I watched in horror as my dear Mama struck through entire paragraphs and scenes until she had removed about a third of the text. When I got over the shock, I was eventually able to see that the scenes I had so carefully crafted were superfluous, but still, it hurt to see them go. When I look back on it, she was a pretty ruthless editor, and I wasn’t the easiest of authors to correct! But I think that any author, even an experienced one, needs someone to read their work and be honest with them.

I had by this time changed schools, and as I neared the end of High school, I had less time to work on the book. I was however determined to finish it by then and I got down to the hardest part of all: checking for continuity and typographical errors.

I was persuaded by my mother to postpone the finishing of the manuscript until after the first half of my Baccalaureate, and my headmistress didn’t want me to carry on either, for she wished me to concentrate on my exams which are taken very seriously in France. As I’m doing a classical Christian curriculum, that means studying Latin, Greek and Spanish up to 12th grade level, as well as all the other subjects such as Math, Science, History, Literature, etc., all of which I have to do in French.

After the first year was finished, Mama let me publish my book through Lulu.com. A friend did the cover for me, because I wanted a cover that would give a clue about the book and be professional enough to catch peoples’ eye. As it is the only graphic I could afford, it had to be a good one.

Two of the major surprises I found were how long it actually takes to get the manuscript to publishing level. There were so many details: point size, font, page breaks, formatting, and the size of the book. I had to change the size of the book in order to reduce the publishing costs as much as I could, because I wanted it to be as affordable as possible so that parents and grandparents would take the chance on a book by a new author.

The other great surprise was that there are many people who say: “Yeah, great, that’s fantastic, that’s cool…” but don’t put their hand in their pocket to buy a copy. I think that if I’d had the capital start-up to buy a stock of books to show people, it would have been easier. People see a screen, but getting them to click and buy a copy is a tricky barrier to get through. So many people today don’t want to touch Christian literature because it’s untrendy or because they think it’ll be boring, others will only buy books that have been heavily advertised.

This was my next problem: how to market it. This is proving the biggest hurdle because I’m marketing from a distance. I live in a French-speaking country and there are no home school conventions, Christian conferences, bookstores etc… where I can promote my work.

I also only get home once every two weeks, so time to learn about Internet marketing has also been in short supply…

However, I do have plans for two other products to put on my website: an audio book which I hope will be done for Christmas and a home school package on life in the Roman Empire at the time of the Early Church, that I hope to have up and running by next June and which will be linked in with the book.

Of course, I’ve got to learn to write the website to do this. It was one thing to put up a blog, but designing a website is going to be tougher. I think my Mum is a good editor, but she knows nothing about computers!

I’m certainly planning to write other books for young readers: I’ve got two ideas, one based during the Italian civil wars and one based on my Great Grandfather’s wartime journal.

I don’t know if the first story idea is the hardest, but I would say that the first book definitely is, because there are so many technical things that one has to learn about: production, editing, formatting, etc… If I was asked to give advice to an aspiring author, I would say: choose a subject in which you’re really interested. If I hadn’t really wanted to know what was going to happen to my characters, there wouldn’t have been a story. The other thing I would say, is don’t tell a lot of people know you’re writing a book. I say this because many people, even if they don’t mean to be negative, put stumbling blocks in the way. They’ll say, for example: you’re too young, you’ll be embarrassed to look back at it later (which may be true, but at least I’ll have had the experience of pushing the project through to completion. On that basis, there’s no point in anyone under 30 even getting out of bed in the morning!)

Also, it was hard to deal with people who promised to buy copies and to pass on the news and then didn’t honor their word. That was tough.

I also think that young writers should be cautious about how they present their work: if they’re not careful, they’re labeled as “school-girl writers”and that is lethal to anything, no matter how good. Many people haven’t wanted to give my book a chance because it was written by a teenager.

Another word of advice: make sure that you publish through a house that doesn’t ask for money upfront. And make sure you keep back-up copies of absolutely everything you do! I kept back-up copies of every single version and edition of my manuscript until it was in print.

Also, storyboard the whole thing and plot it out first. I think I’d have cut my writing time down by half if I had done that. But then the mysterious Greek Inn-keeper whose old comrade had been at the Crucifixion was born because of the way the characters moved. I couldn’t have foreseen it and I think it’s one of the strongest chapters in the book. Let me know what you think!

If I was doing it over again, I would definitely say: try to have your own laptop. My family works from an IBM Thinkpad which is practically an antique and it is shared between everyone in the family. My novel writing time has sometimes taken second place to my baby brother looking at Thomas the Tank Engine on-line!”